661–670 of 686 posts
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Source please.
Wife teaches 4th grade. They cannot give an "F" if the student turns something in. Only for completely missing work.
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I see it even on my GitHub project, issues and pull request comments get longer, responses get longer, all generated by ai and read by ai. This text is no longer for human consumption, but to provide context to ai. See also this video from Nate B Jones: https://youtu.be/FDkvRl1RlT0?si=WUK2WJTXvKAWKD0r
Seems like we risk the atrophy of western software while surpassed by software developed in places and cultures where they don't "move fast and break things". We have never needed to "move slow and fix things" more than right now.
> move slow and fix things
In physical reverse engineering there's a common pattern people use: buy 3. One to break, one to modify, one to reference. You need the one to break because you're going in blind. The problem has a lot of unknown unknowns. It's often difficult to take things apart (especially these days) without breaking them. But the second time it is much easier to do nondestructively.
But I'm also a big fan of taking time to think and understand. To gain deep understanding of things. I've always found this to be helpful and allowed me to move faster in the long run but I often face resistance to this because everyone wants me to "move fast".
The problem is I think people have the illusion that you can run a marathon by doing consecutive 100m dashes. It sounds nice in theory but I think there's no surprise that burnout is at an all time high and things are getting sloppy.
It's weird, we've systematically created a work structure that has the same principles as scams: frame everything as an emergency so the mark doesn't have time to think. Why the fuck are we scamming ourselves?
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I agree, so you should ask yourself "why would the expert do this?" I decided to go for the charitable interpretation of "the alternatives are close enough in functionality that writing by hand is not worth it", instead of the uncharitable interpretation of "these examples are completely made up".
Because the expert has forgotten. Skills that we don't use are forgotten, and there's nothing new in that. Except for the proverbial bicycle.
I think, through these tools as accelerants, we’re finally getting to see the chasm between academic rote memorization of tech-work,
and deep, actual understanding,
that some of our colleagues have.
Folks have been noting a trend of mental abstraction away from the stack, & long-term thinking - that hasn’t changed.
It just has Turbo now.
> The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce [...]. > The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in. There is a third shape. Experts who have become so reliant / accustomed to AI that it dilutes their previously sharp judgment and, importantly, taste . I am seeing more and more work produced by experts which seems st…
One of the top 4 ICS in my (major, public) company just posed a 100 lines of AI slop (which I and others read, and found to be meaningless) in a conversation about a major pain point where they are supposed to be the expert. It's like people have totally turned off their brains.
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What that would be for example?
An example of how a healthy company would deal with an employee who isn't meeting expectations? I honestly didn't think that needed an explanation, but okay: The manager should be giving feedback to the employee, ideally as close to the moment when the expectations are not met (e.g. someone acting poorly in a meeting, take them aside after the meeting and explain what they did that was bad and what would have been a…
> The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce [...]. > The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in. There is a third shape. Experts who have become so reliant / accustomed to AI that it dilutes their previously sharp judgment and, importantly, taste . I am seeing more and more work produced by experts which seems st…
> An over-engineered solution (complete with CLI, storage backend, documentation, unit tests) for a trivial problem which that person would've solved by an elegant bash one-liner only 3 years ago. “There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C.” https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.h...
Fantastic little read that brightened my morning (during a boring meeting).
> "Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes, post-incident reports, design memos, kickoff decks: every artifact that can be elongated is, by people who do not read what they produce, for readers who do not read what they receive." Great article. The "elongation" of workplace artifact…
At my uni, dissertations were supposed to be 10k words.
I handed in 7.5 and got a distinction because it met the brief.
Never pad.
It would be nice if someone invented a mouse with a tiny motor inside, so I could put on sunglasses, rest my hand on the mouse, doze off, and still look like I'm working hard.
There's a camera in the glasses and a motor in the mouse. It watches your screen and moves the mouse to click on the right things at the right times.
What are we doing about the keyboard though? Are we putting your arms on fine strings, marionette-style?
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Problem is that it does not produce better or more work, it actually shifts the work to a different/future engineer. Today’s slop which gets engineer 1 a promotion, is engineer’s 2 problem next month when they are oncall and the codebase makes no sense. Your horse riding analogy, is like riding a horse into battle without your weapon because it’s slowing you down. Sure you got through the enemy first by outmanoeuvrin…
That's a very good revert on horse-riding analogy. But you might still be making an assumption that the horse package doesn't come with a weapon. It might boil down to saying "AI can not achieve the skills of a senior engineer" - which might not have a strong basis.
The person pushing the PR is getting promoted because their are delivering so mane features, but after some time the codebase is a mess.
Sure the same person might end up dealing with some of the cleaning up, but more likely those refactoring tasks end up getting spread across the team as the need arises.
People are incentivized to push out code, which under human-written coding standard usually meant a level of pro-efficiency, so they should be rewarded.
But with the new model of pushing out code with ai, a better metric of a good engineer that should be promoted would be lines deleted, or something like that. Much harder to measure, and hard to justify to management.
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If anything, the current era looks like how 1995-2015 was for me. Back then I was not in the “nitpicker’s radar” yet. I was working in small teams and shipping like crazy, sometimes fixing small bugs literally in seconds. Things worked, were stable, made money, teams were fun and code and product had quality. The post-Thoughtworks, post-Uncle-Bob world of 2015-2025 was absolute hell for a maker. It was 100% about per…
Do you mean to say that in 2026 things look different than they did in 2015-2025?