rmdashrfv

there is so much focus on developer productivity right now that we’re failing to notice team throughput has barely budged

I was with him until the classic economist overstep. You knew it was coming though.

@yaser_najjar_en @zeeg The end result

@zeeg Isn't the problem that we never had a good measure of an engineer productivity? Is it number of tickets finished? Story points? PRs? LOC? All of these are not good... So I wonder if there is something one would use to define the baseline

its obviously not true in absolutes, but its close enough that its worth understanding that maybe this isnt an exponential improvement to generalized productivity. at least in the case of engineering.

Tatsuro Taira

AI startups today are basically: 90% Claude 5% landing page 5% praying a tweet changes their life

Boxing/mma will 100% show you that you don’t have the level of cardio that you think you do

To be a little less vague, I suspect that we're likely (not certain, but likely) to be entering into a period of unprecedented software degradation, and we're going to be seeing an increasing frequency of outages like this across many high profile products. But IMO the cause is actually not just the-one-thing-that-everyone-is-always-talking-about, it's a number of things that have all been bubbling away at just below critical levels for a long time. Some of the things off the top of my head: - Poorly designed / optimised software has been getting a free ride on hardware improvements pretty much since the invention of the computer. That chapter is now coming to an end, and will only be worsened by the enormous industry-wide pivot to producing & innovating on AI specific hardware, rather than general purpose CPUs etc. - The ZIRP era created a temporary suspension of reality in our industry, and now that it's ended we need to deal with the hangover. Companies that spent years making no profit, paying extravagant compensation to employees / shareholders and giving away server time for free are now pivoting into extraction mode, which is putting further pressure on their low quality software. QA is being laid off, hardware budgets are being reduced, timelines for shipping features are becoming more aggressive, etc. - The enormous amount of free money incentivised too many new people to join the industry too quickly. This has led to an abundance of poor quality education programs (bootcamps, uncertified colleges etc) and an influx of people into the industry who frankly aren't interested in programming. If you compared the average person in the industry now to 20 years ago, I suspect the difference in motivations would be stark. I'm not saying it's these people's fault necessarily, it's simply an inevitable result of the absurd compensation / performance expectations ratio that our industry has enjoyed for the last 15+ years. Working for a tech company has also become socially prestigious, which further adds to the problem. - Because computer programming was once an incredibly niche area of interest, many of our fundamental systems are built on trust. We're now starting to see that if systems like open source, public supply chain, discussion spaces, education etc become flooded with bad actors, we have no real mechanisms to deal with them. - Our hiring / recruitment pipeline has totally misaligned incentives. Even before the AI resume / AI HR-filtering arms race disaster that we're experiencing now, the widespread adoption of the leetcode style interviews IMO selected for a very narrow personality type, and filtered candidates that would have made great contributions to the industry long term. - The pivot from purchasing long term stable releases of software, to paying a subscription for constantly updating software has done huge damage to software quality as a whole. Companies have lost their incentive to get their software "right" because they can just "fix it later", and for the consumer - you can't just go back to the version of github that still works because the new one has problems. This was all happening well before AI entered the picture. I won't belabor the point because there has been endless discussion about it. But to me personally, there are two additional and deeply worrying problems with AI code generation. - It's undeniable at this point that it negatively affects the people who use it. It stops juniors from getting better, and it burns seniors out and makes them hate their jobs. Like it or not, humans are still the core of this industry, and I don't see this ending well. - It's completely unfit for purpose in the most important, high-stakes situations. One of the reasons that we excuse all the small errors it makes, is because it's low effort to type "do it again and fix this bug". That kind of thing doesn't fly when you only get one attempt because a mistake results in data loss or an outage. The damage is done. All the above has led to a silent exodus of many of our most experienced and impactful people. There are so many amazing programmers who made enough through stock options / compensation that they didn't need to work anymore, and were only doing it because they enjoyed it. Many of these people have just quit the industry and switched to doing hobby projects in the last 5 years. These are the types of people who have the experience and foresight to prevent the types of outages that we're seeing at github today. It's very easy to assume that the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back is entirely to blame here. But I think it's a reckoning that has been on the horizon for a very long time.

@DokuGamesLTD As a literal solo developer, I appreciate it when people who hire tons of people not use the term

If a game is advertised as being from a 'solo developer' or 'solo developed', it does not mean it was created by one person. Most projects hire artists / audio engineers / animators etc. to create a large portion of the games content. I think some people are not aware of this when they hear it. I dont know if this needs to change, but I feel even for my own project I will need to drop the terminology, as of when I start to add additional content from other artists, for both transparency and acknowledgement of the talent that helps to actually make a game. How do other people feel about this?

@atmoio People will absolutely be fired or ostracized if they tell the truth about what's going on at work

The real reason they keep saying AI will take your job

@warXwizard Some time in 2026, same as it's always been :)

@___4o____ @nickmgallo Every time a weakness in LLMs goes viral and exposes the way they actually work, they patch in a solution for that specific problem in the next release

@nickmgallo Why would I give this to the labs for free?

There are several software domains that LLMs are bad at and are showing no signs of progress. If you're not working on one of these problems your cognitive function is regressing and you're surrounded by idiots.

Most software companies can increase their productivity by 10x without AI by just improving their processes. Companies that refuse to do that but still jump on the AI bandwagon will sadly not see any productivity gains from AI

@thedailymemes_ Noooooo >> whywouldyouthink

"It's because that's why" 💀

Just said this to someone

@airkatakana Come to a vibe coding workshop in the east US and you will be told to ask ChatGPT for ideas. They are still saying this in 2026 and I confirmed that people do actually believe it *because* it comes from an LLM

@rmdashrfv anyone with a good idea is a few prompts away from financial independence but you wont get that good idea from an llm

if i gave you the formula for coca cola right now and told you to go sell it, 5 years down the line you would probably have 0% of the soft drink market share. with literally coke and yet everyone expects ai-coded apps to be in widespread use after less than a year

Last time the SWE industry suffered such wide scale degradation was when Facebook started the move fast and break things movement in late 2000s. It screwed up many companies for a decade before Facebook itself backed off this mindset, with lingering effects still visible today.

Crazy how it says exactly what you were thinking decades later. Something about Halo makes me weep

can we stop fucking around and make the omnigame? put everything in one game. just do it. there's no reason to make more than one game.

@ctjlewis @WillManidis It's totally possible, but you have to spend real time being 100% earnest and invested on both sides of the aisle. Either sides have their disadvantages and for the critic theirs is: "I thought it would be a lot easier than it is"

@WillManidis Hey now, I’m a critic and I care about craftsmanship. But it seems like the exception to the rule. Didn’t stop me from getting totally fucked over anyway.

Not ambitious, no new technology, zero craftsmanship.