nthj

We didn’t fire all our developers when we invented compilers either, and for much the same reason we didn’t stop hiring laborers when we first built ships and established overseas trade routes: business will always expand to meet its reach

Many enterprises are currently exploring to see if they can invite developers to leverage AI tools—like they leveraged the compiler—to be more productive. To operate on a higher plane of agency, collaborating on what we should be building and not just technical execution. Those actively hostile or just checked out with the idea of relearning skills are being laid off. (Some unprofitable business sections are being swept up opportunistically too.) The idea that all developers would be fired if AI tools can write good code doesn’t meet the lessons of history

We’ve had the sycophant problem for as long as people have held power over other people, and the answer has always been “put 3-5 workers in a room and make them compete for the illusion of favor.”

I have been doing this with coding agents across LLM providers for a while now, with very successful results. Grok seems particularly happy to tell Anthropic where it’s cutting corners, but I get great insights from O3 and Gemini too.

A big difference between crypto and AI is around how crypto could paint a better future once we rebuilt most of our transactional infrastructure and persuaded a quorum to move onto it, and how I personally am benefiting from AI day by day to build myself tools and infrastructure for my life, work, businesses and finances only requires me to accept this change. Everyone else in the world could reject AI-augmented engineering, and I will still be tremendously better off.

SVB has a ton of bonds that mature (will be cashable) after ten years, but nobody wants to pay for them today because they can make more money placing their cash in a savings account. For a silly analogy, imagine if you had a bunch of cash locked up in a CD, but also had a surprise medical bill. Our parents could very easily look at your books and say “huh, I can advance you 80% of your CD because there is really no chance the CD won’t pay me back once it matures.” Is this a bailout? I don’t think so. It’s different than paying off our drunk uncle’s gambling debts for the 7th time.

And also we probably don’t want to say “haha silly SVB customers, they can wait ten years to get their money back” because none of us want to live in a world where most Americans, most of whom don’t understand all these complexities, start runs on ALL the banks because they think this is the start of a collapse. It becomes self-fulfilling at that point.

Rails can easily serve up pages in <100ms. If you do have an endpoint that is CPU-bound to where you can’t meet your SLA goals, you can serve up just that endpoint in Rust or Golang. But that’s rare.

Usually what happens at scale is that the SQL database starts slowing down as more data is loaded in. Partitioning, indexes and painful refactorings aren’t prioritized. Engineering will champion “a faster language”—that incidentally allows them a new data model where they add in proper indexes at the start. They aren’t really incentivized to realize they could see the same gains by just improving their existing data inside the Rails monolith.

Source: experience improving performance (including latency) with multi-billion-dollar Rails monoliths

Git and/or feature flags exist for this reason. Adding a network layer isn't the fundamental insight here, but it can cause additional consequences.

> we need to store enough energy to power the whole country for at least 2 weeks before we can get rid of fossil fuels.

Maybe this is self-obvious, but "get rid of" seems to be carrying a lot of weight in that statement. I personally am not offended or concerned by keeping natural gas generators around for decades, even, as insurance for catastrophic disasters, if in practice they're unused 99% of the time because storage infrastructure has reached 24 hour capacity. We reach diminishing returns on increased storage.

I don't know your culture or your boss, but I have worked with people who could not code their way out of a paper bag, and round-robbined there way through DMs to "pair" to complete their assigned work. These people were highly paid and highly damaging to productivity and morale. I suspect I'm not alone, and I'll freely admit I have a large amount of bias in how I perceive your arguments due to that.

I will also say that your mentioned group chats should probably be a team channel, and the responsibility then becomes the Team Manager if the team members don't step up on their own. "#team-channel: @BobTeamManager are you able to help here?" would get a specific team member assigned.

I have at least a thousand hours into Factorio.

Factorio has provided a sandbox for me to visualize and acquire skills on managing bottlenecks in data flows; skills that I have and am applying as the point software engineer to resolve critical bottlenecks in multiple e-commerce systems. I won't speculate as to the commercial value of resolving those data bottlenecks here, but whatever dollar number you're imagining is, I suspect, probably missing multiple zeroes.

There's an episode near the end of The West Wing where it's C. J. Cregg's first day as Chief of Staff. Of course, this same day, a national security emergency has arisen involving weapons-grade plutonium. The whole day goes by, with C. J. increasingly frustrated as the Secretaries of Defense, State, and Energy all pass the buck on the crisis.

The President is able to nudge C. J. to put together a tiger team. With a few words, he has resolved the crisis.

Until I saw this, I never understood corporate structures. Why are reporting lines structured so customers can languish until the CEO barks an order to address? But during a normal day-to-day, the top executive needs stability. Anyone incentivized and empowered to single-handedly address problems is also-by definition-someone who wields immense political power. So departments are set up. The implicit standing order is "maintain stability." And whenever process actually needs to change, the top executive routes around the communication chains he has established.

Part of the problem is we use unintentionally vague terms like "performance." What does that mean? Bandwidth? Reliability? Scalability? Something we can fix later right? That's what all executives and—frankly—most engineers hear.

I only ever talk about "latency." Latency is time—you can't get latency back once you've spent it.

“I have an idea for an app”

That’s a great scene. For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, I might recommend skipping the clip and watching the full film! If you’re on HN, odds are you would enjoy it, and it has an impressive cast.

The 100x impact isn’t usually with proofs of concept, it’s with surgery. 1,000 lawyers would likely never identify and execute the life-saving graft, all while avoiding side effects that eventually kill the patient.

A surgical ten lines of code across 5 services can absolutely create billions of dollars out of thin air. The combination of technical, political and domain expertise required for such changes is relatively rare.

(I mean political in the purest, non-controversial sense, i.e. the communication skills to answer objections and acquire group consensus on the required change.)

I think in many contexts, “I think” means “this is complex, but I am prepared to articulate my position using logic,” and “This feels” means “my subconscious, experience, or instincts are telling me this is wrong, but I can’t yet articulate why in a logical, cohesive argument.” I will often use the latter to justify delaying decision-making or action while I formalize my argument.