dpritchett

The author and his cited examples are folks with decades of experience shipping broadly used OSS so for them it’s probably a lot less of an issue to switch languages, even if the agent is papering over a lot of the details for them in the initial releases.

When a whisper-based agent thinks you’ve stopped talking, it will begin its own reply. If you’re younger, you’re more likely to get interrupted by a bot that’s prematurely decided that you’re done speaking.

That is the usual work of high end programmers, right? Growing codebases as consistent, dependable ontologies?

I feel like most mainstream programming languages do this sort of work for their standard libraries and their official docs. Go and Python come to mind, but plenty others do this reasonably well to the point where one mostly doesn’t need to read the implementation code to effectively use the standard library itself.

I imagine they're going for avuncular but a lot of us as adult engineers receive it as patronizing.

Cucumber-style BDD has been trying to do this for a long time now, though I never found it to be super comfortable.

This sounds a whole lot like Pascal's wager (or Roko's basilisk, if you prefer) for trillionaires.

Sound words out at the smallest level. Practice.

Example: “skin” has multiple sounds to help decipher the word as spelled: “sss”, “sk”, “ih”, “nnn”, “iinn”.

Identifying some of those sounds in order helps a reader to sound out the word “skin”. After doing this a few times in a context that helps the reader confirm the meaning of the word they’ve just sounded out they’ll learn it outright.

From that point forward they can recognize “skin” on sight without requiring any context.

It’s a bit of a class thing, isn’t it?

Independently wealthy folks can stay in the game longer without needing to extract a lot of cash compensation in the company’s early years.

An uncomfortable thing about skill, taste, and experience is that it’s often easier to demonstrate the superiority of one path over another than it is to explain the differences in a way the audience is prepared to absorb.

I imagine this is a large part of why tooling and language wars are still compelling throughout decades of computing. No amount of lecturing on the joy of e.g. Rails vs. Node will really convince anyone to use an “outdated”, slow, dynamically typed language like Ruby in 2025 — even in places where it’d be a major win.

If ADHD-oriented media and discussions provide neurodivergent adults a means to work through decades of internalized shame and anxiety, why get in the way of that?

There may never be a perfect taxonomy of programmer archetypes.

I imagine most of us here can agree that some elevate the craft and ritual to great effect while others avoid such high-minded conceits in favor of shipping whatever hits the expected target this week.

I’ve been both at different points in my career. Usually it’s a response to my environment.

Could be an exit strategy… maybe he’s tired of running a social network and wants to help run governments and fly to space like the other guys.