uhhhd

There’s something familiar about promising to get rid of ownership and ending up with a bunch of people deciding what everyone else is allowed to do.

Sometimes it feels like hiring ethics folks is almost all downside for companies. I genuinely don’t understand why they keep doing it.

It seems like the pattern is almost always the same: the ethics team exists quietly in the background, and the only time anyone hears about them is when they either publicly leave the company or start a campaign against it.

So what exactly is the business case? Is it actually worth maintaining an ethics function just to be able to say you have one, when the only time it becomes visible is when it goes against the company publicly? And if this outcome is so predictable, why do companies keep hiring these people in the first place?

Counterpoint: This no longer matters because we are not going back to hand-writing these functions. These patterns were designed to make code easier for humans to read and write, but that is no longer the primary way software is built.

It can be both. People ride horses for leisure; no one commutes on them.

This. Exactly this. You'll be unemployed. He'll still have tenure.

I think we’re talking past each other. My point isn’t that jj is bad. It’s that it’s solving problems that are rapidly becoming irrelevant.

Tools like git and jj exist to help humans manage state: branches, commits, rebases, conflicts, history curation. That whole model assumes a human is directly manipulating and reasoning about the codebase.

With LLMs in the loop, that assumption breaks. I don’t need to think in terms of branches or commits. I describe intent, and the model handles the mechanics of editing, reconciling, and producing a coherent result. Source control becomes an implementation detail of the toolchain, not something I actively operate.

jj is an improvement over git for humans, but that’s exactly why it feels like a local maximum. It refines a workflow that is already being abstracted away.

I’m not saying version control disappears. I’m saying it moves down a layer, the same way memory management or instruction scheduling did. When that happens, optimizing the human interface to it matters a lot less.

You don’t need jj for this anymore. The whole premise of optimizing human workflows around source control is becoming obsolete.

When LLMs are driving development, source control stops being an active cognitive concern and becomes a passive implementation detail. The unit of work is no longer “branches” or “commits,” it’s intent. You describe what you want, the model generates, refactors, and reconciles changes across parallel streams automatically.

Parallel workstreams used to require careful coordination: rebasing, merging, conflict resolution, mental bookkeeping of state. That overhead existed because humans were the bottleneck. Once an LLM is managing the codebase, it can reason over the entire state space continuously and resolve those conflicts as part of generation, not as a separate step.

In that world, tools like jj are optimizing a layer that’s already being abstracted away. It’s similar to how no one optimizes around assembly anymore. It still exists, it still matters at a lower level, but it’s no longer where productivity is gained.

I love this stuff as a hobbyist, but professionally I can't help but think this is all obsolete in the age of agent-driven development. I wish jj was around a decade ago.

There are towns in England and America where I can't understand them today.

Yes supporting the Islamists puts you in the same league as the Islamists.

"Palestine Action" is terrorism.

No it did/is not.

GPT wrapper.

So true, why is that whole sector so bad?