This is a pretty interesting take. If AIs have as their main knowledge base Internet contents, they're basically roleplaying as a human doing research online - they also need to be thought to think critically about whether some information _feels_ reliable or not. Are current LLMs capable of _really_ doing critical analysis or do they just pretend being able to do it?
I think that's because not everyone does the same job within the same stack and constraints. I'm yet to find an LLM that writes the kind of C++ I dabble with without having to manually tweak it myself (or that truly understands our codebase). Conversely, I find that LLMs are now excellent at python and orchestration tasks for instance. It's very situational
I am much younger than the author, but I've been coding for most of my life and I find close to no joy in using AIs. For me coding has always been about the nitty-gritty quirkiness of computers, languages, solving issues and writing new cool things for the sake of it. It was always more about the journey than the end goal, and AI basically hollows out all of the interesting bits about coding. It feels like skipping straight to the end of a book, or somewhat like that.
I don't know if I am the only one, but developing with chatbots in my experience turns developing software into something that feels more akin to filling out forms or answering to emails. I grieve for the day we'll lose what was once a passion of mine, but unfortunately that's how the world has always worked. We can only accept that times change, and we should follow them instead of complaining about it.
> For me coding has always been about the nitty-gritty quirkiness of computers, languages, solving issues and writing new cool things for the sake of it.
Same. It scratches my riddle-solving itch in a way that the process of "prompt-honing" has yet to do.
for me, and i bet many people, the only riddles being solved (at least at work) for the last few years amount to "what is eslint complaining about now?". It's nice not to have to eff with things like that and other aggravations anymore by offloading it to an agent.
if it gets it right; I'd like someone to show me with a brand new install their AI coding flow and see it get it right. I must be broken because when I use claude code it can't get a gradle build file right.
yeah exactly. For some people, this was like enjoying a puzzle. And now there's an AI that can solve the puzzle -- it defeats the purpose.
However, if your point was to "make more widgets faster" and only saw programming as a means to an end (make money, increase SaaS features), then I see why people are super excited about it.
I see it the same way as cooking. If your goal is "sell as many hamburgers as possible" then the McD / factory farm is the way to go. If your idea is "I enjoy the personal feeling of preparing the food, smelling the ingredients, feeling like I'm developing my craft of cooking, and love watching someone eat my hand-prepared meal", then having "make fast food machine" actually makes things worse.
I think a lot of people in this forum are at odds because some of the people enjoy cooking for the experience, and the other half are just trying to make food startups. Now they can create and throw away menu items at record pace until they find the one that maximizes return. They never wanted to cook, they just wanted to have a successful restaurant. Nothing wrong with either approach, but the 2nd half (the software is just a product half) were hamstrung before, so now they are having a moment of excitement as they realize they don't have to care about coding anymore.
I 100% guarantee that most of the MBA / startup founder types who didn't love coding for its own sake kind of felt a huge pain that they had to "play along" with devs talking about frameworks, optimal algos, and "code quality" and the like, all while paying them massive salaries and equity stakes for what they saw as disposable item to increase revenue. Meanwhile the devs want another 2-weeks and 6 figures of salaries so they can "refactor" for no visible difference, but you can't complain because they'll leave.
Now that the code factory is in place, they can focus on what they really want, finding customers for an item. Its the drop-shipping of code and software. The people using drop-shipping don't care what the product is. Production and fulfillment are just impediments to the real goal -- selling a product.
The actual revelation of AI, if one can call it that, is how few people care about craft, quality, or enjoying work. Watching AI slop videos, ads, and music makes one realize that true artists and craftspeople are still incredibly rare. Most people are mediocre, unimaginative, disinterested, and just want the shortest path to easy riches. While it sounds negative, its more like realizing most people aren't athletes or interested in very difficult physical exertion -- its just a fact of human nature. True athletes who love sport for its own sake are rare and in a way nonsensical on their face.
In the end, we will probably lament something we lose in the process. The same way we've hollowed out culture, local businesses, family / relationships, the middle class, etc all in the name of progress before. Surely each step has had its rewards and advantages, but Molloch always takes his pound of flesh.
I for one still like the good old Cantata. It's still maintained by the community after the original dev bailed out, and it has good UX and lots of features. Feishin is also great but it's way heavier on RAM being basically a glorified website and all, so unless you have a reason to have Navidrome up and running it's overkill for most people
Calling butter or red meat "healthy" is so utterly wrong. Saturated fat is at best neutral, and probably bad for you. Putting it in the same league as extra virgin olive oil is an insult to anyone with intelligence, even lard would be less bad than that
And given that we know that red meat is probably carcinogen it's insane for anyone to recommend its consumption. You should be eating as little of it as possible and focus on fish, beans and poultry. Ironically there are basically no recommendations anywhere to eat more beans.
Is so blatantly clear to me that the USDA and RFK jr got bought by the meat and dairy industry that's not even funny
We're already at the point where in order to have a "decent" desktop software experience you _need_ Rust too. For instance, Rust doesn't support some niche architectures because LLVM doesn't support them (those architectures are now exceedingly rare) and this means no Firefox for instance.
> Embedded - This will always be C. No memory allocation means no Rust benefits. Rust is also too complex for smaller systems to write compilers.
Modern embedded isn't your grandpa's embedded anymore. Modern embedded chips have multiple KiB of ram, some even above 1MiB and have been like that for almost a decade (look at ESP32 for instance). I once worked on embedded projects based on ESP32 that used full C++, with allocators, exceptions, ... using SPI RAM and worked great. There's a fantastic port of ESP-IDF on Rust that Espressif themselves is maintaining nowadays, too.
There's a huge difference between "AI" and "tech bros and finance guys getting amazed by an LLM that talks back to them without realising it's just a language model and not intelligence, so they started chucking the massive piles of cash they had lying around the world to evade taxes to them in a pyramid scheme of colossal scale". We currently are heading more and more towards the latter, and when it crashes it will sow so much distrust and curse the "AI" name so much that we'll probably get a decades-long AI winter after that. In the end none of this nonsense will help the world towards getting better AI any time soon.
Already most "AI researchers" outside of the big corps have basically turned in the last 3 years from "people training their models and doing research" to "webdev plugging into other people's APIs to use LLMs they don't know crap about". When, not if, the big AI bubble bursts, the damage done to the sector will be immense
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