And about the pulling in devs - you can actually go to indeed.com and filter out listings for co-founders and CTOs. Usually equity only, or barely any pay. Since they're used to getting code for free. No real CTO/Senior dev will touch anything like that.

For every vibe coded product, there's a 100 clones more. It's just a red ocean.

Whether its a hotlang, LLMs, or some new framework. Juniors like to dive right in because the promise of getting a competitive edge against people much more experienced than you is too tantalizing. You really want it to be true

Customers bikeshed WAY less than those two categories.

You need a highly refined sense of “smell” and intuition about architecture and data design, but if you give good specifications and clear design goals and architectural guidance, it’s like managing a small team but 12x faster iteration.

I sometimes am surprised with feature scope or minor execution details but usually whenever I drill down I’m seeing what I expected to see, even more so than with humans.

If I didn’t have the 4 decades of engineering and management experience I wouldn’t be able to get anything near the quality or productivity.

It’s an ideal tool for seasoned devs with experience shipping with a team. I can do the work of a team of 5 in this type of highly technical greenfield engineering, and I’m shipping better code with stellar documentation… and it’s also a lot less stressful because of the lack of interpersonal dynamics.

But… there’s no way I would give this to a person without technical management experience and expect the same results, because the specification and architectural work is critical, and the ability to see the code you know someone else is writing and understand the mistakes they will probably make if you don’t warn them away from it is the most important skillset here.

In a lot of ways I do fear that we could be pulling up the ladder, but if we completely rethink what it means to be a developer we could teach with an emphasis on architecture, data structures, and code/architecture intuition we might be able to prepare people to step into the role.

Otherwise we will end up with a lot of garbage code that mostly works most of the time and breaks in diabolically sinister ways.

Otherwise, you never feeelanced on the cheap.

When a customer starts saying “we need to build X”, first ask what the actual problem is etc. It takes actual effort, and you need to speak their language (understand the domain).

But if you have a PM in the middle, now you just start playing telephone and I don’t believe that’s great for anyone involved.

> if you really, never wanted a layer of separation between certain clients over behavioral issues that got in the way of the actual work

Who says I haven’t?

My entire complaint is that the layer of separation is often more difficult than customers, and doesn’t have the same incentives for behaving.

I'm not gonna harp on it. I'll go to bed and wake up completely forgetting about this thread unless I get another notification.

But you're basically telling me to shut off my feelings. Hard to do. I don't know your experiences, so my feelings can be wrong.

I'm unsure why you are putting so much stock into an uninformed feeling on the internet. It doesn't seem like we want to expand on our stories so there's not much more to go on. And that's fine.

I don't try to assert everything about you, but I'm just explaining the vibes I got. But that's all my words are: vibes.

>Just that there might be worse problems elsewhere

I love my industry and in my personal experience I can count on one hand how many truly problematic coilkeages I've worked with or under. I am lucky in that regard for my industry.

Meanwhile, clients and consumers constantly make me question if I want to continue this career long term. My plan was always to focus more on a B2B angle to insulate from that, but the current winds blowing suggest that angle might not even exist in a decade. So I want to at least have a side hustle ready.

And despite those notions, I'm still on the lucky end in terms of what third and even secondhand accounts I've heard of. Diving more into that pool is unsettling for me, but it might still be more stable than what's going on right now.

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/15396 a guide for running gpt-oss on llama-server, with settings for various amounts of GPU memory, from 8GB on up

~ Monty Python, Meaning of Line (1983), on The Machine that Goes Ping.

Saying that function "getUserByName" fetches a user by name is redundant. Saying that a certain method is called because of a quirk in a legacy system is important.

I regularly implement financial calculations. Not only do I leave comments everywhere, I tend to create a markdown file next to the function, to summarise and explain the context around the calculation. Just plain english, what it's supposed to do, the high level steps, etc.

If that was the consensus, it was wrong. There are valuable kinds of comments (whys, warnings, etc) that code can never say.

It wasn't an entirely bad idea, because comments carry a high maintenance cost. They usually need to be rewritten when nearby code is edited, and they sometimes need to be rewritten when remote code is edited - a form of coupling which can't be checked by the compiler. It's easy to squander this high cost by writing comments which are more noise than signal.

However, there's plenty of useful information which can only be communicated using prose. "Avoid unnecessary comments" is a very good suggestion, but I think a lot of people over-corrected, distorting the message into "never write comments" or "comments are a code smell".

There is no framework, just confusing junk. At some point, it needs to actually work and….

I suspect the gap is that you don't know enough about IBM's business model.

When something doesn't make sense, a very common cause is a lack of context: many things can be extremely sensible for a business to do; things which appear insane from an outsider's point of view.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/is-water-wet https://centreforinquiry.ca/keiths-conundrums-is-water-wet https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-17... http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=6097 https://parknotes.substack.com/p/is-water-wet-or-does-it-jus...

...etc. Turns out, it's not a solved question!

Also weekend hackathon events have completely/drastically changed as an experience in the last 2-3 years (expectations and also feature-set/polish of working code by the end of the weekend).

And as another example, you see people producing CUDA kernels and MLX ports as an individual (with AI) way more these days (compared to 1-2 years ago), like this: https://huggingface.co/blog/custom-cuda-kernels-agent-skills

Have you ever looked for, say, WisprFlow alternatives? I had to compare like 10 extremely similar solutions. Apps have no moat nowadays.

That's happening all over the place.

- Edsger Dijkstra

But there are thousands of people on social media claiming huge productivity gains. Surely at least 5% of devs are holding it right.

If a 10x boost is possible, we’d notice that. There are only 20k games a year released on steam.

If my hypothesis is true and the real final output boost is somewhere near 20%, we’re seeing exactly what you’d expect.

Now if it’s something closer to 20%, we’re seeing exactly what you’d expect.

If you look at every game dev forum in existence, or you’ve ever talked to people about why they got into CS there are probably 1000x more people who want to publish a game than have done it.

If there was a a tool that provided a 10x-100x speed boost it would push enough of those people over the edge and make a significant impact on number of games released.

That’s to say nothing of boosting existing game devs.

There aren’t noticeably more total startups or projects though.

Many games don’t need physics, and there are a billion hobby projects on GitHub.

Also the accelerating trend dates back to 2018 if you remove the early COVID dip. Which is exactly my point. You can look at the graph and there is no noticeable impact correlated to any major AI advancements.

The iOS data is interesting. But it’s an outlier because the Play Store and Steam show nothing similar. And the iOS App Store is weird because they’ve had numerous periods of negative growth follow by huge positive growth over the years. My guess is that it probably has more to do with all of the VC money flowing into AI startups and all the small teams following the hype building wrappers and post training existing models. If you look at a random sample of the iOS new apps that looks likely.

Seriously go to the App Store, search AI and scroll until you get bored. There are literally thousands of AI API wrappers.

LOL: especially with Claude this was only in 1 out of 10 cases?

Claude output is usually (near) production ready on the first prompt if you precisely describe where you are, what you want and how you get it and what the result should be.

Once people have had the experience of being a lead and having to pass tasks to other developers a few times, most seem to develop this skill at least to a basic level, but even then it's often informal and they don't get enough practice documenting the details in one go, say by improving a ticket.