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It’s wild how apple went from there will be no app store and everything will be a web app to walled gardens of native apps that lock users in. And not just users but friends of users. Apple was supposed to lean on the web for all of its apps. It was Jobs’s original vision, but it was shortlived for one version before the app store was launched.

yes Linus, this is the future super optimized personal software using tokens we buy from the the big bois. I feel the same feel you can see on Lukes face, this is here, theres no going back. Its one part absolutely amazing and 2 parts scary shit. To answer Linus’s quesion how do you hire someone, when you run all custom software. We stop hiring experts in adobe suite and hiring expert story tellers who have taste, style, and the ability to create something amazing that users want no matter what suite they are in. Someone who understands the craft of making something good, how to feel when its wrong, and turn it around. I can totally see part of this future where someone is making amazing content for Big Beast Time and Linus hires them cause they look good, but turns out Big Beast Time just had a cracked dev that made the greatest way to click together content for their audience that was foolproof and the guy had no idea what he was doing. I get it, this is not the future that anyone wanted, no one asked for, for every upside theres so many flaws, but this is now the generation we are working in and we gotta figure out how to make it work.

This, THIS is what I’ve been saying all along. To the point where friends will show me what they are doing and before they can say the word mcp they say , yes this is mcp, I know you don't think it doesnt need to be, but it is, just look at the cool shit. Almost always I end with that coulda been CLI/REST, or nah it’s auth mcp is fINe, followed by woah that’s some cool shit, I’m gonna ask my clanker to do that too.

Oh this is such a sick way to make a cool fontpack of random fonts.

The timing of watching this talk is uncanny timing just this week I started building out something that started as a prompt to pull pr data, and as I typed out the prompt in the moment it turned into something that is more like a software factory. I think I have a lot of the general ideas that matt share here. Around harnessing up automated review, fix, fix corrections. I need to read through some of his specifics as they seem better and more well honed than what I have. Had I not started just this week I probably would have glazed through the talk and been like sure sounds good, but having just started this I was pulled in. One of the favorite things I have in mine so far is really good hotkeys. I can fly through reviews, diffs, approve and merge in just a few keystrokes. This was a huge hurdle in existing tools so much that I put off a lot of sweeping change I’ve needed to do and I’m cranking through them this week.

oooh, excited for this upcoming feature to opencode to be able to gracefully ask a side question without interruption.

Excited to see Mitchell’s multiplexer project come together.

Interesting device from Scott Tolinski here. Looks like a fun, novel build for a problem he has that no one else is going to just build for him. I like how he was able to build it with such cheap and available hardware. I’m not sure how I feel about this single purpose device movement. Coming from a generation who dreamed of the phones we have today it feels weird to go the other way.

The state of agentic coding is one of my favorite new podcasts of late. The name sounds just like the same slop as everything else, but Ben and Armin are top tier hosts that actually do this stuff for work and on the side. Which brings me to the first intersting topic they talked about. Both talked about going slow at work. Ben still reads everything and deeply understands the insode of what he is working on. Home is a different story. At home both are cranking on new side projects, vibing them out quick and fast. The projects work for them and thats all they need. They dont need to support hundreds of users. All making it much easier to just let thr clanker kick new things out fast. An interesting side topic on open weight models. Armin opened with them being too expensive. The big labs have such good subsidies right now that it’s hard to justify not using them. He did have an interesting use case though. He has a side project using cheap Chinese carplay devices. When trying to get openai to work on them it tends to refuse to work for security reasons, but if he starts thr session with kimi, openai has no problems continuing. This is next level of whispering just the right tokens to thr model to get it to magically do things for you that it otherwise wouldn’t. He also commented this tends to work with distillation refusals too. He said he will get refusals for false distalation atrempts when working on pi. Armin admits that he tries all of the new ai tools as the come out, maybe not all, but a lot. He says he has adopted a whopping zero of them and his ai tools has not changed in the last year. They just dont seem to add anything for him. Agents with a good harness and some skills is about all he needs.

This is the first time I’ve seen or heard of Perry Daniels, I really like his editing style, it reminds me of good eats; the tone, tempo, the resesarch, the odd camera angles. I found this video very inspiring to go make something, My wife likes to keep field notes and sometimes has one for a few different tasks at the same time. It would be so cool to make her some custom ones for each.

The world has changed it’s now different and there is no going back. You get to choose to adopt it or not. You get to choose your attitude. But at this point the agents write most average code, better than the average developer, faster than the average developer, and the average developer sucks at steering it. Over time we will get better at steering them, they will continue to get better at breakneck speeds for a long time. We will either learn restraint or they will get better at making that choice not to boil the ocean for us. I really do get this feeling of the self-retire. It’s so easy to let agents do everything, and it so hard to watch the world turn to slop around us. No one can simply answer a question in a meeting or an interview without referring to their clanker and its it’s so irritating from both ends. It sucks to hear no one understands the depth of projects anymore, and at the same time it sucks to get called out on the complexity you glossed over. Things are changing fast, like it or hate it, its not stopping because of your opinions, you get to choose your outlook on it.

It’s crazy how many people are discovering linux here and are like why would I use this, oh it has tiling, it has workspaces. No shit so does every other good desktop environment that’s has came out in the last 10 years. All of these reviews are missing the polish that you don’t recognize until you have done it by hand. Full disk encryption setup with noting more than a password. Agents property use pkexec to ask for sudo permissions with a message saying what they are running. Out of the box I get snapshots and boot into snapshot. If I like using agents and I add an API key, I get a crash agent when any application fails if I choose to click the notification to have the agent fix my issue. Themes has polish that no other distro can claim. There are many good looking themes that automatically theme so many if the applications. You can do all of this yourself and maybe you should if you really like Linux and want to understand. The magic is how it is all assembled. The community being built to make it work on so many different devices, with a taste for speed and design.

LOL, interesting I just heard DHH talk about how we needed goal for a minute blip in history, it did it’s job. Then new models come out trained on our use of it and the models just do it whether you ask for it or not it does not really matter much either way. /goal is a special command for OpenAI Codex in which it will keep working toward whatever goal you set until it gradually convinces itself that the stated goal is not what you wanted but rather some much easier objective was the real goal all along.

Love the calendar view for Jim’s posts. I’m on my way to do this, I’ve been using a view like this in plaindown and nvim for my daily notes for awhile, but yet to publish a version on the website. I like how jim has made a visual indication on the different days highlighting posts that have landed on hacker news.

These are absolutely lovely. They look like they are ready to really get some work done. The Ducky is a little heavy on the gamer side for me looks wise, too much flash, not enough gas.

If this existed before, I probably would not have gone down the path of building my own from scratch. A monoblock that can plop down on a laptop is goated, split is nice at a desk, but nothing beats the portability of a monoblock. I dont like how this one covers up the trackpad with its 4th set of thumb keys. Also theres no need to mae the sides so thin, the height in the middle goes up to the top of the caps. Doing this all the way around makes it so much easier to toss into a backpack wtihout touching any keys. almost there dygma, just a few nit picks.

Damn this hits. I’m trying to change it up, but I’m far on the right. constantly greasing the pipeline and writing about it. or lately just not writing at all.

I really like the art style of this game. Love that someone is making something Hollow Knight like in their own style. The bosses though… oddly a little close to hollow knight characters.

Interesting tangent here on sleep, Adam talks about jet lag and his experience taking abien to shift his sleep schedule. In his experience it helped fix the sleep schedule, but did nothing to change how he actually felt during that time of re orienting in a new drastically different time zone. He was reminded of all of the sleep studies they did on mythbusters and how they found that it did not matter so much how much “sleep” you got that lying there still and quiet was nearly as effective as sleeping. Knowing this will, like others mentioned, will greatly relieve the sleep pressure I feel on nights of restlessness.

I had no idea how these pipes work, I’ve accidentally spawned so many that have sat there and waited for something to come down the pipe, but did not know this is what was happening.

Every Dax Raad interview is worth a listen, this one does not disappoint. They talk about running local dev setups in a vm in the cloud. Always connected, seemlessly upgrading hardware without you needing to buy sell or trade a thing. They talk about the one model that drove them into psycosis, I’m pretty sure it was 5.6 sol, but it could not be revealed at the time. Software engineering is still required alive and well even through the agentic era here.

Great reference to 11 laws of the universe.

So much nuance in model selection its hard to keep up.

Completely missing the point of physical media. I don’t see why preserving physical media is a win for xbox right now. The game is not on disk. In 30 years when the game servers are gone, I wont be able to play the game. I wont be able to buy cheap used copies in 6 months as people beat the game. I wont be able to trade in games I’ve beat to get a different game at a low cost. own nothing and be happy.

Interesting thoughts from a real OG Kent Beck. He argues we are whitnissing the biggest advancement in computing in 40 years. For 40 years we have been almost exclusively writing in compiled languages. Languages that output to some sort of binary compiled assembly instructions for each processor type. Before that it was all hand written instructions directly to CPU. Now we are seeing the genie revolution. The genie is good a writing in many different programming languages given english prompts. It loves to complete problems and is not afraid to write lots of code very quickly. Its quite good at skirting around our best judgement in order to accomplish the goal we set. Some take aways from this talk is that NO ONE knows what the fuck is next. No one knows the best ways to use these things. Everyone has their own opinion wrapped around their experience that might be wildly different than yours. It seems clear this is changing every day and ways no one can measure, predict, or prepare for. So much sits in the hands of model labs and model providers. Without real access to any of it, its all magic.

I align a lot with this post. From growing up in a rural house where internet access was harder to get. It was slow and only had one line, if you were on the internet, no one in the house could recieve a phone call. Idk if what is now the smol webl, the indieweb, is seeing a resurgence, if I’m just noticing it more. It does feel like along there has been a very small number of users willing to get their own domain, their own server, and host their own shit. A few of these are starting to really break out occasionally, see things like wordle hitting mass adoptioun before being swooped up by a giant. I too miss the internet of old, heck I really dont even mind the middle era of fb, twitter, instagram dominance, but what we have now is dominated by political undertones on it all with everyone shouting “Fake News” at each other. These sites are the easiest place to stay in touch with those you have met online, yet they are riddled with so much toxicity its impossible to have a great experience on them. I’m about a year and a half of not having a single one on my phone, and at this point I barely log into them once a week. RSS is the way forward, as long as its not killed by paywalled substack and medium.

Absolute whimsy achieved in this book themed #keeb build!

oof Mark, this does not feel like it is set to age well. These people in power feel so disconnected from regular people with a job trying to do work.

A solid checklist for agents to implement on most sites. Very few sites need 100% coverage, but most should probably check most of these boxes

It’s incredible how some problems seem so simple until you load the browser with so much text it just bogs to nothing and how impossibly difficult it becomes after this point. Very cool implementation of a problem that…. who has this problem. If it takes me 2 mintues to scroll through a diff at mach speed like the video, is a diff going to solve my problem?

Remember this clip in 5 years, after the churn we just had with RTO and ai this is going to hit. Or AI will just figure is all out for us, who knows anymore. Not that they will figure out the human side, the what does this do, why is it here. A temporary fix is a clear signal to your other devs I didn’t have enough time to do it right, but this works. I think AI will squash a large number of these, especially in big coorporate internal tooling where you are trying to juggle as much as you can and just keep it a float at all times.

How many people watching this sent their clankers out to make a uuid service for them as they were watching it. UUID as a service sounds great, heck @steipete just has to mention it and his claws are on it building out the service, no need to even type anything or directly form a thought, just mention it in the meeting and a new repo will be up by end of meeting.

Incredibly well done satire on t3.gg, love the at one of the top comments is Prime asking to be done next.

Lamb of God, a true classic, This album takes me back to high school. I don’t think I listened to the sacrament album as much, but “The Ashes of the Wake” was my jam for awhile, particularly hourglass.

The 3 piece design for wheel s without a z-seam is absolutely genius. That is a sick trick. Love this guys style. Need a tool Make a tool.

damn Johnathan Blow is not afraid to give you the cold hard opinions. If you want to be good you need to spend your early most formative years doing hard things, because you will not do it later, then goes on to say you should not do anything related to web development during that time as it will rot your brain.

Thorsten is always a great listen with well thought out answers. I thought the advice “all you have to be is good” from his is so great, so many people focus too hard on credentials and certificates, they miss the time in the saddle and raw, just being good at what you do. They talk a lot about industry trends and that ai/llms have been here long enough to see that they are the new iphone. In some way you need to learn to work with them. Much of the minutia is churn, it will change and we will forget about it in six months. Working at amp right now is really trying to focus on releasing exactly the right thing and not everything. We’ve been given these great models that can churn out poc very quickly, it is our job to focus on what the right thing to adopt is.

Thorsten is always a great listen with well thought out answers. I thought the advice “all you have to be is good” from his is so great, so many people focus too hard on credentials and certificates, they miss the time in the saddle and raw, just being good at what you do. They talk a lot about industry trends and that ai/llms have been here long enough to see that they are the new iphone. In some way you need to learn to work with them. Much of the minutia is churn, it will change and we will forget about it in six months. Working at amp right now is really trying to focus on releasing exactly the right thing and not everything. We’ve been given these great models that can churn out poc very quickly, it is our job to focus on what the right thing to adopt is.

Hilarious ai episode of the office. all sort of flaws. nailed the personalities.

one minute in, I cannot believe Prime has never used a password manager. For all the shit they give Trash for his one password, He does not use a password manager!

Prime on Big A they make a really great mix. I really like primes perspective on the layoffs here. Adding in an ops perspecive a bit here. Maybe inspiring a full level post. infra, ops, sre roles are incentivised to keep uptime, that is your goal in these roles. Idk how it works on big products, its probably more greased, higher stakes, more well thoguht out, more well discussed. In my role for many small internal applications developers constantly use my platform different and find new edge cases that we never expected to hit. Depending on my week I’m either the team blocker and I’m fighting fires all week making sure new releases are getting out and stay running while everything is breaking, or I’m tending to the fire lanes, predicting the new edges, looking at previous outages and asking myself how do we never see this category of failure again. I think AI is really good a enabling both of these. I think you can probably run a leaner team with AI on the latter half. AI is really good at implementing things consitent (if you are careful) and fast. But when shit hits the fan, you still need the people who know the systems to get things back up quickly and prevent a cascade of more problems.

What a great way to start a Wednesday morning with a fresh brand new tiny desk concert with the Foo Fighters. The killed it, love the classics.

I havent used windows in years at this point, but I feel this on the products I am forced to use for work. Basic features are not right, kinda work most of the time. New features, ai integrations, new skin/design, but still teams can’t use my system mic appropriately yet every other app does. Also feel this computers have not got significantly better since around getting ssds. Yes they are better, but not at the same rate of being obsolete every two years. I hope we hit local model land and it flips this a bit, not in quite the obsolete every two years range, but some new hardware actually lets you do meaningful more new things.

Really good tutorial for how to mod silksong on the steam deck. We just did this on my son’s steam deck. I’d add a reccomendation to map ~ to a back button like L4. I think this guy was docked with a keyboard.

Full salary for the rest of the year after being let go. As much as this sucks as much as the job market sucks. It’s good to see that these companies laying off huge numbers during good times are trying to take care of those they brought on.

Absolutely incredible, will fill some notes later

I’m taking this as a reminder to treat every machine like its about to catch fire, any machine with a user regularly using it already has the match lit. I need to go through and commit draft blog posts, dirty homelab POC’s need to get out or get in, and not forever be in limbo. My efforts this year have been well intention ed to keep projects clean, on main, not dirty, but I think agents are making it worse before they make it better. I have some new ideas forming and old ideas for managing this have failed me.

Hank Greed made a really cool site to explore the Artemis II mission with Claude Code. Now this is what agentic coding is for, such a cool app to scroll around on and visualize when the photos were taken. Listening to the video is sounded really hard to get all of the data to line up correctly, between devices and timezones it ws not straightforward even though all of the schedules and images were made public.

The most iconic shots of a scrub ever caught on camera.

Casey had an interesting point here. I think demitri came back with some sense of sanity that its just not how corporations look at employee cost, but I still thought it was a head scratcher. Roughly translated not quoted If the sellers of ai are telling you that your developers are going to be 10x productive, why are they only spending half their salary in tokens? Why not 9x?

I hate how he called out terminal user interfaces as shit… then proved web interfaces to be superior. Damn him. I love working from my terminal, but having ai prove itself through html reports including video, image, metrics, charts, and text is goated. Rethinking yourself has the bottleneck not the orchestrator feels real. Validating the work is hard, theres a shift right now and everyone is trying to figure it out. Lucas’s technique is a little bit of be lazy and tell it to prove itself to you, so as you juggle your 15 agents you have a nice report to read.

This is a really good guide, with quite a few good nuggets. I need to try deleting my AGENTS.md and rebuilding it from scratch more often. I liked how he talked about having agents prove their work and tell them up front how they will be judged. What I didn’t care for so much was the feeling that a lot of the rules go in markdown, thats not a rule, thats a suggestion. Rules should be deterministic. They should be tests and linters that ensure they are followed. Suggestions are good, but dont trust the agents to always follow them. And don’t trust that they wont change your rules, keep them honest.

Interesting take by Kenneth Reitz. Not quite sure how I feel about it anymore. It kinda hurts, but I’m not sure if code aesthetics matter as much as the product anymore. I cared when I was the one editing, but at this point I’m not doing a lot of edits by hand. Do these aesthetics affect the final products that users use, Not sure. AI makes me sad.

If agents make prime a bit faster, what does that mean for the rest of us mortals?

I’ve gotta agree with bob on this one, the first thing I did to my biggest brownfield project I wanted to use agents on BEFORE they did work was a hardened pre-commit.yaml, ci, hardened type checking and linting. SECOND get rid of bad inconsistent patterns, let them replicate consistency, force them to pass checks. Agents will follow all of your markdown suggestions most of the time, enough for you to become complacent if you let it. They are goal seeking, if you put them to a task you thought was possible that is not given your constraints, they will try to find a way given enough tokens. I dont see this ever changing, its one thing that makes them great, it just needs to be kept in check.

5 star video, if you are going to watch one video to understand how harnesses and agents work, this is it. This really had my gears spinning on what tools do for agents and how big of a difference they make in their ability to manage context efficiently and accurately create changes. It’s crazy how good bash works, and that gives the agents the ability to do just about everything, but it could be better.

One of the biggest scientific achievement of our lifetime happened this week. I will forever remember sitting in a Culvers in between theater builds looking through these photos as they came live, looking at them in awe.

What an amazing set of photos created by the Artemis II crew accompanying a fantastic breakdown by Hank Green. Whole gallery is worth looking at https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/lunar-flyby/

A really interesting long form interview with @simonwillison. If you follow him closely most of it is probably not new, but I found some interesting nuggets. Simon is writing most of his code from his phone these days using anthropic hosted platform. He mentioned that a lot of security risks go away when you don’t put secrets on the platform and you let them take the risk of running ai written code with ai chosen supply chain. He talked about the Pelican Riding a Bike benchmark for quite awhile. He was surprised at how well of a proxy it is for how capable a model is at just about everything. He also said that when he runs the benchmark he also runs half a dozen others that he’s never talked about so that He could see if they were to train a model specific to his benchmark he could catch them, but it seems they had caught on and if they were they seem that they would already be doing it on all of his others anyways. TDD is incredibly boring for humans, it strips so much creativity and joy from the process. Who cares if agents are bored they do better when doing TDD.

THIS is the future of homelab, excited to see someone who knows so much more about hardware than I do get excited about this.

Is Glasswing the next inflection point

Absolutely sick texture app from cnc kitchen. Like him I’ve spent a bunch of time attempting and failing to learn blender, I’m so glad someone else vibe coded out such a good app that can just add texture to stls with basic masks and is the very basics of what you would want to add to 3d prints to make them interesting, I’m excited to use this for some real projects.

Bush on tiny desk. Iconic band on an iconic platform. Will be re-listening to this several times.

smassh is the coolest monkeytype tui clone, its impressively accurate. Easy to install and run, all the same themes appear to be there and everything. maybe a good way to get a few reps in while agents are running these days.

I’ve been thinking about this for awhile and Daniel makes some great arguments here. Interestingly keeping inference cheap removes the incentives to make our tools better, help us choose the right model, lean on local models, open weight models. The frontier models are so affordable through subsidized subscription models why would you deal with anything less intelligent at this point. The tooling we use is not optimized for it, and why should it be.

uv adds dependency cooldowns via #16814. Well needed feature in todays world, far from a guarantee, but its something.

Everyone look away, nothing to see here.

Anthropic safewords are the talk of the town today.

webdev twitter is blowing up with implementations of pretext text calculations. The examples are absolutely fun and ridiculous.

The claude code source code leaked today and the tweets are great, maybe twitter is back. Did you know you can replace the spinning verbs in Claude Code. I’m having fun with it.

I’m about to be pi pilled.

I try to keep a pretty light every day carry, but it never works out, keyfobs and headphone cases end up causing more bulk than I’d like, but My EDC is no where near the bulk I had as a kid with my cargo pants decked out with everything I could possibly need. I hold no attachment to anything in my EDC. Nothing on my person has sentimental value. Anything I carry can be lost, stolen, or destroyed at any point in time. I pick things of sufficient usable, utilitarian, quality sufficient to work. No extra fluff. Google Pixel 6 Ridge Wallet Olight Perun - Since April 2022 Civivi Qubit - Since March 2024 after my last one was donated to the Indianapolis Stadium OpenFit Shokz lightweight replacable no emotional attachments utilitarian everything serves a purpose Google Pixel 6 I will not get finance a new phone for the foreseeable future again. The last time I feel like I got a phone that felt like an upgrade was 2018 when I went to the Pixel 3. The pixel 6 and pixel 8 my wife has feel no different whatsoever to me. It’s become more of a tool that does its job, there’s no major upgrades really driving me to create more ewaste with new devices. Ridge Wallet A necessary evil that I still need. I keep as few of cards as necessary in it. This would be the worst thing in my kit to loose. Only because the time it would take to replace all of them. This one was a gift to replace my last leather wallet, and I see no reason for this one to ever need replaced. It’s much lighter and smaller, would not change that aspect. Olight Perun When I became a homeowner I added a dedicated flashlight to my EDC. Its light and out of the way. It’s the only thing I’ve ever found useful to fit in the coin pocket of jeans, so I don’t even notice it. Compared to using a phone, its more powerful, easier to position on me with the clip on my shirt/pants, or magnetically to a metal surface for inspections/house work. Civivi Qubit I’ve carried a knife since as long as I can remember, feels like 10 but probably more like 14 years old. Never anything fancy, a few knock off leathermans, a few Buck, Case, KaBar that I found on a bridge, and now 3 Civivis. I use them till they break or more commonly they get lent and not returned, or lost. This is the most utilitarian thing I keep, almost always kept razor sharp, used, abused, and put away dirty. Never used for prying, but used to cut anything it will cut no matter how hard it is on it. Its not to look pretty, show off, its purely a tool that I hold no attachment to. OpenFit Shokz Not my first choice in headphones, but they work. Headphones are probably the item of biggest churn and ewaste for me. Eventually I might pony up for something that is more durable and repairable, but headphones just don’t last forever before they stop working for me. This latest pair was a pair my wife chose to try and did not like. They sat in a drawer for a year or so until I started carrying them.

We f&#ing said @pype, well f&#ing said. I think a lot of us are feeling this, we’ve pitched our brain into a bucket and we are no longer stretching it in the same way. We still work in similar ways of old, with new ways of turning off and saying yes a bunch of times. the best thing I can hope for is that as things get better we have fewer yes loops, and more architectural design debates and deep thoughts. But I fear deep thoughts are gone to the way of “research the leading 10 frameworks and pick the best one for this project.” and letting the clankers do the deep thinking. Its signing us up for a weird distopia. I think a lot of us wish we could undo what has happened and go back to actually understanding what we are doing, but the world has changed, and if you are building average shit, like the average person, using models trained on average people doing average shit you cant keep up anymore.

I’m in step with @pype here, I really want beads to work for me, but my systems for infra/platform work are all over the place, not one repo. I’m considering trying the BEADS_DIR env var but idk if it fits my workflow. For now, similar to @pype, I am rocking my own home vibed solution that I’ve intentionally put little effort in and its working great and I expect it to be broken and not working with the latest harnesses and models within a few months anyways, cause there is no predicting this train.

oof, outage on the homelab during vacation, brutal. I can think of a couple of similar solutions to what @pype has done to tailscale in, but I’m not sure that I could do this remotely. On one hand I’m so glad that cloudflared just takes care of certs on the other hand this really brings a gap in my understanding of what the heck I would do if it were broken. An untested DR plan is not a DR plan. An untested backup does not exist.

Vibe coding is going so far into the news sphere now that Adam Savage even weighs in with perspectives from someone who has built a life around building things with his hands, keeping up with new making techniques, discovering old techniques as they combine with new. He talks about 3d printing reviving his love of the pantograph as one automation technique eases the most difficult part of another.

Does anyone think fast-code will continue to pay the same salary? The answer isn’t to switch your brain off during your McCode shift and write a poem after work. Your job will be replaced by a Banglasdeshi slop-shop if AI improves (which is inevitable, apparently). Possibly the same sweatshop that loomed my £3 T-shirt. The Luddites didn’t accept their fate so easily. David has some good points here, but I’m feeling the opposite direction a bit. Execs have always liked keeping the PM’s and the people steering the ship close by and were willing to farm out more and more grunt work. It feels like we are in a weird phase where there used to be a big group of people paid to write code. A few of them are exceptionally good at it and will remain. There will be a need for these people everywhere. Somehow we still need people hand editing assembly code optimizations, fortran, and cobol today. Those industries largely moved on, but a few great ones remain. I think this fast-code slop factory is going to be a short forgotten time in history, but no one yet knows what’s next. We are all waiting to find out. Just with anything there is still value in doing it by hand and understanding it at a deep level, but its quickly becoming hobby work. The things that most people code, things like CRUD apps do not require a special skill. They are largely replicating existing good patterns on frameworks to implement business logic that are custom to the app. There is no way of getting around the latter. Someone will always need to understand the business logic and be able to “sign off” and assert that it does the thing the business needs.