you learn by struggling and slogging through, even as a senior if your shit breaks it's on you to understand why. no LLM will shortcut that process for you (even asking LLMs why something is wrong requires you to actually understand it eventually, aka LEARNING). how that happens is up to the person.
i don't understand all this fear projected as if people won't have agency of learning just because LLMs make it easier to do certain things. i don't think it's contradictory at all. half the people here will never have to wrangle the bullshit i dealt with 20 years ago and i'm sure when i was dealing with it there was another 20 years of bullshit before me lol.
if you vibe code your app with no regard for the underlying code you will pay the price for it at some point in the future, anybody worth their salt will slow down enough to figure it out the "artisanal" way.
I'd argue that the engineers of 20 years ago were better than the engineers of today because they were significantly more resource constrained and for example, would never use a 300mb javascript library for a profile page.
John Carmack did praise restraint of resources when he recalled his early days working as a lone contractor and as an employee of Softdisk, when he and the team had to push out games on a very tight schedule.
I think this extends to other parts of life, too. I still remember that I fondly played a game over and over again back in high school, when I did not have the Internet and had to borrow CDs from my friends — but when I went into the university and had access to pretty much every game freely on the Intranet, I rarely do that anymore. That’s why I always think an abundance of X may not be the best option for me. That’s why probably includes money, too.
As a percentage of good to mediocre, maybe.
Engineers of 40 years ago were probably better than engineers 20 years ago. Less of them and more constraints they had to deal with.
Democratization of technology makes it easier for more people to use. It applies to programming as much as just using a computer.
I never buy these examples. Being a good engineer is more than purely resource optimization. I can think of many times over my career where resource optimization mattered but it’s not always a valuable undertaking.
You're missing a step in the middle: It's not resource optimization itself, it's working under the constraint that forces you to learn, get creative, and figure things out. The investigation, attempts, failures, detours - all of it teaches you more about the language and system you're working on. That's where the experience and improved skills comes from.
Referring to it just by the end result of "resource optimization" is overly simplistic, along the lines of "painting is no big deal, it's just a bunch of colors".
Why do folks like yourself jump to such dull and cheap comments.
> “Painting is no big deal, it’s just a bunch of colors”
I don’t think anyone was saying such a thing. The original post stated that engineers of yesterday were so much better because of resource use, nobody would install a large JavaScript library.
My counter is that I don’t believe these arguments ever truly hold up. The times change and engineers are just as good as they once were but in other attributes. Sure constraints are great in work and in the market but that was not the original thesis.
20 years ago we were complaining about steam being bloated and unnecessary, we were 6 months off vista being a bloated mess and the Office Ribbon debacle being in full swing. PC games were often half baked console ports with atrocious performance and filled with game breaking bugs. Software was super rigid - there was no real cross platform support. We were just heading into the core 2 duo realm and it was a mess.
having tried to wrangle this on my own over months and still seeing gaps everyday i have to raise severe skepticism on this lol.
you mandate and "solve" this in a few weeks over 1:N channels and measure on a metric that nobody even fully understands yet = someone getting paid to bullshit some metrics on agentic productivity to executives. i agree with other posters, 12 months until a dumpster fire of shit reveals itself.
FWIW, i think it is the future but not in the way that'd described here.
I’m in the cutting edge of agentic dev at my company, but there’s no way they could have rolled this out in a meaningful way in two weeks. I can barely get a repeatable process, let alone one that I can actually teach everyone else.
“Decide upfront” is a load of crap. I can write the “perfect” spec plan, but we always, always miss something or misunderstand something. Agents will follow a high confidence spec blindly because they think it’s the blessed pattern.
To me, it sure looks like they took a “best practice”, stuck it in the flow chart then demand everyone use it.
I see zero details about how they actually learned what their devs need, how they know devs are getting value out of this, and what problems devs are trying to solve with agentic tooling.
goofy is a pretty nice way of say he has a history of dressing up his shenanigans by literally... lying lol. the fact that wpengine debacle was framed as a defense of OSS should tell you a lot, probably don't even need to look at the details to know that it's usually him trying to profit while framing it as something moral.
pretty much you have to build for humans as the "source" of truth and then have a robust agentic surface if you want to survive as a company. after using linear (for ex.) u can really see how it all fits together, i can be in cli, co-workers in slack, cowork, whatever and update tasks from anywhere). i refuse to use shit where i have to context switch by going into an app now. posthog is another good example of where it's going. the dirty detail now is that you HAVE to have the actual app so you can still manually look at data and do operations.
mcp is really easy for non-techies to understand. if i own the system, can install cli tools, cli + skills beat it every time and i can tweak, etc. if you're asking someone else to do that there's real friction. i'll sometimes use mcp if i just want to get up and running am not watching context as much, then if they offer a cli i'll just move to skill + that or write my own wrapper off the api.
"I’ve helped found six companies in my life, and been involved in the start of a handful of other startups and nonprofits, and literally every single one was full of people who love to work hard"
lol, no offense, but if you helped found the company this pretty much excludes any impartial view of what your employees actually might feel, and i say this as a founder myself.
it's a wonderful thing to have a team that is on board with you and the mission, but at the end of the day they just want to go home and relax and you want to work on your baby.
that's not to say people are lazy by any means, just don't drink the coolaid too hard. even if i'm working for someone else i'm using my hard work to optimize my free time not putting in extra work unless i'm getting paid for it.
conductor was a non-starter for due to requiring the github + PR workflow. do you just allow management of a local repo without pushing us into a specific git flow? worktrees for diff work is fine, just if you want to handle the merge yourself (for whatever reason) how would that work.
ask ai for advice, ask it to steelman an argument, ask to replay what your situation from the other perspective (if it's involving people), push it hard to agree with you and pander to you, then push it to disagree with you, etc.
once you have all the "bounds" just make your own decision. i find this helps a lot, basically like a rubber duck heh.
i don't understand all this fear projected as if people won't have agency of learning just because LLMs make it easier to do certain things. i don't think it's contradictory at all. half the people here will never have to wrangle the bullshit i dealt with 20 years ago and i'm sure when i was dealing with it there was another 20 years of bullshit before me lol.
if you vibe code your app with no regard for the underlying code you will pay the price for it at some point in the future, anybody worth their salt will slow down enough to figure it out the "artisanal" way.
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