kristianc

We did get poultry from French poulet

The problem with smart people is that they are able to construct ever more elaborate justifications for their own mental gymnastics.

That said, if you think developers have never enjoyed telling other people what to or not to build, I recommend checking out Stack Overflow.

The opposite actually. I suspect some programmers may come to realise what some of the people in product, design, marketing, who they suspected didn't do very much at all actually do. Finding programmers especially those who self-define as programmers with good product instincts is hard.

In so far as "unless you specify precisely how the user interaction should work, you will get bad design" that's true, but that takes you far from the vision of "give AI a prompt, it will provide you with usable output with minimal human intervention".

Claude is better because it validates its work visually and seems to have a more intuitive sense of what makes an interface pleasant to use.

Codex manages to be both rigidly literal about the spec but also prone to adding unnecessary explanatory text, helper elements and visual clutter, oddly like a 1990s ERP system.

The role of product manager/product design is literally to turn whatever is being asked for into the optimal solution someone would actually want to use - it's this translation instinct that is missing from AI.

This age will be brilliant for sorting between those who care about "done" as in "technically complete" vs "done" as "creates enduring value for the person on the other end of it". AI largely only does the former.

It’s probably still there, but it’s 26,000 light years away, so the light we’re seeing today left Sag A in the Paleaolithic era.

Creates another expensive bar for prospective challengers to clear - regulation nearly always ends up favouring incumbents, especially if they have a hand in shaping it.

> Fact is, vibe-coded projects devolve over time into an unmaintainable mess. The reason is simple, yet hard to fix: code maintainability and good architecture don’t have good measurements that we can apply, because it takes months, years even, to notice the effects of bad architecture or of unmaintainable code.

Oh boy do I have some news for you about legacy codebases.

I’m not even sure that his axiom is true. A project started with a 2024/5 model can subsequently be worked on by more capable models (who don’t, unlike some humans, have a deep aversion to paying down technical debt). I’ve seldom seen a human written legacy application spontaneously acquire a better engineering team every six months.

That’s the bargain Dropbox made when it took VC and then went public. Public markets don’t price a company purely on today’s cash flow, they price the expected stream of future cash flows. If growth stalls and the attempts to create new growth vectors don’t work, the valuation adjusts accordingly, and at some point an acquisition can become the rational outcome.

Dropbox will be one of the next Bending Spoons acquisitions. Low growth, none of the upsell or product extension things they've done have really worked out, and no-one's idea of what the future looks like.

For me it's a trust gap. Because I know the website UI has been automatically generated, I can't be sure of how much of the product is actually real, or how closely the claims on the page have been audited.

Whose strategy is explicitly to hold good stocks for a very long time.

It's interesting as grill-me and the other Matt skills are very much positioned to people who would consider themselves as developers. In fact, I'm not sure if people who were completely new to development would have heard of him at all.

Ed West’s longstanding intellectual project is fairly conventional reactionary/retvrn/conservative pessimism, and he has no particular technology background of all to speak of.

The argument is basically here is what happened to civilisation X when it abandoned virtue/cohesion/tradition; therefore contemporary liberalism, immigration, feminism, secularism, etc. are leading us towards the same fate.

No interest really in people whose project it is to launder reactionary opinions through ancient history.