adpirz

It's hard to unpack without knowing more about the use case, but adding discriminant properties (e.g. "user_type") to all the types in the union can make it easier to handle the general and specific case.

E.g.

if (user.user_type === 'authenticated') {

  // do something with user.name because the type system knows we have that now

}

The dot com boom is an apt analogy: the internet took off, we understood it had potential, but the innovation didn't all come in the first wave. It took time for the internet to bake, and then we saw another boom with the advent of mobile phones, higher bandwidth, and more compute per user.

It is still simply too early to tell exactly what the new steady state is, but I can tell you that where we're at _today_ is already a massive paradigm shift from what my day-to-day looked like 3 years ago, at least as a SWE.

There will be lots of things thrown at the wall and the things that stick will have a big impact.

Having used the latest models regularly, it does feel like we're at diminishing returns in terms of raw performance from GenAI / LLMs.

...but now it'll be exciting to let them bake. We need some time to really explore what we can do with them. We're still mostly operating in back-and-forth chats, I think there's going to be lots of experimentation with different modalities of interaction here.

It's like we've just gotten past the `Pets.com` era of GenAI and are getting ready to transition to the app era.

both "get" and "eat" would be followed by an expletive.

op doesn't like nate.

I’ve never been able to put it into words, but when we think about engineering in almost any discipline, a significant amount of effort goes into making things buildable by different groups of people. We modularize components or code so that different groups can specialize in isolated segments.

I always imagined if you could have some super mind build an entire complex system, it would find better solutions that got around limitations introduced by the need to make engineering accessible to humans.

The "iPhone moment" gets used a lot, but maybe it's more analogous to the early internet: we have the basics, but we're still learning what we can do with this new protocol and building the infrastructure around it to be truly useful. And as you've pointed out, our "bandwidth" is increasing exponentially at the same time.

If nothing else, my workflows as a software developer have changed significantly in these past two years with just what's available today, and there is so much work going into making that workflow far more productive.

This write up was also fantastic and has made the rounds at our org!

Whoa missed this! Love it.

You posted on X a while back asking for a crowdsourced definition of what an "agent" was and I regularly cite that thread as an example of the fact that this word is so blurry right now.

The collective backlog of every software company probably stretches into centuries.

This gives us the tooling to A.) burn through those faster. B.) solve more complex problems.

If your entire job as an engineer is “take tickets with very clear acceptance criteria and turn into component / basic business logic”, I’d be worried for sure. I was initially worried myself when all this landed two years ago, but using it daily and now building enterprise scale apps with it, I know we’ve got at least another decade or two before it’s able to tackle the full breadth of an engineers role.