AstroBen

"I saw her duck" - how much would you be willing to bet on the intended meaning of this sentence?

English isn't a good programming language if you want to trust that the output will be as you want it to be. High level code has no room for ambiguity - that's why we use it. It's a concise, very explicit language to tell the compiler exactly what to do.

Dealing with an LLM is a fundamentally different thing. The reason it's able to speed us up is because it makes assumptions for us and reads between the lines. The only world where we trust the output is one where it can literally read our minds. That's not coming any time soon

I thought about doing that with Todoist.. and then just decided I'd rather pay the $4-5/mo or whatever to not have to use unpolished apps and sync server

And engineers have a lot of leeway to just make shit up and the PM would have no idea until it blows up.

So you just click around the UI, assuming there is one?

Can you break down for me exactly how the unit and integration tests are made? Do you ask the AI what to assert?

How do you test code that you don't understand?

Black-box e2e testing isn't suitable, or practical, for a lot of applications. Unit and integration tests generally require you to understand the code you want tests for, to know what to actually assert

Are you just trusting the AI to do it all?

Makes a lot of sense to me. If you're young and things aren't going so well then at least you can have hope that you'll be able to turn it around. You have time on your side. That all goes away when you start to get to middle age. You're locked in by your earlier choices.

Now I'm here staring at AI with the reality that if it makes my skills irrelevant I'll have no fallback, and I'll be at an age where reskilling is extremely hard and I'm still nowhere close to retiring.

Yeah, fair point. They're certainly trying to push it in that direction but so far there are still alternatives. I've seen age verification get a hell of a lot of pushback so that's encouraging.

Yeah, but you're not beholden to them. There are 100 different hosts you can use if you own your own domain. If a host changes in a way you don't like, just move your domain elsewhere. If you're using Gmail, you're stuck with Google. Being independent of any one host is the important part to me.

Personally I have my own mail server and use smtp2go for sending which handles the deliverability issue. I'm not sure it's worth it going this way but I found it fun and its been 0 maintenance

Why is it an issue? I don't care what other people do with their email.

If it's not deterministic you can never fully trust it. In a deterministic abstraction I don't need to audit the lower levels.

If you don't feel that's worth it you can use Gmail, yeah.

It's not just work meetings. This is being taken to healthcare settings, also.

Register your own domain and use that for your email, and you'll no longer be held hostage by Google. Takes almost no effort and will cost you a few dollars a month.