351–360 of 630 posts
He should join the Ardour project. Or go to work for Ableton or Bitwig or Presonus or Digidesign or MOTU or any other DAW manufacturer. Or any video or image editing application. Or get involved with more or less any complex, "creative" native desktop application. All of the stuff he feels he is falling behind on? Almost completely irrelevant in our domain.
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Is that really what he's saying here? He's not against the technology, I think he's just feeling like there's a lot of potential that he's not quite grasping yet.
This guy is one of the top names in AI. This is pure propaganda written to instill "fear of missing out" and encouraging people to buy into his platform, lest they become "obsolete."
What exhausts me isn’t “falling behind.” It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore. This agentic arms race by C-suite know-nothings feels less like leverage and more like denial. We took a stochastic text generator, noticed it lies confidently, wipes entire databases and hard…
I think AI-assisted programming may be having the opposite effect, at least for me. I'm now incentivized to use less abstractions. Why do we code with React? It's because synchronizing state between a UI and a data model is difficult and it's easy to make mistakes, so it's worth paying the React complexity/page-weight tax in order for a "better developer experience" that allows us to build working, reliable software…
I empathize with his sense that if we could just provide the right context and development harness to an AI model, we could be *that* much more productive, but it might just be misplaced hope. Claude Code and Cursor are probably not that far from the current frontier for LLM development environments.
I've seen that these tools have different uses for different devs. I know on my current team, each of us devs works very differently to one another, and we make significant allowances to accommodate for one another's different styles. Certain tasks always go to certain devs; one dev is like a steel trap, another is the chaos explorer, another's a beginner, another has great big-picture perspective, etc. (not sure why but there's even space for myself ;)
In the same way, different devs use these powerful tools in very different ways. So don't imagine you're falling behind, because the only useful benchmark is yourself. And don't imagine you can wait for consensus: you'll still need to identify your personal relationship to the tools.
Most of all, don't be discouraged. Even if you never embrace these tools, there will remain space for your skills and your style of approaching our shared work.
Give it another 10 years and I'm sure this will all become clearer...
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Simon, you're starting to sound super disconnected from reality, this "I hit everything that looks like a nail with my LLM hammer" vibe is new.
My habits have changed quite a bit with Opus 4.5 in the past month. I need to write about it..
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If the complexity grows beyond what it makes sense to do without React I'll have the LLM rewrite it all in React! I did that with an HTML generation project to switch from Python strings to Jinja templates just the other day: https://github.com/simonw/claude-code-transcripts/pull/2
Simon, you're starting to sound super disconnected from reality, this "I hit everything that looks like a nail with my LLM hammer" vibe is new.
Even IF llms don't get any better there is a mountain of lemons left to squeeze in their current state.
I think it's mistaken to think in terms of 'falling behind' or 'catching up' I've seen that these tools have different uses for different devs. I know on my current team, each of us devs works very differently to one another, and we make significant allowances to accommodate for one another's different styles. Certain tasks always go to certain devs; one dev is like a steel trap, another is the chaos explorer, anothe…
I am not [yet] ready to just let an agent write a whole app or server for me, but I am increasingly letting them write a whole function for me.
They are also great “bug finders.” I can just feed some code, describe the symptoms, and ask for an observation. I often get great suggestions, including things like finding typos and copy/pasta problems.
I find that just this limited application has significantly increased my development velocity, and, I believe, the quality of my work.
Wow - can we coin "Slopbrain" for people who are so far gone into AI eventualism that they can no longer function? Liked "cooked" but "slopped" or something. Good grief lol. Talk about getting lost in the sauce...
What exhausts me isn’t “falling behind.” It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore. This agentic arms race by C-suite know-nothings feels less like leverage and more like denial. We took a stochastic text generator, noticed it lies confidently, wipes entire databases and hard…
Every technical person has been complaining about this for the entire history of computer programming Unless you’re writing literal memory instructions then you’re operating on between 4 and 10 levels of abstraction already as an engineer It has never been tractable for humans to program a series of switches without incredible number of abstractions The vast majority of programmers never understood how computers work…