joshvince

> if you’re working on novel code, LLMs are absolutely horrible

This is spot on. Current state-of-the-art models are, in my experience, very good at writing boilerplate code or very simple architecture especially in projects or frameworks where there are extremely well-known opinionated patterns (MVC especially).

What they are genuinely impressive at is parsing through large amounts of information to find something (eg: in a codebase, or in stack traces, or in logs). But this hype machine of 'agents creating entire codebases' is surely just smoke and mirrors - at least for now.

This is my feeling too. I’m never sure why React is the tool that is reached for in this situations (an entirely unreactive page?)

20, 15, 10 years ago this sort of stuff (Rails, Laravel, Phoenix) was free, and open source. The good ones are still going strong. I wonder if these sorts of schemes will still be offered in 20, 15 or 10 years

the economic picture is not getting any better. In part because so many people each month are coming off fixed-term mortgage deals bought in the ZIRP era. The more time they give Labour to govern, the more rope they give them to hang themselves with. Or so the theory probably goes. They're already massively, massively behind in the polls and if recent local elections are anything to go on.

If you don't already know a language and its ecosystem, then I'd recommend Rails. It is simply the most mature and batteries-included framework. Ignore the claims that it is dead - if you're a solo developer the specific jobs market doesn't matter.

Ruby on Rails has recently started actively marketing itself as the solo developer framework. I've worked with it for a long time now (among a bunch of other languages and frameworks) and I have to say the recent updates to the frontend 'story' are really compelling for a solo dev.

One of the compelling reasons to write JS on the server was to have the same language and ecosystem in the client and server, and things like Turbo for Rails really go a long way towards delivering on that for Ruby (although of course you still need to understand javascript and browsers.)

That said, if you're already familiar with something else, then pick the most mature batteries-included framework in that language. Languages are just a tool for the job, it's incredibly unlikely as a solo dev that you can pick a "wrong" one.

A srangely loaded question. You’re not going to get a straight and accurate answer to such a broad philosophical topic.

Perhaps it’s worth reflecting on whether, in a pandemic, someone’s personal freedoms are incompatible with the means by which a virus can be prevented from spreading. And then, what is “worth” more?

I dug back six or seven of the blog posts and they all looked static enough to me - my point is that react is complete overkill for sites like this.

Why do you need react to render static blog posts?

Just want to say, I love your writing -- it's rare to find someone with such a distinctive voice. I've read a bunch of your articles and posts, keep going!

You must be fun at parties!

This is spot on. As people, a sense of community is not something we usually associate with commerce, but these online platforms are _only_ instruments to get a return on someone's investment.

The fact that part of the journey involves mutually beneficial behaviours (like using VC money to acquire more users, build a better UX, and make the community larger) is just an accident, and the incentive to capitalise the whole shebang will always win out.

This sort of thing feels like The Price We Eventually Pay for a massive, free-to-use online community.

got a source for that company? Presumably it'll be semi-public knowledge. I'd be incredibly surprised if a business was already proficient enough to replace software teams. Call centre operatives or content-farmers maybe...