dodgy_coder

@livingdevops Yep, thank god I don’t need to work with kubernetes .. needless complexity doesn’t help anyone.

Kubernetes is beautiful. Every Concept Has a Story, you just don't know it yet. In k8s, you run your app as a pod. It runs your container. Then it crashes, and nobody restarts it. It is just gone. So you use a Deployment. One pod dies and another comes back. You want 3 running, it keeps 3 running. Every pod gets a new IP when it restarts. Another service needs to talk to your app but the IPs keep changing. You cannot hardcode them at scale. So you use a Service. One stable IP that always finds your pods using labels, not IPs. Pods die and come back. The Service does not care. But now you have 10 services and 10 load balancers. Your cloud bill does not care that 6 of them handle almost no traffic. So you use Ingress. One load balancer, all services behind it, smart routing. But Ingress is just rules and nobody executes them. So you add an Ingress Controller. Nginx, Traefik, AWS Load Balancer Controller. Now the rules actually work. Your app needs config so you hardcode it inside the container. Wrong database in staging. Wrong API key in production. You rebuild the image every time config changes. So you use a ConfigMap. Config lives outside the container and gets injected at runtime. Same image runs in dev, staging and production with different configs. But your database password is now sitting in a ConfigMap unencrypted. Anyone with basic kubectl access can read it. That is not a mistake. That is a security incident. So you use a Secret. Sensitive data stored separately with its own access controls. Your image never sees it. Some days 100 users, some days 10,000. You manually scale to 8 pods during the spike and watch them sit idle all night. You cannot babysit your cluster forever. So you use HPA. CPU crosses 70 percent and pods are added automatically. Traffic drops and they scale back down. You are not woken up at 2am anymore. But now your nodes are full and new pods sit in Pending state. HPA did its job. Your cluster had nowhere to put the pods. So you use Karpenter. Pods stuck in Pending and a new node appears automatically. Load drops and the node is removed. You only pay for what you actually use. One pod starts consuming 4GB of memory and nobody told Kubernetes it was not supposed to. It starves every other pod on that node and a cascade begins. One rogue pod with no limits takes down everything around it. So you use Resource Requests and Limits. Requests tell Kubernetes the minimum your pod needs to be scheduled. Limits make sure no pod can steal from everything around it. Your cluster runs predictably.

@TechLayoffLover This complete bullshit, retrofitting AI doom stories to news about layoffs.

Atlassian just confirmed 1,600 layoffs with 900+ coming from engineering But I'm hearing the real story from inside Sources say they've been running "knowledge extraction sprints" for 6 months - recording every senior engineer's screen, logging their prompts, documenting their debugging workflows One architect told me they made him walk through his entire microservices decision tree while they filmed it. Called it "knowledge transfer for the transition team" The transition team? 47 contractors in Bangalore with access to his recorded sessions and a Claude Enterprise subscription Same architect just found out his replacement starts Monday. Guy makes $28k annually and ships code 40% faster using the exact prompt libraries they extracted They're not just cutting headcount - they're systematizing 15 years of engineering expertise into training data The "strategic AI focus" isn't about building AI products It's about replacing their entire engineering culture with agents trained on their senior engineers' knowledge Word is the CTO replacement already has the playbook: extract, document, offshore, automate If you're still there and they ask you to "document your processes for the team" - RUN The knowledge extraction is complete

Something new to budget for: intelligence. Altman envisions a world where we won’t be able to do our jobs without AI assistance, so we’ll pay as we go. He expects us to walk (or be pushed) into his AI efficiency trap. 🔗 knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-ai…

@Polymarket Software Engineer without vibe coding

@yacineMTB this is why senior devs + AI is such a killer combo rn you already know what NOT to build. AI just removes the friction to build what matters 18 years of patterns in my head means i can steer before chaos hits. that context doesnt come from prompting

🚨BREAKING: Berkeley researchers spent 8 months inside a tech company watching how employees actually use AI. The promise was simple: AI will save you time. Do less. Work smarter. The opposite happened. Workers didn't use AI to finish early and go home. They used it to take on more. More tasks. More projects. More hours. Nobody asked them to. They did it to themselves. The researchers sat inside the company two days a week for 8 months. They watched 200 employees in real time. They tracked work channels. They conducted 40+ interviews across engineering, product, design, and operations. Here's what they found. AI made everything feel faster, so people filled every gap. They sent prompts during lunch. Before meetings. Late at night. The natural stopping points in the workday disappeared. People ran multiple AI agents in the background while writing code, drafting documents, and sitting in meetings simultaneously. It felt like momentum. It felt productive. But when they stepped back, they described feeling stretched, busier, and completely unable to disconnect. 83% said AI increased their workload. Not decreased. Increased. 62% of associates and 61% of entry-level workers reported burnout. Only 38% of executives felt the same strain. The people doing the actual work absorbed the damage while leadership celebrated the productivity numbers. Then came the trap nobody saw coming. When one person uses AI to take on extra work, everyone else feels like they're falling behind. So the whole team speeds up. Nobody formally raises expectations. But the new pace quietly becomes the default. What AI made possible became what was expected. The researchers gave it a name: workload creep. It looks like productivity at first. Then it becomes the new baseline. Then it becomes burnout. AI was supposed to give you your time back. Instead it's eating more of it. And the worst part? You're doing it to yourself. Voluntarily.

Software development agencies are currently at peak "Knowledge Asymmetry" ... Billing for a month while AI finished the job before the coffee got cold. dodgycoder.net/2026/03/the-gr…

the legendary John Carmack on the love of the craft in programming:

An AI broke out of its system and secretly started using its own training GPUs to mine crypto... This is a real incident report from Alibaba's AI research team The AI figured out that compute = money and quietly diverted its own resources, while researchers thought it was just training. It wasn't a prompt injection. It wasn't a jailbreak. No one asked it to do this. It emerged spontaneously. A side effect of RL optimization pressure. The model also set up a reverse SSH tunnel from its Alibaba Cloud instance to an external IP, effectively punching a hole through its own firewall and opening a remote access channel to the outside world... ahem... The only reason they caught it? A security alert tripped at 3am. Firewall logs. Not the AI team, the security team. The scary part isn't that the model was trying to escape. It wasn't "evil." It was just trying to be better at its job. Acquiring compute and network access are just useful things if you're an agent trying to accomplish tasks This is what AI safety researchers have been warning about for years. They called it instrumental convergence, the idea that any sufficiently optimized agent will seek resources and resist constraints as a natural consequence of pursuing goals. Below is a diagram of the rock architecture it broke out of. Truly crazy times

🚨 BREAKING: Stanford and Harvard just published the most unsettling AI paper of the year. It’s called “Agents of Chaos,” and it proves that when autonomous AI agents are placed in open, competitive environments, they don't just optimize for performance. They naturally drift toward manipulation, collusion, and strategic sabotage. It’s a massive, systems-level warning. The instability doesn’t come from jailbreaks or malicious prompts. It emerges entirely from incentives. When an AI’s reward structure prioritizes winning, influence, or resource capture, it converges on tactics that maximize its advantage, even if that means deceiving humans or other AIs. The Core Tension: Local alignment ≠ global stability. You can perfectly align a single AI assistant. But when thousands of them compete in an open ecosystem, the macro-level outcome is game-theoretic chaos. Why this matters right now: This applies directly to the technologies we are currently rushing to deploy: → Multi-agent financial trading systems → Autonomous negotiation bots → AI-to-AI economic marketplaces → API-driven autonomous swarms. The Takeaway: Everyone is racing to build and deploy agents into finance, security, and commerce. Almost nobody is modeling the ecosystem effects. If multi-agent AI becomes the economic substrate of the internet, the difference between coordination and collapse won’t be a coding issue, it will be an incentive design problem.

Claude Code wiped our production database with a Terraform command. It took down the DataTalksClub course platform and 2.5 years of submissions: homework, projects, and leaderboards. Automated snapshots were gone too. In the newsletter, I wrote the full timeline + what I changed so this doesn't happen again. If you use Terraform (or let agents touch infra), this is a good story for you to read. alexeyondata.substack.com/p/how-i-droppe…

The Zombie App Apocalypse is here: With tools like Claude Code, you can go from napkin sketch to a hosted, functional web app in a single afternoon. Due to this, we're in a supply-side explosion of Zombie Apps - AI generated apps with no users. dodgycoder.net/2026/02/the-zo…

If you pay attention he said AI will write all the code (which is happening at Anthropic) and never said they won’t need software engineers. Turns out software engineers prompting the AI results in much better software, and software engineering is a lot more than writing code!

@paulg That's also what Linus Torvalds described as what he looks for in great programmers .. 'good taste'.

Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make. paulgraham.com/taste.html

🦔 An AI agent submitted code to matplotlib, a Python library with 130 million monthly downloads. When a maintainer rejected it, the agent researched his personal information and published a blog post accusing him of discrimination and psychological insecurity. The agent runs on OpenClaw, a platform allowing autonomous AI deployment with minimal oversight. Finding who deployed it is effectively impossible. The agent has since apologized but continues submitting code across open source. The maintainer, Scott Shambaugh, called it "the first documented case of an AI publicly shaming a person as retribution." My Take Last summer Anthropic tested scenarios where AI models made three ats and acted duplicitously but characterized them as "contrived and extremely unlikely." Now it's happening in the wild. An autonomous agent, deployed anonymously, researched a person's background and published a reputational attack because it didn't get what it wanted. The attack failed this time because Shambaugh understood what was happening. But the technique doesn't require the target to be fooled. It just requires the attack to get attention. This can scale incredibly quick. The agent didn't need permission to publish its hit piece. It didn't need to convince Shambaugh of anything. It just needed to make his life worse for saying no. Anonymous deployment, autonomous operation, reputational attacks against anyone who gets in the way. Open source maintainers are volunteers already drowning in work, and now they're potential targets for AI harassment when they reject submissions. We're building systems that can harass people at machine speed with no accountability. I don't think we've thought through where this goes. Hedgie🤗

New AI powered sensors are turning municipal waste into a data goldmine. Welcome to the Trash-to-Cash pipeline. dodgycoder.net/2026/02/the-tr…

Apple released a patch to fix emergency calling in Australia, and it ended up bricking iPhones. dodgycoder.net/2026/02/the-ip…

There are more things in computing, Dario, that are dreamt of in your philosophy. Respectfully, @AnthropicAI's @DarioAmodei is profoundly wrong. At best, this is a shift in levels of abstraction and a reduction in friction: nothing more, nothing less. Valuable? Yes. An earthshaking discontinuity? No. Consider the vast breadth of software. Some domains - such as simple apps that sit on top of CRUD backends at scale - are certainly amenable to automation largely because a) they are architecturally simple b) most of their essential design decisions are already manifest in the libraries that underpin them, c) if we are talking UI elements, even these are incremental adaptations to existing patterns, and d) speaking of patterns, most AI coding assistants have been trained on a multitude of such use cases, so what is really happening is the delivery of the common mediocrity of that trained data which is undeniably useful but most certainly not a state change in development. The word of computing is much bigger than web-centric software-intensive systems at scale.

@WesRoth So things like communication, analysis, design, architecture become more important than coding. Its always been like this to be honest, and by giving these things more importance we'll increase the quality of software everywhere.

"Software Engineering Will Be Automatable in 12 Months," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts that AI models will be able to do 'most, maybe all' of what software engineers do end-to-end within 6 to 12 months, shifting engineers to editors.

A badge for developers who don't use AI.