AllanSavageDev

This is and has been the number one question over at WalMart for a long time. They have the money and resources, the supply chain, seemingly all thats necessary to at least get a really strong start at solving the remaining problems.

I forget but I believe Amazon gets a decent chunk of its earnings from AWS too.

This is a great example of what I'm coming to call "Good Enough is Good Enough". They could have paid more for a "quality" website, but that so called quality wouldn't make any difference to the customer so what does it matter? Is quality you cant see and don't notice even quality at all? If bad code runs is it bad code?

It was dirty cheap and it works. The accountants are running the show now and so long as AI Slop gets the job sufficiently done, thats more than fine with them.

Lambda is awesome .. until you actually try to use it for realsies. Cat turd is an apt description. Just being able to get the damn logs for debugging is itself a hassle. Terraform helps a ton in all this and I rarely find myself using the AWS UI anymore. Still Lambda is a great idea that just doesn't deliver for any use case more than responding to some S3 upload action or Event Bridge operation.

Don't even get me started on the API Gateway sitting in front of a group of related Lambdas. Its OK once you get it setup and running but buildign/changing it amounts to stabbing yourself in the eyes.

EU hosting their own ops like they built the Airbus A380:

Database runs in France, front end in Belgium, Operations in Spain...

EU Fairness dictates they all need to get a slice of the pie so this will be interesting (and by that I mean absurdly hilarious).

I spoke with some high level folks at a very profitable private company recently and inquired as to why they had DBAs on staff for what amounts to a pretty simple OLTP type system. Id naively assumed that someone of that scale would be using a cloud provider (RDS for AWS etc) thus negating the need for someone who really knows DB internals and upgrades and OS level stuff.

The answer was that they simply didn't trust GCP or AWS or Azure to see their data and know how much silly money they were making in the niche industry they almost completely monopolize.

I recently interviewed with a lower-case-m megacorp in a similar situation and they host on-prem for the same reason, at great expense and hassle in facilities all over the country.

Seems like theres room in the market for some kind of an On Prem Private Cloud Stack that emulates GCP/AWS etc but locally maybe?

Cloud-In-A-Box anyone?

For some time now I've had some loose abstraction swimming around my head sort of between code and prompt, and maybe its the OUTPUT of the prompt. Im assuming going forward that developers will be no better at reading generated C code than I am at reading assembly today.

I'm imagining some "AI Native Intermediate Representation" where the prompt says "Give me a function that takes an array of strings and returns that array sorted", the real code that runs in the end is the actual C code, and the representation might be something low complexity but still human readable:

func sortArray(<String> input) -> input.order.asc;

Not quite a prompt, certainly not runnable code but a higher level hybrid that is human readable AND can be compiled into actual C code. At some point someone is going to have to debug something and nobody will be able to read assembly/real code anymore.

It just seems to me in the whole "AI WRITES MY CODE" world that nobody is really thinking about debugging and maintenance. What do we just commit the prompt we built the program with to Git and call it a day? What about when we need to modify the system? Do we make a prompt to modify? Do we modify the original prompt?

AI so far is probabilistic, and that can certainly be dealt with via various workarounds, and theres currently no reason to think todays stuff would even generate the same code twice. I can't shake the idea theres a step missing in everyone saying "AI will write all our code now".

Its all a hack until a PHD writes a paper, then it becomes a technique.

Edit: Funny story - this morning Im up early to write a program of low complexity but still somewhat rigorous. Let me see if I can think up a prompt that I might use:

I need a program invoked with a main. We'll use this as a scaffolding to extend as the requirements materialize and constraints emerge. It will generate valid trading days for ES index futures where contract months are HMUZ. For each contract it will start with the last day of trading as defined by the contract specification located at (www.cmegroup.com/contracts/ES) and build and build an array consisting of 4 calendar months of those dates starting back from the last day of the contract. This collection will be sorted in ascending order by date where by the 0 element in the array is the earliest trading date.

^^ So this here is just my intermediate step. Im not even sure this is how I want to go forward with it but this approach is just the first way I can conceive of to get the job started. From here I'll read the output and figure how to add in the useful things I need to make it actually perform the intended function beyond what this prompt tells it to do. I cant even imagine how I might specify the final product I need in English. Id be writing a giant prompt for everything I need built and code would be so much faster to write and think in. Describing my stated intent in all this in English sounds like ... murder. And we all know that prompt I just made up sitting here is both a decent start at a prompt AND wholly inadequate and will produce absolutely useless garbage.

Someday people are going to get tired of "programming in English" with prompts, getting inaccurate output, etc and someone is going to invent a higher level kind of CODE that allows the user to directly specify the actions the computer should take to solve the problem. Later someone will invent a kind of tooling that COMPILES these CODES into a runnable thing skipping the prompt part all together. It might be called something like Unified Prompt Language.

From all I can see, things for US citizen developers are all but over.

Not AI, offshoring combined with downsizing of US based engineering orgs.

Corp America has figured it out finally after 2 decades of entitled developers making 2 day tasks into 2 week tasks in the name of "best practices", "architecture" and "Doing It Right!" etc, all while commanding high salaries.

It turns out that Good Enough is in fact good enough and the people who write the checks are onto it. Even if its not quite good enough, cheap offshore resources can just be sent back to make it work. US based staff of 5 people who can be held responsible for guiding a much larger offshore group seems to be the common pattern.

All of this was imparted to me by a CIO on a recent interview with a financially strong mid sized company in the eastern US. The developers I interviewed with where EXCEPTIONALLY COMFORTABLE and displayed zero signs of any kind of stress from maintaining their literally 20 years out of date infra. It was insinuated that the team I interviewed with "probably wont look the same in 6 months" too.