You can, most certainly, drive a car without understanding how it works. A pilot of an aircraft on the other hand needs a fairly detailed understanding of the subsystems in order to effectively fly it.

I think being a programmer is closer to being an aircraft pilot than a car driver.

Sure, if you are a pilot then that makes sense. But what if you are a company that uses planes to deliver goods? Like when the focus shifts from the thing itself to its output

Agreed

Indeed - there is a lot of fake "productivity" going on with these swarms of agents

I was reminded of this classic short story by Isaac Asimov, The feeling of Power: https://archive.org/details/1958-02_IF/page/4/mode/2up

I feel grateful that I retired a few years ago and no longer have to make a living being a developer.

This reminds me of the early 1980s, when home PCs were still very new, the main use cases that vendors used to promote were managing household accounts and recipes. These use cases were extremely unimpressive for most ordinary people. It took a long time for PCs to become ubiquitous in homes - until gaming and the web became common.

The web was an academic project funded by modest research grants, requiring nowhere near the level of capital and electricity AI requires. The output of that research emphasized open source and decentralized implementation, which is antithetical to corporate AI models that are predicated on vendor lock-in.

Consumer adoption also happened organically over time, catalyzed mostly by email and instant messaging, which were huge technological leaps over fax and snail mail. IBM and DEC didn't have to jam "Internet" buttons all over their operating systems to juice usage (although AOL certainly contributed to filling landfills with their free trial disks).

Well, LLM is mainly aiming to “Improve” what we can already do. It’s not really opening up new use cases the way the personal computer, the smart phone, or the Internet did.

Thank you for putting this so succinctly, this is what I'm observing as well.

Feels like this combination (usually) creates a race to the bottom instead of expansion of new ideas.

LLMs kind of feel somewhere in the middle

IDEs used to be extremely expensive back in the 1990s. IDEs such as Microsoft Visual Studio and IBM's Visual age for Java were quite expensive subscription as I recall. subsequently, open source IDEs like Eclipse and VisualStudio seem to have become the norm.

Visual Studio has never been open source, though some of the underlying build tools and compilers are.

Visual Studio Code is a different thing... and claims to be open source, but by intent and approach really is closer to source available.

I used to pay a fortune for a full Visual Studio + full MSDN experience every year until I eventually earned a free ride.

Wild how much you can get for free now. Amazing free IDEs. Every LLM offers excellent free plans if you are on a zero budget.

$10/mo GitHub Copilot is an absurd deal that has to be a loss in terms of pure compute cost.

Compilers and programming languages themselves used to be hideously expensive as well.

The next generation of SEO - this article is both hilarious and disturbing

This is absolutely mind boggling. Why hasn't this bubbled up to the top of HN?

Reviewing someone else's large pull request is like having a second task in parallel with what you are working on yourself!

So don't do it in parallel.

Completely park other tasks, spend time on the review and record that time appropriately.

There's nothing wrong with saying you spent the previous day doing a large review. It's a part of the job, it is "what you're working on".

You might as well go into HR. Everyone knows reviewing other people's PRs is like nurturing their kids at the expense of your own.

Well, then just don't play the game. Make a decision in the team, that everyone accepts everyone's PR immediately without any review. At least you won't have to wait.

I'm semi-retired now, but I spent most of my career at a Bell Labs-caliber place (I was the dumbest person there) before "PR" and "code review" became part of the lexicon, and yes, everyone was good enough not to mess things up too badly.

I don't understand what you're trying to say.

It's not "like" another task, it IS another task!

Yeah but it is just a quick look, "yep", "yep", "oh what about this"?, "wow we dodged a bullet there". Its like self managed error correction that the collective does on its own. Fast, simple and produces good results. The less software you write the more this resonates.

Telecom vendors were doing exactly this before the dotcom crash of 2000