You might believe you should spend less time thinking about code because of AI. I strongly disagree! We’re watching this play out live where tons of AI generated code becomes a liability. At the end of the day, an engineer needs to be responsible / on call for code that gets shipped to production. If you don’t understand the system you’re trying to debug, you’re probably going to have a bad time. Yes, AI can help with all of this, if you set up the proper systems. You can have agents triage prod logs, look at errors, etc. You can speed up parts of the investigation, but an engineer needs to make the call. There might be serious customer or financial implications from that change. I expect the trend continue for trimming dependencies, vendoring code so you can modify it directly, preferring simpler systems with fewer abstractions, and spending waaaay more time thinking about system design and code maintenance. I’ve said this before, but it’s a great time to get familiar with CS fundamentals and some of the history behind what great software looks like. Many parts will be different in the coming years as AI progresses, but also a lot more than people realize will stay the same.

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out. I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really). It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely. The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture. We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying. I worry.

oh well, @plasticine@mastodon.social I suppose 🤷‍♂️

That tiny trunk 😍

Holy hell retool.com looks impressive! :O

The dream

needy

The highest form of city-building today is turning a space for cars into a place for people. Like Paris did, turning a waterfront freeway into a vibrant & diverse promenade. Our cities are full of car sewers in key locations awaiting change. V/@EmmanuelSPV

this account’s darkest day

Never forget, electric cars are here to save the car industry, not the planet.

Oh this is really rather nice! github.com/casey/just

Wrote this filth little script a few years back and it pretty much lives in every project I work on as little executable at bin/slugify, super helpful for sanitising strings in build scripts, etc... gist.github.com/plasticine/1…

I wanna learn how to weld

iOS 16 ➡️ Settings ➡️ Sounds & Haptics ➡️ Keyboard Feedback ➡️ Haptic ✅. You’re welcome.

Again, we are recklessly "developing" a common resource, with little or no regulation, for the benefit of a few, but at a cost that will impact everyone. #DarkSkiesForAll

RT @mxshift: Terrifying fact: we figured this out at Google and it was part of why we stopped the program. The folks who left the program t…

This is actual cyberpunk