A new technology comes out — admittedly one that’s extraordinarily capable at some things — and suddenly conventional software engineering is “more or less obviated at this point”? I’m sorry, but that’s really fucking dumb. Do you think LLMs are actually intelligent? Do you think their capabilities exceed the quality of their training corpus? Is there no longer any need to think about new software paradigms, build new frameworks, study computer science, because the regurgitated statistical version of programming is entirely good enough? After all, what’s code but a bunch of boring glue and other crap that’s used to prop up a product idea until a few bucks can be extracted from it?
Of course, there’s nothing wiser than tying the entirety of your career to a $20/month subscription (that will jump 10x in price as soon as the market is captured).
Is writing solved because LLMs can make something decently readable? Why say anything at all when LLMs can glob your ideas into a glitzy article in a couple of seconds?
I swear, some people in this field see no value in their programming work — like they’ve been dying to be product managers their entire lives. It is honestly baffling to me. All I see is a future full of horrifying security holes, heisenbugs, and performance regressions that absolutely no one understands. The Idiocracy of software. Fuck!
> Is there no longer any need to think about new software paradigms, build new frameworks, study computer science, because the regurgitated statistical version of programming is entirely good enough?
All I'm saying is you're gonna have to figure out how to do this with an agent. It's not that I don't see value in the craft; it's just that value is less important. As far as the new paradigms, the new frameworks, new studies in computer science -- they still exist, it's just that they are going to focus on how to mitigate heisenbugs, performance regressions and security holes in agent written code. Who knows.. in five years most of the code written may not even be readable. I'm not saying it's going to be like that, but it's entirely possible.
In the meantime, there's nothing stopping you from using the agent to write the code that is every bit as high quality as if you sat down and typed it in yourself. And right now there is a category of engineers that exclusively use agents to create quality software and they are more efficient at it than anybody that just does it themselves. And that category is growing and growing every day.
I may be out a job in five years because all of this. But I am seeing where this is going and it's clear and so I'm going to have to change with it.
> you're gonna have to figure out how to do this with an agent
I'm really not, though, any more than I "had to" learn JavaScript 20 years ago or blockchains 5 years ago (neither of which I did). Hell, I still use Perl day-to-day.
> In the meantime, there's nothing stopping you from using the agent to write the code that is every bit as high quality as if you sat down and typed it in yourself.
“When you're in Hollywood and you're a comedian, everybody wants you to do things besides comedy. They say, ‘OK, you're a stand-up comedian — can you act? Can you write? Write us a script?’ It's as though if I were a cook and I worked my ass off to become a good cook, they said, ‘All right, you're a cook — can you farm?’”
—Mitch Hedberg
Agentic programming isn’t engineering: it’s a weird form of management where your workers don’t grow or learn and nobody really understands the system you’re building. That sounds like a hellish, pointless career and it’s not what I got into the field to do. So no thanks: I’ll just keep doing the kind of monkey engineering I find invaluable. Especially while most available models are owned and trained by authoritarian, billionaire, misanthropic cultists.
Fortunately, I am not beholden to some AI-pilled corporation for salary.
It’s quite possible this is running with a reduced color space (chroma subsampling). Degradation happens automatically based on available throughput and most people don’t notice.
I had no idea what it was for the longest time. As it turns out, macOS frequently enables it even when it’s unnecessary, and without any way to override.
Uh, really? In my experience, at least a quarter of the info it gives me is usually manufactured or incorrect in some critical way.
In fact, if you switch to "Pro" mode, it frequently says the complete opposite of what it claimed in "Fast" mode while still being ~10-20% wrong. (Not to say it's not useful — there's no better way to aggregate and synthesize obscure information — but it should definitely not be relied on a source of anything other than links for detailed followup.)
Of course, there’s nothing wiser than tying the entirety of your career to a $20/month subscription (that will jump 10x in price as soon as the market is captured).
Is writing solved because LLMs can make something decently readable? Why say anything at all when LLMs can glob your ideas into a glitzy article in a couple of seconds?
I swear, some people in this field see no value in their programming work — like they’ve been dying to be product managers their entire lives. It is honestly baffling to me. All I see is a future full of horrifying security holes, heisenbugs, and performance regressions that absolutely no one understands. The Idiocracy of software. Fuck!
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