Also anecdotally, I've had a handful of software development positions throughout the years (never at a position with more than 200-300 person company) and have yet to be laid off due to money. I've yet to be laid off at all, but that's irrelevant.
I truly believe that these new tools will actually hurt the bigger companies and conversely help smaller ones. I'm in healthcare. The big players in the EMR space are Epic and Cerner. They are one-size-fits-all behemoths that hospitals have to work against than with. What if, instead of having to reach out to the big players, the economics of having a software developer or 2 on staff make it such that you could build custom-tailored, bespoke software to work "with" your company and not against?
> What if, instead of having to reach out to the big players, the economics of having a software developer or 2 on staff make it such that you could build custom-tailored, bespoke software to work "with" your company and not against?
The behemoths exist especially, but not exclusively, in that space because regulations (correctly) are steep. In the case of hospital systems you're talking both the management and protection of both employee and patient data. That's not to say of course that the behemoth's are particularly good at that, it's merely that if the hospital rolls it's own solution, as you suggest, they then take on the liability should that system go wrong. On the other side, if Epic has a data breach, every hospital shrugs it's shoulders. It isn't their problem. And, even more fundamentally, if Epic as a product sucks ass... well. The employees didn't choose it, neither did the patients, leadership did.
You see these relationships (or lack thereof) all over the place in our modern world, where the people doing the work with these absurdly terrible tools are not given any decision-making power with regard to which tools to use. Hell, at my workplace, we actually have some in that leadership asks if we're happy with our various HR softwares and things, but fundamentally, they all pretty much suck and we're currently sitting at the least shitty one we could find, which is far from a solid fit for our smaller company. But it's the best we can do because none of these suites are designed to be good for people to use, they're designed to check a set of legal and feature checkboxes for the companies they sell to.
Honestly I don't know how you fix this, short of barring B2B SAAS as an entire industry. Time was, when you wanted to run a sales company, you had to run your own solution to keeping track of internal data. Salesforce didn't exist. You had rows upon rows of file cabinets, if there was a fire data was a lost, if a disgruntled worker stole your sales list and sold it to a competitor, that was it's own issue to deal with. Now crooks can crack the locks off of NetSuite and steal your whole fucking business without even knowing where the hell your HQ even is or caring for that matter, and our business universe if you will is bifurcated all to hell as a result. Companies are engaged in constant games of "pin the legal responsibility on someone else" because to compete, they need internet and software based sales and data management systems, but building those systems is a pain in the ass, and then you're responsible if they go wrong.
Aren't they still going to need to reach out to the big players because of the regulatory environment? And for good reason, as it happens. We don't need hospitals handing over the public's health data to the cheapest person they can find to prompt it all into Claude.
You can be a small player and still deliver immense value in health care I work at a firm in a niche with about 30 employees. We follow all regulations and go above and beyond them in regards to security.
Absolutely. I'm in the same boat (a bit bigger with around 200).
It's crazy the underlying business has succeeded despite being boxed in by the software they're currently using. And at least in my niche, you only have a few options. Each with their own unique quirks.
Instead, EMR's could position themselves as more of a "data provider" where you build bespoke software on top of the underlying storage. And to that end, having the abiliy to pump out small, focused apps can be really beneficial.
Just anecdotally, my experience was the total opposite. I didn't work in the health care industry long though and I think you're probably right in general. But you might also find there's a lot of variation between small companies too and a lot of failures for every success I suppose.
> Aren't they still going to need to reach out to the big players because of the regulatory environment?
First, saying "We can now build software faster" doesn't imply that "we" won't eventually include professionals. There is nothing stopping someone from building up an app and having people come in to polish it up.
Second, "regulatory environment" doesn't actually mean somethin because every part of the industry has different regulations and requirements. There are different standards for what big hospitals can use and the software requirements than there are for home care software. So trying to wave this "you can't because of regulations" wand doesn't make sense if you're actually in the business.
Third, I was speaking more to the small-medium sized agency.
Fourth,
> We don't need hospitals handing over the public's health data to the cheapest person they can find to prompt it all into Claude.
Means absolutely nothing since you don't need to feed health data into a Claude instance to build healthcare apps. It sounds like you aren't in the field or familiar with it.
And lastly, if you're a Microsoft customer with a BAA, then you're already covered by HIPAA. Again, not something you would know if you weren't in the industry, but now you do.
What if, instead of having to reach out to the big players, the economics of having a software developer or 2 on staff make it such that you could build custom-tailored, bespoke software to work "with" your company and not against?
Because the hospitals those practices want to associate with say "we're on Epic and expect you to be as well"?
Wife in healthcare management...overhear this conversation once or twice a week.
Also the nurses in the floor learn the system and many are not great at adapting to different interfaces. Travel nurses who come in and only worked with GE or Cerner and now having to use Epic causes all kinds of issues.
Also from what I’ve seen is big city hospitals use a mix of all three. Which I believe actually creates an opening as it shows a willingness to use different walled gardens.
However I think there are a lot of opportunities to just build on top of these systems rather than wholesale replace. Because they’re one size fits all and the people who work on them haven’t a single designer bone in their body the interfaces are terribly clunky and slow. Macros exist but seemingly no one is aware of them. It’s rife to build better interfaces tied into macros behind the scenes.
> What if, instead of having to reach out to the big players, the economics of having a software developer or 2 on staff make it such that you could build custom-tailored, bespoke software to work "with" your company and not against?
It's probably risk and liability and not development costs that keep things from moving in house. Not things AI is great at mitigating.
That's not actually true. It might be for the bigger companies, but certainly not the smaller ones.
And "risk" in this industry could mean any number of different things. We, as a medium-sized provider, have a BAA with Microsoft for HIPAA. That means that I can utilize information I've gotten from my EMR and build line-of-business apps that bridge the gaps between other systems they may have to work in. In fact, our Microsoft tenant has a much higher level of security than the underlying EMR.
I'm quite literally living what I spoke about above. The reason why I was brought in was because teh current CEO has a very tech-focused mindset, otherwise agencies usually can't afford a full-time software developer. Now, those economics are changing.
Also, I haven't heard of an agency that didn't want custom reports built because they found the default ones unsuitable. So even something like the ability to mainline Power BI reports would be compelling.
Hospitals are huge liability sinks. Doctors are constantly sued for killing, injuring, or traumatizing patients, because it's impossible to consistently save everyone.
Which is why they don't food liability when they can. Is it worth saving $100,000 a year if it allows the lawyer to say "if they had used industry standard software would the medical error have happened?"
The research hospital in my neighborhood has a whole biomedical engineering dept and regularly tries out new medical technology on me.
They consistently try non-standard approaches if they feel like it can improve the standard of care since their commercialization team can make more money. They can also iterate faster and deliver better outcomes.
I'm guessing either EHR software is uncompetitive or nobody has tried it yet. Or it's just because I live in Toronto and we have a really good healthcare system.
Improved EHRs would improve medicine by making doctors more productive. Increases the amount of time they can spend billing instead of on administrative overhead. More billing is more money.
I don't think this is bureaucratic maliciousness to kill innovative EHRs. My guess is it's a really hard and boring problem to solve due to the integration work which makes it hard to break the network effects.
> Most engineers (including me) spent months grinding LeetCode at least twice in their career, studying system design, and passing grueling 6-round interviews to prove they are the “top 1%.”
Really grateful that the opportunities I've been given weren't predicated on knowing things completely irrelevant to my job. I have spent exactly zero time solving LeetCode problems in my career (beyond algorithm stuff in college).
As a Clojure developer I have the opposite experience. The more they ignore my open source work, the more they never call up any of my references, the more they give me useless test jobs and assignments unrelated to the actual work, the more it's a signal of a place with poor engineering culture and generally also not that great salaries.
However the places that actually do read my open source work, do contact my references, and where the interview has had no tech assignments of any kind other than a simple discussion about a variety of topics, perhaps just going over some of my OSS projects, the higher the salary has been.
This is in Northern Europe though, your mileage may vary.
> They are difficult. As I'm not a native English speaker
Kudos to you. That would be insanely difficult. There is a lot of American-based pop culture, knowledge, and slang that makes it even difficult if you are a native, English American speaker.
Yeah, it can be pretty difficult at times. I'm quite proud of my 75% solve rate with Connections, which I'm slowly but surely improving (though the last week or so has been a bit of a regression).
I'm almost tempted to include that stat in my next CV as evidence of my grasp of the language :p
I always find it interesting to take a look at the Connections Bot, which gives the puzzles a difficulty rating based on how many people solve it or fail. It's not rare that I nail one rated 5/5 difficulty, just to completely fail the next day on a 1 or 2 out of 5. The gaps in general knowledge that you can have as a non native can be pretty funny at times! The groups relating to sports team names always get me.
I still think the ultimate puzzle is the Sunday crossword (followed closely by Thur-Sat), though Connections is great. And definitely difficult (but never feels unfair).
I cancelled my subscription a few years back due to the way NYT was covering the current administration. At the time, I believed they'd never offer a "puzzles only" subscription because then they'd lose a large part of their subs. But, I was wrong. And now they offer a puzzle-only subscription.
There's a great documentary about the Crossword with Will Shortz that came out about a decade ago that's interesting.
In 2023, 55% of visits to NYT's website were to games, not news. The puzzle-only subscription points to the NYT's fate as a game company that also offers news, much as airlines are credit card/loyalty point companies that also offer flights.
> Ends up being circular if the author used LLM help for this writeup though there are no obvious signs of that.
Great argument for not using AI-assisted tools to write blog posts (especially if you DO use these tools). I wonder how much we're taking for granted in these early phases before it starts to eat itself.
> All he wanted was to make his job easier and now he's shackled to this stupid system.
What people failed to grasp about low-code/no-code tools (and what I believe the author ultimately says) is that it was never about technical ability. It was about time.
The people who were "supposed" to be the targets of these tools didn't have the time to begin with, let alone the technical experience to round out the rough edges. It's a chore maintaining these types of things.
These tools don't change that equation. I truly believe that we'll see a new golden age of targeted, bepsoke software that can now be developed cheaper instead of small/medium businesses utilizing off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all solutions.
Are we living in the same universe? We manage a fleet of tablets (both Apple and Android) for a healthcare company whose EMR is web-based. And because of that Sarafi has made our lives miserable. So much so that we're migrating to Chromebooks.
I've been developing for the web for 15 years. The first half was spent battling Internet Explorer. Now it's Safari.
There are some proprietary Chrome APIs but if you’re not using those it’s been pretty rare to have major problems in recent years. I open a couple of bug reports a year against Chrome, Firefox, and Safari—mostly accessibility related—but most of the time it’s been a problem with code written specifically against Chrome rather than code which couldn’t work in the other browsers.
The people complaining about Safari often are running enterprise crapware that requires some esoteric Chrome API or bug to operate correctly and should actually be an app on iOS but cannot be funded as such because its creators don’t care about its users.
Then again, if a company can't polish a web browser app, then the native app they'd produce will be even worse.
Now you have a crappy app that only works on some devices, and now with no tabs, no links, text you cannot select anymore because they used the wrong component, etc.
Well, formerly you would have been right, but WebUSB and whatnot are gaining a lot more traction.
I didn't take WebUSB seriously until I steered someone to flashing a small firmware onto something and they could do it straight from the browser! And it was a nice workflow too, just a few button and a permission click.
Two other examples I can think of are flashing Via (keyboard) firmware and Poweramp using WebADB via WebUSB to make gaining certain permissions very easy for the layman. I imagine it's gonna get more and more user in enterprise too.
Firefox is seriously behind by refusing to implement it.
WebUSB is a giant gaping hole in the browser sandbox. Innocent use cases are really nice, I've used WebUSB to flash GrapheneOS on my device, but the possibilities for users to shoot themselves in the foot with nefarious website are almost endless.
Consider the fact that Chromium has to specifically blacklist Yubikey and other known WebAuthn vendor IDs, otherwise any website could talk to your Yubikey pretending to be a browser and bypass your 2FA on third party domains.
I'm conflicted on WebUSB because it's convenient but on the balance I think it's too dangerous to expose to the general public. I don't know how it could be made safer without sacrificing its utility and convenience.
It really isn't. Chromium (since 67) does USB interface class filtering to prevent access to sensitive devices. Then there is the blacklist you mentioned.
On top of that, straight from Yubico's site:
".. The user must approve access on a per website, per device basis .."
This isn't any more a security hole than people clicking "yes" on UAC prompts that try to install malware.
> ".. The user must approve access on a per website, per device basis .."
Of course, but a phishing website "fake-bank.com" could collect user's username, password, and then prompt them to touch their yubikey. This wouldn't trigger any alarm bells because it's part of the expected flow.
> This isn't any more a security hole than people clicking "yes" on UAC prompts that try to install malware.
Yes it is. The only reason why Yubikeys are immune to phishing and TOTP codes aren't is because a trusted component (the browser) accurately informs the security key about the website origin. When a phishing website at "fake-bank.com" is allowed to directly communicate with the security key there's nothing stopping it from requesting credentials for "bank.com"
Again, that exploit factor is irrelevant now because WebUSB is blacklisted from accessing, among other things, HID class devices. So no site, even with permission, can access U2F devices over WebUSB. There is no special blacklist needed per vendor or anything.
You are right that it was a security hole in Chrome <67. Which is almost a decade in the past by now.
I’m a developer too, but the developer experience doesn’t matter to users. As a user of the app, it’s fast enough, cleanly designed, seems to be reasonably private and secure, and I haven’t hit any website with it where I’ve had to download chrome to view it or something.
You're a developer but you can't connect the dots between features being hard to build and the inconsistencies between other browsers vs Safari to how that might effect the user?
I can be a user separate from being a developer. The user experience of Safari is basically perfect for a browser. The development experience is completely irrelevant from that perspective.
I mean… what do you want me to do, list problems I don’t have with it? As a user of the app, Safari fades completely into the background for me, I don’t know what else I could ask for from a browser.
You could say that there are Apple devices that do not work well or don’t work at all without another Apple device, and off the top of my head I would say the only ones are the Watch and the HomePod, but most alternative devices work fine with Apple ones, e.g Chromecast, Garmin watches, Google Home hubs, etc.
And even so, the same could be said about Android only features and devices, e.g. Samsung Watch doesn’t work without an Android phone, Google Earbuds are feature capped on iPhone, etc.
IMO, if we are looking at rent seeking behaviors, Google shoving Gemini down the throats of Google Home users, with no chance of rolling back if they don’t like it, is way worse.
The difference between Apple vs Google is that with Apple you ARE the ad. They don't need advertising when they know people will adopt them and then be forced into their ecosystem.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say here. Even if that was true, my point was that an ad driven business like Google, would be incentivized to monetize all the aspects of my life they could have access to. If that’s not what Apple is doing, compared to Google, then that’s a win I guess?
Google most profitable business line is ads. They profit from literally knowing everything about you, then selling access to that to ad bidders. Apple makes the most money from devices. It is not the same.
Then why is it that they advertise? We just last week had a thread about how the Apple app store is making ads blend in more with organic results. So not only are they advertising to users (which admittedly was news to me), they are engaging in dark patterns to make those ads more enticing. It doesn't seem like being locked into the Apple ecosystem (and paying their tax on hardware) is actually benefiting the users.
I think these types of articles miss the point. It's not about not loving what I do, or not being interested in problem solving. It's about time.
For instance, I use a React form library called Formik. It's outdated and hasn't seen a real commit in years. The industry has moved onto other form libraries, but I really like Formik's api and have built quite a bit of functionality around it. And while I don't necessarily need a library to be actively worked on to use it, in this instance, it's lack of updates have caused it to fall behind in terms of performance and new React features.
The issue is that I'm also building a large, complex project and spend 80-90% of my waking time on that. So what do I do? Do I just accept it and move on? Take the time to migrate to a form library that very well be out-of-date in a year when React releases again? Or, do I experiment with Claude by asking it to update Formik to using the latest React 19 features? Long story short, I did the latter and have a new version of Formik running in my app. And during that, I got to watch and ask Claude what updates it was making and most importantly, why it was making those updates. Is it perfect? No. But it's def better than before.
I love programming. I love building stuff. That doesn't change for me with these tools. I still spend most of my time hand-writing code. But that doesn't mean there isn't a place for this tech.
How is the article missing your point though? For example, right in the beginning of the article:
> I’ll likely never love a tool like Claude Code, even if I do use it, because I value the task it automates. [...] Like other technologies, AI coding tools help us automate tasks: specifically, the ones we don’t value.
Where the article talks about value, you're talking about time [savings] - but you both actually mean the same thing: Getting a fair amount of value for the time spent.
I also don't seem to get your React Formik example... programming isn't solely about "SemVer numbers going up", it's about designing powerful abstractions for (re-)occurring problems. Being on the consuming side of a UI form library is something different from designing its API.
For one thing, I'm sure stable products have been build with Formik@1.0.0^ (it's at @2.4.9 currently). For a second thing, I don't think doing the manual labor of playing a smarter dependabot is as valuable as you think it is. Formik still has 3 million weekly downloads with its latest release being 2 months old, why don't you upstream your changes?
> Where the article talks about value, you're talking about time [savings] - but you both actually mean the same thing: Getting a fair amount of value for the time spent.
This is straight from the article: "People who love using AI to create software are loving it because they don’t value the act of creating & understanding the software."
How is my response that this is missing the point wrong? I have no personal feelings about AI. I don't "love" it. And I also value the act of creating and understanding software, but I don't have the time to do all of that. So, I'm failing to see what point you're making.
> programming isn't solely about "SemVer numbers going up",
Did you read my post at all? What on earth does this have to do with Formik using legacy API's and not being as performant as the other options?
> it's about designing powerful abstractions for (re-)occurring problems. Being on the consuming side of a UI form library is something different from designing its API.
Again, did you read my post at all?
> For one thing, I'm sure stable products have been build with Formik@1.0.0^ (it's at @2.4.9 currently).
What? What does this have to do with it being years behind current React features? Do you even use React? Don't tell me you're arguing about a React form library while not actively using React?
> For a second thing, I don't think doing the manual labor of playing a smarter dependabot is as valuable as you think it is
lol What?
? Formik still has 3 million weekly downloads with its latest release being 2 months old, why don't you upstream your changes?
This is what happens when you think just Googling and thinking you know everything. Just a quick question, that last "release", what did it include? Actually, take this a step further, in the last 2 years, what major updates were released?
> Formik still has 3 million weekly downloads with its latest release being 2 months old, why don't you upstream your changes
Who said I wasn't lol? What is wrong with you? Not only have you completely misinterpreted what I've said (while not having any relevant experience in the area), you're now accusing me of things.
me: "I'm working on a Formik update to newest React features wtih Claude"
you: "WHY AREN'T YOU ON THE CONTRIBUTOR LIST!>!?!?!"
The irony in sharing that screen while it obviously shows it hasn't been maintained. lol.
lol go ahead, look at that commit. What did it do? And what about the one prior to that? Explain to me in your own words (no AI) how Formik has kept up to date with new React features?
But since you're on the repo, go take a look at the issues and discussions log. Go search for "Is htis repo dead"? Go read any number of the 10,000 comments about forms in React on any social media site of your choosing. If Jared works at Vercel and Formik, according to you, is still in "active development", why would they use RHF?
You're not a serious person if you think you can Google a few things and automatically understand the form ecosystem in React.
I truly believe that these new tools will actually hurt the bigger companies and conversely help smaller ones. I'm in healthcare. The big players in the EMR space are Epic and Cerner. They are one-size-fits-all behemoths that hospitals have to work against than with. What if, instead of having to reach out to the big players, the economics of having a software developer or 2 on staff make it such that you could build custom-tailored, bespoke software to work "with" your company and not against?
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