I don't understand why companies don't "get" this bit of it.
I'm fairly amenable to the idea of RTO. Office work with a team is just different, and I've worked almost exclusively remote my entire career.
If I were a high level leader in these giant orgs trying to implement RTO I'd 100% ban any internal Zoom calls for in-office days. If you are in the office you are in the office. Why take the worst possible form of communication ever invented and totally remove the entire point of people being in one spot?
If you absolutely must sacrifice an entire day’s productivity, dedicate one day each week exclusively to video calls.
Ironically, screen sharing on zoom whilst all colocated can be less bad than sitting round a gigantic TV type screen for calls where screen content is needed :-|
This is why many see it as babysitting. In larger orgs, many or even all meetings l, depending on your function and seniority, are going to all be online and spanning multiple time zones.
> Here’s the thing - we want to help. We want to build good things. Things that work well, that make people’s lives easier. We want to teach people how to do software engineering!
This is not what companies want. Companies want "value" that customers will pay for as quickly and cheaply as possible. As entities they don't care about craftsmanship or anything like that. Just deliver the value quickly and cheaply. Its this fundamental mismatch between what engineers want to do (build elegant, well functioning tools) and what businesses want to do (the bare minimum to get someone to give them as much money as possible) that is driving this sort of pulling-our-hair-out sentiment on the engineering side.
“The only way to go fast, is to go well.” Robert C. Martin
Maybe spaghetti code delivers value as quickly as possible in the short term, but there is a risk that it will catch up in the long term - hard to add features, slow iterations - ultimately losing customers, revenue and growth.
Anecdotally I'm already seeing this on a small scale. People who vibe coded a prototype to 1 mil ARR are realizing that the velocity came at the cost of immense technical debt. The code has reached a point where it is essentially unmaintainable and the interest payments on that technical debt are too expensive. I think there's going to be a lot of money to be made over the next few years un-fucking these sort of things so these new companies can continue to scale.
So basically the new version of the 1990's people's projects that grew to high ARR based on their random Visual Basic codebase? That's how software companies have been starting for 30 years.
if i have 1mil ARR, i can hire some devs to remake my product from scratch. and use the Vibecoded Example as a design mockup.
If i manage to vibecode something alone that takes off, even without technical expertise, then you validated the AI usecase...
Before Claude i had to make a paper prototype or a figma, now i can make Slop that looks and somehow functions the way i want.
i can make preliminary tests, and even get to some proof of concept. in some cases even 1million $ annual revenue...
Yes, this is exactly where AI shines: PoCs and validating ideas. The problems come when you're ready to scale. And the "I can hire some devs to remake my product from scratch" part is the exact money making scenario some of my consulting friends are starting to see take shape in the market.
But people say this about technology in software engineering time and time again.
VB? VBA macros in Excel? Delphi? Uhh... Wordpress? Python as a language?
Well you see these are just for prototypes. These are just for making an MVP. They're not the real product.
But they are the real product. I've almost never seen these been successfully used as just for prototyping or MVPs. It always becomes the real codebase and it's a hot fucking mess 99% of the time.
What ends up happening is that humans get "woven" into the architecture/processes, so that people with pagers keep that mess going even though it really should not be running at that scale.
This is where the missmatch is, the future is not in scaled apps, the future is in everyone being able to make their own app.
You don't have to feature pack if you are making a custom app for your custom use case, and LLMs are great with slim narrow purpose apps.
I don't think LLMs will replace developers, but I am almost certain they will radically change how end users use computers, even if the tech plateaus right now.
> the future is in everyone being able to make their own app.
Everyone can do their own plumbing and electrical work in their homes too. For some people it works out, for others it's still better to pay someone else to do it for them.
I guess that depends on how you get that ARR-figure. If more than all of it goes to paying your AI bills, then you can't really afford that much engineering investment.
Or, you can be like many modern CTOs: AI will likely get better and eventually be capable of mostly cleaning up its own mess today. In which case, YOLO - your startup dies, or AI is sufficiently advanced enough by the time it succeeds. The objections about quality only matter if you think it’s going to plateau.
That is, literally, faith-based business management. "We suck, sure - but wait, a miracle will SURELY happen in version 5. Or 6. Or 789. It will happen eventually, have faith and shovel money our way."
I suspect it's going to tank instead of getting better, no matter what they try to do with attention or agents or whatever, especially if it's training on AI-written code of which there will be more and more of as time goes on. I'm not an AI expert by any means, so take that with a grain of salt.
This is true, but what I've come to realize is companies only prioritize the short term, no matter what, no exceptions. They take everything on as debt.
They don't care about losing customers 10 years later because they're optimizing for next quarter. But they do that every quarter.
Does this eventually blow up? Uh, yeah, big time. Look at GE, Intel, Xerox, IBM, you name it.
But you can get shockingly far only thinking about tomorrow over and over again. Sometimes, like, 100 years far. Well by then we're all dead anyway so who cares.
Right; I discovered at the new company I joined, they want velocity more than anything. The sloppy code, risk of mistakes, it’s all priced in to the risk assessment of not gaining ground first. So… I’m shooting out AI-written code left and right and that’s what they want. My performance? Excellent. Will it be a problem in the future? Well, either the startup fails, or AI might be able to rewrite it in the future.
It’s not what I want… but at the same time, how many of our jobs do what we want? I could easily end up being the garbage man. I’m doing what I’m paid to do and I’m paid well to do it.
While this is true, the push-pull between sales and engineering resulted in software that is built well enough to last without being over-engineered. However if both sales and the engineers start chasing quick short term gains over long term viability that'll result in a new wave of shitty low-quality software being released.
AI isn't good enough yet to generate the same quality of software as human engineers. But since AI is cheaper we'll gladly lower the quality bar so long as the user is still willing to put up with it. Soon all our digital products will be cheap AI slop that's barely fit for purpose, it's a future I dread.
>AI isn't good enough yet to generate the same quality of software as human engineers
The software I have vibecoded for myself totally obliterates anything available on the market. Imagine a program that operates without any lag or hicupps. Opens and runs instantly. A program that can run without an internet connection, without making an account, without somehow being 12GB in size, without totally unintuitive UI, without having to pay $20/mo for static capabilities, without persistent bugs that are ignored for years, without any ability to customize anything.
I know you are incredulous reading this is, but hear me out
Bespoke narrow scope custom software is incredibly powerful, and well within the wheelhouse of LLMs. Modern software is written to be the 110-tool swiss army knife feature pack to capture as large of an audience as possible. But if I am just using 3 of those tools, an LLM can write a piece of software that is better for me in every single way. And that's exactly what my experience has been so far, and exactly the direction I see software moving in the future.
If you haven't seen an LLM output a functional 2K or even 5K LOC program at this point, you probably never will.
The problem space of average people problems that can be addressed with <5K LOC is massive. The only real barrier is having to go through an IDE, but that will almost certainly be solved in the near future, it already sort of is with Canvas features.
Try Claude or Gemnini pro, copilot is like the dollar store steak of LLMs. Gemini will go up to 8K LOC if you really optimize the context, but that's about the limit. You can use it free in aistudio[1]
Well, in such a future, when people have been burned by countless vibecoded projects, congratulations - FAANG wins again! Who is going to risk one penny on your rapidly assembled startup?
Any startup that can come to the table saying “All human engineers; SOC 2 Type 2 certified; dedicated Q/A department” will inherit the earth.
the fundamental issue remains that there is no objective and reliable measure of developer productivity. So those who experience it (developers) and the business who are isolated from it; end up with different perspectives. This IMHO is going to be the most important factor that fuels "AI first" stories like these, that could dominate our industry over the coming decade.
I don't think the chasm is unbridgable, because ultimately everybody wants the same thing (for the company to prosper) but they fail to entirely appreciate the perspective of the other. Its up to a healthy company organisation to productively address the conflict between the two perspectives. However, I have yet to encounter such a culture of mutal respect and resource allocation.
I fear that agentic AI could erase all the progress we've made on culture in the past 25 years (e.g. agile) and drag us back towards 80s tech culture.
Seems like you don't remember the 80s, 90s or even early 2000s. Agile was a movement specifically designed to help represent the interests of development in organisations. Obviously business corrupted it over time but the industry before it was considerably worse.
MVPs exist to force business into better defining their requirements. Prior to Agile we'd spend years building something and then we'd deliver it, only for business to then "change their mind", because they've now just realised (now that they have it), that what they asked for was stupid.
Do me a favor and spend a few years in the early 2000's writing enterprise javabeans in a place doing waterfall. Then you'll understand how we ended up with agile.
I guess it's not ENTIRELY a favor since I founded that company but stepped away a few years back and always felt a bit guilty ever since. They certainly weren't expecting me to build it though.
I built it all myself (including the integration with our ordering platform) It was sort of my white whale project that I've always wanted to do but didn't have the chops/time.
The advancements in AI-assisted coding encouraged me to give it a shot though and the results turned out great. It was a heavily supervised vibe-coding project that turned into a production-ready system.
The word "hijacking" in this scenario would only be applicable if the domain was still registered and active and he forcefully took the domain away. That is not the case. The fact OP was able to register it quickly and easily indicates it was unused and to call this "hijhacking" would imply permanent ownership of domains even after previous owners knowingly let the registration lapse.
The legality of hosting a tracker isn't obvious, and as pointed out elsewhere the nuance is less about concrete legality and more about having the resources to deal with lawyers harassing you with lawsuits.
> If you want free stuff, is your strategy to smear them into giving you more free stuff?
Docker literally offers free stuff if you follow their process. They followed the process and have gotten silence in return. Somehow that doesn't strike me as "smear them into giving you more free stuff".
Don't say you're going to do a thing if you're not going to do the thing.
I think the Onion is as good as it ever was. The issue now is that the real news is so wild and unhinged the Onion doesn't have that segment cornered anymore.
The Onion youtube vids of the late 2000's were phenomenal. It was all downhill from there imo. Take a look at this recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2niC4ACCp20. I don't like Taylor Swift but this is just not funny. I don't see what the point of it is is.
The new one is really bad. Feels so fake. And the anchor can't role play. The old one is so much better. If you don't listen, you don't even get that it is a joke.
That is true, but the Onion is also a shell of its former self. The Onion became a household name because of how widely consumed it used to be. It doesn't have anywhere near that reach or cultural influence today.
I think the problem is that American politics has become so polarized, that humor anywhere is more likely to be partisan political and written directly in reaction to that week’s events. The development has been observed for late-night television, and it’s not a new thing with The Onion either: already over a decade ago, friends who had grown up on classic 1990s Onion were bemoaning this shift. Sure, The Onion had used political figures in jokes before (“Congress Debates Rush”, “Clinton Declares Self President For Life”) but those politicians could have stood for anything; there was very little reference to specific policies or controversies.
Oh come on now. The world wasn't just sent to live with it's auntie and uncle in Bel-Air. The distressed sullen worldview might be new to you, but people certainly had it back when I found the Onion regularly quite enjoyable too.
In 2004, George W Bush was re-elected. At that time, a plausible Onion story might have been that George W Bush was going to appoint a vaccine denier HHS and someone who was investigated by the DOJ as AG, and that would have been, like, mildly funny (which was always the Onion's thing, really; it was almost never _great_), because haha, the president popularly considered to be a bit incompetent is appointing obviously unsuitable people, how amusing, but also, well, a bit of fun, not real. (Actually, if anything I think this might have strayed a bit too far into absurdity for the Onion's liking, particularly Gaetz.)
Fast-forward to 2024, and, well... It just doesn't work as well anymore. Like, imagine an Onion story about Trump's appointments. What could it possibly say that would be stranger than the reality?
Maybe appointing Paula Deen as the secretary of health. Show a "food pyramid" that is just multiple pies stacked on top of each other with a side of melted butter to wash it down with, and her vice secretary is a disgraced police officer with over 800 sanctions kitted out in full milspec riot gear whose job it is to beat every child who fails to eat 15 pies a day into submission?
