whstl

It's worse than that.

People are producing output that is worse than "doing nothing".

AI makes it all worse, because office workers are now trying to take each other's job and trying to protect their fiefdom.

Ego and agendas multiplied by 1000.

I dunno. It definitely can happen.

Code was never the bottleneck.

I've worked with plenty of teams that did the "in prod the same day" trick without AI.

The problem was just fucking ego. Designer has an ego, product owner has an ego, QA has an ego, stakeholder has an ego, platform teams have massive egos, developers have egos.

Unrelated but: the only reason people are shipping more with AI is because more people are ok with slop now.

For me that turning point was 10-15 years ago.

I guess it was slow-boiling, but somewhere between 2010-2015 was the turning point.

It got dominated by brogrammers who judged you by whether you used vim or not, teams of 20 people producing the same output as a team of two, designers doing mockups for absolutely everything and trying to boss the programmers, product managers making mountains of useless documents for everything and trying to boss the programmers, some rando had Scrummaster certification (who doesn't) and wanted to boss the programmers.

It was also when everyone started copying Google and Spotify and etc and a meeting was required for every decision, RFCs or other documents that would be produced but wouldn't survive reality, the software would have more trackers than features, and subscription was the default software model.

People keep saying "you only need 1 or 2 people to make a product now".

Well that was already the reality for me from 2000-2016.

For sure! What I'm suggesting is more aimed at the personal laptop level, Homelab or smaller startups.

Although I'm sure someone is bolder than me is running a fleet of Mac Studios somewhere!

It is very suitable and very straightforward for a crazy large amount of models! I haven’t even mentioned the ones we use at work! There’s a lot beyond LLMs. I suggest trying!

For people interested in super quick models:

"One cool trick" I like for running those kinds of models very quickly on macOS is converting them to CoreML so they run in the Neural Engine.

I had amazing success with Spleeter, Demucs, MVSEP-MDX23-music-separation, DeepFilterNet, Whisper, Hunyuan3D for 3D mesh generation. Plus a lot of others for both work and leisure.

I also convert the code to Swift without dependencies, but that's a personal preference.

The runtime on some of them went sometimes from 60s to 10s. And since it's just Swift, I can just give them to non-technical co-workers and they don't have to setup a whole Python environment.

If you don't wanna do this by hand, this is something that existing LLM models are good at. Even Luna can do it without much fuss.

I agree with you, but I'd say that writing code hasn't been the bottleneck in a lot of industries for quite some time.

Even in the 90s, the internet and the web dramatically lowered the costs of distribution, and YC itself was built on top of that (ViaWeb).

Then there has been so many frameworks, libraries, tools, services and APIs to pick and choose from that most of the coding work has been about organization, selling an idea and doing a lot of testing. Which are still unsolved problems.

The only new idea here is the idea that Software Developers are disposable.

This was brought by the same people who did RTO and layoffs post-covid, but now with support of non-tech workers who want a piece of that (supposedly) sweet money.

Well there was this political movement in the 18th century...

Seriously now, Marx says that industrialization and other developments were essential for having a socialist society able to sustain itself. Russia, China and Cuba did it way too soon if you go by the book.

So yeah, there's that.

I agree.

But I feel like it's a minority that really know how the software they're writing really works. And it's 10x worse for older legacy software.

Mostly because the people doing it don't care. Not judging, just reporting I guess. I know because I used to work in quite a few companies where the "money maker" app was on maintenance for years and nobody was able to answer questions or didn't even know most corners of it still existed.

This desperation mindset also often correlates with people writing code without care for the next maintainer.

And the scary part is that this also correlates with advocacy for going all-AI.

I don't think anyone care too much about their job as you put it in your first message.

Even the article itself: they care about "having a job", not having that specific job. And they care about it in order to "make a living".

This problem definitely exists in C++ or Rust.

The solution in those languages is either to use something like serde validator, garde (for Rust), or go all the way to protobufs... or write your own data validation/parsing by hand.

Rust and C++ don't even have a Javascript deserializer.

Considering everyone today is a “social media manager” or “email marketing manager”, and I have even seen “QA manager”, chances are there are more individual-contributor being called “managers” than managers themselves.

You might be familiar with a shift manager?

The person who has some power about who to fire, but still flips burgers or mans the cash register when everyone else is busy.

Not saying it's not a noble job, but it's very far from executive.

I think both of your points stand: you worked with one truly good executive leader.

But we can still already replace 99% of C-levels with a $20 subscription to Claude and a few MCP integrations.