OakNinja

English has been the high level language for programming since Common Business-Oriented Language - COBOL.

Programming has always been defining the problem you have. Nothing has changed from that perspective. Sometimes that problem is recreating something that already exists :)

Spot on. Generative AI is an amplifier of your current trajectory, and a good side effect of that is that it exposes inefficient internal processes. As a company, it will be increasingly hard to go for the naïve and easy solution (the template) when the blockers are clearly visible.

One of my mantras is:

Automate governance first, creation second. Streamline code reviews and compliance before content generation, or you'll drown in manual oversight.

And this is not what people want to hear, because generating content is easy and automating governance (code reviews, build the domain knowledge into skills and automated processes) is a _real_ and hard engineering problem.

This problem is not new. The new thing is that anyone can understand the core problem they’re trying to solve without involving a dev team by quick ideation and rapid prototyping.

Just as always, it’s then up to the company to prioritize what to focus on - Just like how it’s always been.

* Don't hold onto an idea or prompt output just because you spent time on it.

* Writing code is easy. Maintaining it is hard.

* If it doesn’t save time or generate revenue, it’s just an expense.

* Output does not equal value.

From what I’ve heard, this is actually a problem with the exposed OS level api’s provided by Apple. Other manufacturers have solved this with on device workarounds. Doesn’t make it better though. I resorted to only the system only notifications (Phone, Texts).

A bad analogy is like a leaking screwdriver…

Kent Beck is smart because he proposes fixes that work in real life, as in environments with dumb code and undisciplined people.

I can very much recommend his latest book ”Tidy first?”. It’s extremely short and concise, and is perfect for a very light book club within any tech team.

Genuine question - What part of ”that” is just not true?

Volvo still produces cars in Sweden. Koenigsegg still build their cars in Ängelholm.

There’s already a flash lite tier since 2.5. Latest is 3.1 currently.

To be fair, Gemini 3.1 flash _lite_ supports structured output (guaranteed json), it’s super fast, runs circles around 2.5 flash and costs $0.25/$1.50.

I use it _a lot_ and it’s very capable if you just plan correctly. I actually almost exclusively use 3.1 flash lite and 2.5 flash lite (even cheaper) and we have 99.5% accuracy in what we do.

That said, I think we’ll see the lite/flash models and the pro models will diverge more price wise. The pro models will become more and more expensive.

To me, LLM's free up time for me so that I can spend time on the fun parts of coding. Less boilerplate, more focus on the interesting problems. This is no different from using high level languages. The problem domain is less around memory management and garbage collection and closer to the problem you're actually trying to solve.

Good tooling, high level languages, faster computers and sane standards also enabled enormous productivity gains. I predict very few positions lost to LLM's, rather I'd say that just with any technical "revolution" we'll just set a new baseline for productivity, get rid of some bottlenecks, and have a new situation where we need even more engineers to maintain upkeep.

Most jobs lost to AI is just companies that want / need to lay people off and shareholders like "Replaced 30% of our workforce with AI" more than any other conceivable reason.

For me personally, both at work and in my free time, I spend _more_ time on writing things _that matter_ since I’ve freed up time by using LLM’s for boilerplate tasks.

My motto is - If it wasn’t worth writing, it won’t be worth reading.

A good example of writing where I’d recommend using LLM’s is product documentation. You pass the diff, the description of the task, and the context (existing documentation) with a prompt ”Update the documentation…”.

Documentation is important but it’s not prose. However, writing a comment on hacker news is.