wry_discontent

It can feel like that sometimes.

It's weird cause there's this whole set of things (favorite bands/live shows/albums/etc) that most people are really into and care a lot about and it's a big absence in my life.

This was really interesting to read as a person who doesn't experience music deeply.

Yes, I think it's a big deal if you worked for a big evil organization on purpose.

And you'll keep hearing that, because it's a marketing term.

How I interpreted their thoughts on "loops" and "graphs" etc, is that they 1. have unlimited token allowances, and 2. are working on problems where the solution itself can be described by code.

It reminds me of property based testing. I really liked the idea when I heard about it, but most of what I work on does not tend to behave in a way that can be easily described mathematically like that.

Maybe I'm just not clever enough to do it.

What the hell am I supposed to be excited about? Endless slop? Career change from intellectually stimulating creation to bland gatekeeping?

There is nothing fun about programming anymore. The joy is completely gone. I would switch careers if I could make money elsewhere.

They work on research problems you can define a clear solution criteria for.

The kinds of business software I work on don't have those characteristics. If I needed something like a utils library, I think I could easily have Claude write the whole thing and not read the code.

You get over it really quickly once you start actually using it. I find it basically impossible to read Clojure outside the editor in any meaningful sense.

Huge fan of the Voyager with home-row-mods.

This seems totally reasonable. It is designed to be addictive, and they definitely target folks under 18. The article specifically mentions teens.

The tools produce mediocre, usually working in the most technical sense of the word, and most developers are pretty shit at writing code that doesn't suck (myself included).

I think it's safe to say that people singularly focused on the business value of software are going to produce acceptable slop with AI.

That makes sense given that it's trained on real world developers.

I've always heard this sentiment, but I've also never met one of these newly skilled job applicants who could do anything resembling the job.

I've done a lot of interviews, and inevitably, most of the devs I interview can't pass a trivial interview (like implement fizzbuzz). The ones who can do a decent job are usually folks we have to compete for.

This is great. One of the things I say to my wife all the time, which is taken from a Kurt Vonnegut quote, is that "I don't have to be good at my hobbies".

It's my preference to a point. I think you can over-do it. I've worked in systems that didn't use it and worked just fine. I would bet most folks err on the side of too little, unless they have some kind of framework doing the heavy lifting.