dejawu

If vibe-coding is hopping into a self-driving car and telling it to take you anywhere you can get a coffee, then I use coding agents more like a bicycle - they let me get further faster than if I'd walked, but I still have to decide where to go and how to get there, and I still have to pedal.

I don't vibe-code, but I do decide what to implement and what patterns to use (perhaps asking the model to analyze and give advice on this first), then I have it handle the nitty-gritty of the implementation itself. For this usage style, the latest local models are as good as having Claude at home.

I won't say it's been _easy_ (I ended up implementing my own harness to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of local models), but I will say that for the effort, having a coding agent that's essentially free to query as much as I want has been life-changing as a dev, especially when it comes to working on side projects. Knowing that my agent will never get worse in quality, suddenly cost more than it does now, or be suddenly made unavailable by external factors, was absolutely worth the trouble. And on top of all that, I can't believe it's as good as it is.

It's strange to me that Apple would choose to disadvantage themselves by selecting Google as their provider as opposed to, say, Anthropic or even OpenAI. Doesn't this mean they'll struggle more to differentiate themselves from the assistant on Android phones? Thinking more cynically, couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?

As the consumer, this just sucks because it means no matter which phone platform you choose, you're getting the same thing underneath, and there's no way to avoid it (besides not using an assistant entirely, which I recognize a lot of people do, myself included).

My Computer Engineering degree had an "ethics" course (really a course on "engineering communications", but it was considered to satisfy the ethics requirement for graduation). It was a semester on how to file memos, cargo-cult your resume, and tell recruiters what they wanted to hear. Not a word was said about considering the implications of the things you're hired to build. When defense contractors took over the entire ground floor of the engineering building to hold a recruiting fair, we were encouraged to go.

The only time ethics in engineering was ever mentioned to me was in a class on applied number theory (cryptography), taught by a professor who had previously worked for the EFF. He went off-topic to tell us that many problems, like how to hit a target with a missile, may fascinate and compel us as engineers, but we shouldn't let that distract us into building instruments of death.

That course was an elective, and it was entirely possible to complete my degree without hearing a single mention of ethics.

There are many reasons I look back on my academic experience with disdain, but this one stands out to me.

This is exactly why, as someone who thought I'd be an IC with my head buried in code my whole life, I accepted a role as a tech lead last year. Humans will always need other humans to be human for them. I love working with computers, but supporting, teaching, and mentoring junior engineers has been rewarding for me in ways that writing code never could be. There is no social substitute for concrete relationships with specific people that grow in visible ways. Maybe they can automate away the part of me that's good with logic and reason, but empathy can't be simulated.

I've similarly thought about building a language that compiles to Rust, but handles everything around references and borrowing and abstracts that away from the user. Then you get a language where you don't have to think about memory at all, but the resulting code "should" still be fairly fast because Rust is fast (kind of ending up in the same place as Go).

I haven't written a ton of Rust so maybe my assumptions of what's possible are wrong, but it is an idea I've come back to a few times.

It's astonishing just how awful Spotify's software is. Everything it does, it does poorly, even down to things like playback and playlists that were figured out by other media players decades ago. Just this week, it started randomly playing music on its own when I open it. The fact that this thread has over a hundred comments within an hour speaks to just how despised it is.

Spotify truly isn't a software company the same way your health insurance company has a web portal but isn't a software company either.

An ex of mine used disposable vapes and I was shocked by how beautifully designed some of them are - transparent covers with visible inner workings reminiscent of the Nothing phones; custom multi-segment displays for battery and temperature status; original artwork printed in vibrant color on the side. It made me even angrier that these things are meant to just be used once and then thrown out. Of course putting all this e-waste into the environment is a disaster, but to then also treat art and design as similarly disposable feels heartbreakingly cynical on another level entirely.

I collected a few that she was going to throw out, someday™ I'll build some driver boards for the displays and make a little art piece out of them.

The worst toast I've seen is on Android Auto (itself already a veritable petri dish of awful UX) where, when the on-screen keyboard appears, a toast helpfully pops up informing you that a keyboard is also available on your phone... Thus blocking the on-screen keyboard from being used until the toast fades (and no, tapping it does not dismiss it).