It's worth remembering that this isn't that. What the poster describes is constant pushing from the Chrome OS designed to train dependence on the tools and to essentially checkout of the education process. In my opinion this is definitely useless for learning.
I don't have a lot of patience for Bob. That being said I have to agree with him on test coverage (that's as far as I made it through his monologue). IMHO, that is something that I 100% am okay letting the LLM tooling write and manage. I used to argue about whether or not we needed a test that verified that the value of a constant didn't change, and if 100% coverage was really that important. Now I don't care, I just let Claude write the test and keep it up-to-date.
I think concentrating on the physical act of typing on the keyboard is maybe taking it a little too far. The author of the OP talks more about holding a lot of the problem in their head and entering a "flow" state where they figure out a solution.
Most of my interaction with AI models and agents is still mediated by a keyboard and still requires a lot of "typing ascii characters". ;-)
The "typing ascii characters" angle is a bit hyperbolic, I admit. But my intention is to get people to think about their software, not their personal experience of it.
BTW, there's nothing preventing you from using AI agents and staying in the flow state. If you want that, the universe is not stopping you. In fact, not dealing with the minutia of source code may well free us up and allow even greater flow experiences.
> In fact, not dealing with the minutia of source code may well free us up and allow even greater flow experiences.
You say minutia, but others say well organized notation and predictive systems. At least for me, writing code is as easy as writing English and with less effort.
When I retire almost none of the software I produced during my career will still be in use, but I'll have memories of 40 years of work to live with until I pass away.
I understand that commercial companies want to get as much value out of each developer as possible, I understand that managers want work to complete as quickly as possible. I can see why they are so excited about LLM tooling and the current increase in output.
This post makes a good point: managing LLM models isn't really the same thing as thinking hard about a particular problem, solving that problem and then concretizing it in code. If the work becomes managing models, I think we're going to see a pretty stark divergence between what people enjoy about developing software today and what the job is requiring. I'm not yet convinced LLM tooling will stick but, if it does, it makes me wonder what kind of person will be doing software development. Maybe some of same people and they find something else to enjoy about the job but I bet a lot of a different kind of person.
Personally, I am very uncomfortable with the idea that all software development might be mediated by LLM tooling and, as a consequence, require payment to a large corporate entity like Anthropic or Google. Hopefully some open source projects will remain open to accepting PRs from people, like the author of the OP, who enjoy working in that "flow" state. I enjoy writing software as a hobby (as well as at my job) but it looks like the hobby might become a larger source of personal fulfillment.
> I'm not yet convinced LLM tooling will stick but, if it does, it makes me wonder what kind of person will be doing software development. Maybe some of same people and they find something else to enjoy about the job but I bet a lot of a different kind of person.
TBH, I've often felt like a weirdo who enjoys "the wrong things" about software engineering.
Are they? I remember when heavyweight IDEs where all the rage, there was a similar sentiment that if you weren't using one of them then you would eventually be so much slower that you'd be out of a job. It only took maybe five years until people started asking themselves if the dependency on a big IDE (and cost) was worth it. I don't think anyone would look at someone who prefers a stripped down text editor today and think they are backward or doing it wrong.
We have yet to see hard numbers on time saved by those who use LLM tooling extensively. It could be it doesn't turn out as compelling as we might expect.
Just sayin', I never forced software developers to use NetBeans or Intellij IDEA. I'm certainly not changing my tune and forcing them to use LLM tooling either.
Maybe it depends. If what you want to build is one-shot crap anyway, then micromanaging LLMs to make them vomit what you need for that is "productive". I wouldn't know, because I prefer real work over the make-believe and leave the AI coding acolytes to be left behind and die when their ingenious plans explode in their faces.
Vim and Emacs can do a lot of what IDEs used to offer thanks to language servers and build servers. Before those (lang/build servers) they were largely useless for large scale development (believe me, i tried).
It can put out code much faster than any software dev. And if you are careful with your prompts and demands, it is good quality code as well.
Especially for visualising data, to just get a quick look at, it can now be done in lightning speed and I am quite familiar with "manual data processing" in a few languages.
AI use me decently outcompetes manual me. Sometimes there are also stupid tasks. Data must be serialised in a certain way for some stupid reason. You prepare the info to be digested and the busywork can be done by agents with little oversight, which otherwise would have taken you a few hours. There simply is a limit in how fast you can read, look up field names, etc... If you outsource these critical paths to AI, you can gain productivity.
I also start way more side projects now and I like manual coding a lot.
Of course, it isn't the quantity. It is more about the features you wouldn't implement because manual dev takes a long time and why not let the AI spin up a non-critical site for administration or testing just for you. The cost/benefit calculation shifts a bit.
That said, if you get something quite heavy to lift off, it probably is a decent engineering feet. Not saying it would be the best plane :)
Big social media companies are likely overjoyed to be able to get discrete, government issued info of a person's full legal name, date of birth, residential address (as is printed on US drivers licenses) for advertising and demographic profile targeting purposes. And then be able to correlate it with their existing social media history/clicks/profile, browser fingerprinting, IP address, daily usage patterns, geolocation. It's a massive gift to them.
I doubt they need that to identify you. There are also lots of other problems like algorithmic manipulation. But also just stop using these junky websites. Everyone always complains about Meta doing this, TikTok doing that, and it's like if all they do is make you mad, stop being their user/customers?
It's very hard to stop being their users/customers when they're the only platform where people are gathering for that particular purpose. The nature of walled gardens and network effects often mean that there isn't a viable alternative.
It's bad when the choice one has is between 1) using a platform that's significantly problematic or 2) being disconnected from everyone you'd like to connect with because they're only using that platform.
It’s pretty easy. I haven’t had social media besides LinkedIn since, I think 2013? I participate in all sorts of events, I know about things going on in my neighborhood and city, and I have quite a few friends. You don’t need this stuff and it’s just going to suck up more and more of your time and attention misleading you in to believing you need it.
You’re not connected with anyone. It’s a surrogate activity.
Be careful saying you don’t use social media or soon you’ll have a wholly off-topic sub-thread about whether or not HN is social media too, even though we’ve all read the same tired arguments from both sides about a billion times in other threads.
You're right, and if someone wants to say I have social media because of this forum that's totally fine. I just mean I don't use any of the major social media platforms, well, except LinkedIn. And I just haven't gotten over the hump yet on deleting that one too.
In the US, the plan is to require adults to take a picture of their state ID and upload it to a third party that provides age verification. It's not explicitly part of the proposed law but there are only a handful of companies who meet the qualifications to provide this service (id.me, Persona) and this is how they do it.
I believe if you are a "minor" then you can go the post-a-selfy route.
If someone wanted to be a martyr and just uploaded all their personal documents so they could be accessed by everyone, I wonder if an interesting court case might follow.
I could imagine it ending with a court ruling that people are responsible to protect their own personal documents which... yeah, that would muddy the waters in a world where every website expects to see your ID.
The verification apps are starting to require live video selfies to verify that the person doing the verifying is the same face as the person on the scanned ID credential.
> In the US, the plan is to require adults to take a picture of their state ID and upload it to a third party that provides age verification.
That's not just the plan - that's what's already legally required in many US states.
These laws were introduced by the explicitly religious right-wing groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media, as ways to de facto outlaw pornography (in their own words). They've since been laundered into the mainstream so the general public is unaware of the root cause.
This quote in particular struck me as way out there.
“Maybe one way to say it from the administration's perspective,” Stassun says, “is that this group of presidential appointees was advising the Congress to not follow the president's wishes."
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