searls

I enjoy puzzles as much as the next guy. But I can just pick up a crossword or sudoku or something and get that mental stimulation elsewhere. The thing I always found vexing about programming was that the puzzle-solving was a prerequisite to getting anything done. Now that the two are decoupled, I'm a lot happier.

Yes. This is much closer to how many people are experiencing it and why the OP's suggestion of letting people practice it as an unpaid hobby doesn't address their issue.

I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.

I think just about everyone in the industry appreciated hand-typed programming as a job, because it was a pleasant enough craft to practice and for a solid couple of decades programmers were treated extremely well in comparison to the vast majority of other careers out there.

Today, juggling a bunch of agents to do what you want them to do, figuring out how to verify their work, remediating problems, and spreading yourself thin cognitively—all the while looking over your shoulder at an increasingly precarious job market—is notably less pleasant for a lot of people. It sounds and feels a lot more like an engineering or product management role—something a lot of programmers would never in a million years have signed up to do voluntarily.

I'm probably an 8 out of 10 on the cooked scale—I'm juggling a suite of ten iOS apps and haven't written or read a line of code in over a year—but I get where these people are coming from. I think the suggestion that they can reclaim what they've lost in this new job they've been loudly expressing distaste for by adopting a new unpaid hobby will ring hollow to them.

… which would only exacerbate the computational disparity they're operating under.

I'll be honest, I struggled to get much done with SwiftUI each of the last four years but this summer I started 4 greenfield iOS 27 apps on SwiftUI and it's genuinely been pretty delightful and none have required escape hatches to UIKit/AppKit.

I get people are upset, but the edge cases and frustration in no way feel like fundamental failures—just stuff they haven't gotten around to yet. Yes, they should have gotten to them all sooner but that doesn't convince me they won't eventually.

I've been using agents to develop Mac and iOS apps for over a year now and I would say this post is bad advice, particularly because the excellent Xcode MCP requires Xcode to be running. The MCP tool gives you faster, better access to a number of functions for which xcodebuild is much slower and much chattier and a number of others (like the #Preview generation and rendering) that aren't possible at all while Xcode is closed. Also, in Xcode 27, the MCP & built-in agents are able to drive simulators with DeviceHub extremely well. (If you haven't been following, DeviceHub replaces Simulator.app and as far as I can tell, it's actually scrutable by agents without relying on hacking at the accessibility APIs with tools like axe.)

Xcode MCP is not perfect, by any stretch (stupidly, it issues a permission prompt on every single agent launch—something I defeated with a Keyboard Maestro hack to auto-accept it), but Xcode 27 is such a huge leap forward in the ergonomics of vibe coding with Xcode that I've actually stopped dealing with the MCP and (after an afternoon of futzing) have started using the app's own agent UI for driving Codex because that harness better steers the model to take advantage of the tools available.

All of this redounds to two things: faster feedback and more robust verification. The two things that matter most.

Akira showed me this work in progress in January and I was pretty amazed by it, but I have to be honest—as someone who prides himself on clever OSS repo names, he just absolutely put me to shame. English as a second language but he's a first class punner.

Read this:

> Every time any of LinkedIn’s one billion users visits linkedin.com, hidden code searches their computer for installed software, collects the results, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers

And thought, "no way in hell this gets by Safari."

And then, under "The Attack: How it Works":

> Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser

Shocker. If you use a Chromium-based browser, you should expect to be trading away your privacy, IME.

I'm glad to see this comment and the parent comment and the grandparent comment voted so near the top. I've had the same experience.

I honestly would love to be able to give my Kagi key to the ChatGPT or Claude clients (or more realistically, configure a proxy) just to have it be their primary tool for searches—respecting my site rankings/lists

lol, just yesterday a friend asked me if he should move his business to Railway from Heroku. Welp.

This feels a bit like when some Hubbers broke off to work on PlanetScale, except without the massively successful, proven-to-be-scalable open source tool to build off (Vitess).

If you're approaching this problem-space from the ground up, there are just so many fundamental problems to solve that it seems to me that no amount of money or quality of team can increase your likelihood of arriving at enough right answers to ensure success. Pulling off something like this vision in the current red-ocean market would require dozens of brilliant ideas and hundreds of correct bets.

Agree, extremely poorly reported out across numerous outlets.