munchbunny

As a hiring manager and a manager of engineers across the seniority spectrum… yeah, I think these traits now matter more than raw coding skill. They always did at senior levels, but now juniors need to start picking that up sooner because the ability to get code through the system is no longer a common bottleneck. Now matters of taste are far more obvious, and consequential.

The ability to understand the interactions between systems still matters a lot. Unfortunately AI does hit walls, and how well you can handle when it does is a big productivity differentiator. I consider myself lucky to have paid my dues well before coding agents entered the picture, and I feel for the people who are only just now entering at ground level because we really have no idea how to teach our discipline anymore.

I suspect this VBO will see a lower acceptance rate because there will be a lot of eligible people in their early or mid careers, and unless you are one of the people who won't have trouble finding a new role, or you expect to be fired/laid off soon, or you're are already on your way out, you probably don't want to be starting the job search right now.

For my case (modding games), yes, a big part of my reason for doing it vs. any other software project is experiencing others enjoying my work.

I also have projects I make for myself for personal practical reasons. In those cases very little has changed, because whether or not I use AI only affects me.

I will corroborate that AI and pressure even in hobby spaces (like game modding) to ship faster if only to preempt a crappier implementation from gaining traction is making it harder to feel motivated to make something because there’s no time to also enjoy the technical puzzle or to really pay attention to excellence in the details.

I’m not really lamenting a bygone era, just saying that the feeling of programming for a hobby has also changed and the parts that are fun don’t line up as well anymore, so I do less of it now.

> Some may consider it extreme, but, in my view, in an ideal world, people would treat testing in animals almost like testing in humans.

I don't consider it an extreme view, as lots of people share that view. But within the scope of pharmaceuticals, as opposed to cosmetics, I disagree with it because I think that's an impractical guideline to follow. Animal testing happens because there aren't good alternative ways to get safety data (on a per-treatment basis) without putting human lives at risk, and it's already a tiered system designed to balance scientific need against animal welfare. This is also why in standard medical trials proving safety comes before proving efficacy.

> The researcher should first ask "would I feel comfortable testing this in a voluntary human test subject?" Non-human animals would still be the first line of testing, since harm/death in a rat/mouse/chimpanzee is less morally bad than in a human, but I think this should be the mindset.

The problem is: how do you as a researcher become comfortable testing on a voluntary human test subject? You need safety data. How do you get the safety data? Right now, the main way is a tiered system that starts on a petri dish and eventually passes through mice, monkeys, etc. before humans.

> The kind of expectations I have is that people do their best and I expect people to understand what they are doing.

> But that understanding has very little to do with what tools they use.

> And quite honestly, in my experience, the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools.

He’s saying that understanding or competence are more about the person than their AI use. I think that’s a reasonable argument, even though I disagree on the basis that it’s at least a little correlated in the shortcuts in understanding the many devs I’ve seen (not all, but a nontrivial amount) seem to be taking.

But to pull something from the post:

> If this is the right mental model, you should expect to see:

> An unusual amount of in-house harness building on both the build side and the sell side

Yup.

> Org structures and individual roles being reshaped around their place in the business harness

Not yet, this is the one I am most skeptical about because it's still way too easy for the harness-driven processes I've seen to go off the rails, so it's still very much human SME-driven. However, the number of butts in seats required is going down.

> AI-native startups beating incumbents in domains where the “moat” can be easily harness-ified

In most cases I've seen the "moat" is not easily harness-ified, and increasingly the money and energy seems to be going into getting to the starting line.

> All software a software company uses (on or tied to the core build or sell paths) needing to be headless so the outer harness can run it

Tech companies are definitely doing it, but I don't think this is actually realistic yet for companies whose core competence isn't software. But this feels like a matter of when, not if.

It's also more fun on a server with friends, where it can be more about hanging out and doing something together, rather than a solo creative exercise.

From my experiences using AI to write documentation, if your bar is high quality documentation, yes, you do save time, but it's on the order of a 1.5-2x efficiency boost, not 10x. The AI basically saves me one draft iteration and saves me the trouble of creating charts by hand, and that's substantial, but I still need to take a fine toothed comb to the output.

The biggest issue I run into is that AI is good at the tone to address an intended audience but is not good at framing and structuring the information for said audience.

My experience with AI-written documentation is that, as a category, it contains just enough technical errors that more often than not I end up spending time running down confidently stated errors the old fashioned way: cross-referencing API documentation, reading code, etc. At that point you inevitably end up trying to get in touch with a human from the other team.

In other words, it's not because I don't know it's there, or I don't want to read it, it's because my priors tell me it's going to waste my time. What I end up doing is searching, finding the docs, and reading until I start to get the feeling of hallucinated factual errors.

I'm sure there's AI-written documentation in there where the authors really did a good job reviewing it, and I just didn't notice. But I've also had engineers under me lose weeks of productivity at this point because of documentation confidently presented, insufficiently vetted, that turned out to be wrong.

But the canonical way to do it that is both free and infinitely customizable is to host your own server. It’s pretty straightforward to do these days. However, before you do, I would suggest playing the game a bit to understand what the settings are/mean. You and your kids could play together a bit on a Realms server or a community/public server to get a feel for what you want in a custom server.