Mars

@mardehaym They are on fact utter shit as engineers

A senior architect told me she'd stopped approving AI-generated PRs from her juniors. Her VP noticed. Approval rates dropped. Cycle times spiked. Suddenly, she's the bottleneck. So she invited the VP to a code review. Just to observe. The junior explained the PR. Confident. Articulate. Code executed. Tests passed. Then she asked, "What happens if we add a second payment provider next quarter?" Silence. The junior stared at the code. The model that generated it doesn't know the roadmap. The code didn't contain an answer, because the system design didn't exist beyond the current ticket. In 8 months, the juniors shipped 40,000 lines of code. None of them could explain how the system worked outside of their immediate task. They thought they understood the codebase. They never actually read it. "They're not bad engineers," she said. "But they've never been wrong long enough to learn anything." The VP had offered courses, certifications, book clubs. But the architect needed something else, and it wasn't more training. She needed permission to slow things down, so the juniors could build a real mental model. One that lives outside the chat window. Juniors don't develop judgment from getting things right. They develop it by sitting with wrong answers, long enough to understand why they failed. You want to test their understanding? Ask them to diagram the system. No IDE/docs/ AI. If the diagram has gaps, those gaps exist in their heads too. You won't notice, until something actually breaks.

@usr_bin_roygbiv Too bad this has become something no one knows how to interview for anymore

Every once in a while you work at a company that only hires people who know what they're doing, and suddenly its 20 people doing the same work as 400 somewhere else. There's zero meetings, everyone talks once a week on slack, and you go huh, how much garbage is there actually.

@johncrickett Not only this but maths focused CS degree programs went well in on programming and skipped all the theory and low level basics

The result of several decades rapid growth where people were drawn to programming for the salary. And sold the dream of learning all the skills in 8-12 weeks, then $$$.

@bryanrbeal Government is incompetent, yes. Government is mostly fraud, yes.

The fact this one dude - by himself - can walk into any state and find blatant fraud everywhere he goes proves two things: 1) the fraud is rampant at an unprecedented scale and 2) the government agencies who are supposed to protect our tax dollars are either completely incompetent or complicit in the fraud.

@unclebobmartin AI tools are too expensive and too much magic incantation and most corporate engineers lack the spells. What if I could hire an engineer for 30% more comp that would be able to do what an entire team of averagers could NEVER do. It's not 10x it's infinity-x.

Here’s the question that every development manager should be asking themselves: What would I do with three times the productivity if I had it?

@davidcrawshaw Lisp

Everything about programming languages needs to be rethought for agent-based development. What an exciting time to be a PL researcher / builder. I don't think you can design a programming language today without simultaneously training models.

@JackNapierNot End the Fed

You better start having in group preferences. Her loyalty does not lie with the US, but her home country. Like all Indians getting into power before her. Prepare for a lot of Americans to be fired and replaced with HB1's.

@davidcrawshaw Telling people to F-off is a fundamental right. Just because one person has good intentions and wants to help does not give them an automatic right to demand that their help be accepted and appreciated by another.

OSS authors don’t have to be professional. This is very confusing to people who are paid a salary to do open source work. The truly independent are throwing their work into the void and can do anything they want.

@svpino Because AI has no creativity

I keep hearing that building with AI is easier than ever before, and yet I don't see that many new good applications? Why haven't I seen a significant increase in quality in the apps I use every day? Why aren't they bursting with new and useful features? Even the apps released by the labs that claim software engineering is dead are full of bugs and kind of meh. What gives?

@esrtweet Spot on

This is a certain kind of talk around LLMs that I find increasingly puzzling. That is all of the people bitching that LLMs constantly generate crap code and hallucinate solutions, and are worthless for programming. This has almost never happened to me, and never during the last two model generations I have used (chat GPT 5.4 and 5.5). Occasionally a model used to get a little deranged when I pushed its context limit, but under codex that doesn't happen anymore; instead I got a red-highlighted warning when the limit has been exceeded and I need to clear my session. I've applied AI to feature changes, refactoring, and debugging over 63 different projects written in C, Go, Rust, Python, and shell. I've written documentation with it. I've decompiled a DOS binary into readable source code. It's now routine that whenever I have to touch one of my projects I start by running the regression tests, then fire up codex and asking it to audit the code for bugs and suggest improvements. My experience is that LLMs are excellent and tremendously empowering tools. Their worst limitation is a kind of architectural tunnel vision - they're extremely good at generating code to specification but sometimes blind to higher-level patterns. Which is okay, it's my meatbrain job to be good at that. The most valuable thing I find about LLMs is exactly that they *don't* screw up details and edge cases. I'm a very, very good coder by human standards (I'd better be, with 50 years of experience!) but the LLMs are better than me. Because if a code change needs to touch (say) five places in the code, they reliably find all five rather than doing the human thing of fixing four and then having to debug for hours before you figure out that there's a fifth one you missed. Are the downshouters living in a different universe than me? Are they using old, weak models? Or do they have some kind of skill issue that I can't see because I have mental habits and communication skills that are a good fit for the handles on these tools? I don't know. And I think this is an important thing to figure out, because I'm seeing lots of stories in the news that suggest billions of dollars are being wasted on misdirected token spend. It all seems very simple to me. Be clear in your thinking, tell the model what you want with precision, and good things happen. What...what am I missing here?

@TheChiefNerd Excellent assessment.

🔥 Chamath Shuts Down Axios’ Dan Primack on Immigration and H-1B’s “A handful of companies in certain countries have abused this system. You need to stop and tourniquet the bleeding so that you can reestablish trust with the American population.”

@IamAroke They got breached because they hired jackasses to write their software.

Data Validation is so underated. Equifax got breached because they didn't validate a single input field. 147 million people's data gone. Your if statement matters more than you can imagine. Validate everything. Trust nothing.

@neembu_paani31 85%

60% staff of microsoft is just decorative

@allenholub Spot on. When without ai tools, projects where communication breaks down, will fail. Writing down the solution to the wrong problem or the wrong solution, well result in failure no matter what methods you use, and isn't constrained to software projects.

To me, the key factor in successful software projects is people interacting with other people. All software-development systems that encourage people to work in isolation fail, IME. I don't care how much AI you introduce. If that introduction causes people to stop interacting with one another, you will fail. It's that simple.

@dreamsofcode_io Yes. And instead of trying to figure what mess the ai created, they will reprompt until "it works"

“He who controls the spice, controls the universe” I’m have a very cynical viewpoint on this, but I believe it’s a way to get developers and companies so dependent on using these tools to the point that they can’t hope to modify or understand their codebase without them.

@FirstSquawk Yes, AI replaced the human to human to computer interface.

39% OF BUSINESS LEADERS CUT STAFF DUE TO AI DEPLOYMENT, ORGVUE REPORT FINDS A report by Orgvue says 39% of business leaders have made employees redundant as a result of adopting AI technologies.

@ShaneEBurns 95%

This is 80% of H1B

@IamAroke Taxes and jobs are the things.

Fact. The open source community built the tools that made billion dollar companies possible. Most of those companies give nothing back.

@melqtx They're in the land on make believe where most CEOs and industry leaders get their ideas.

bro what happened to all those agentic browsers, one day they were gonna "autonomously browse the web, book flights, do research", where are they now????

@myzccc Isn't that treason?

Tucker Carlson calls to revoke citizenship of Americans who served in the Israeli or Ukrainian military