This is easily disproven. I mean how can someone still believe this? Wow!

I can come up with many examples that would take you ages to search in Kagi vs one prompt in ChatGPT.

You really should be updating.

Being blunt here but this is a good example of dogmatic thought.

AI is leaps and bounds better than google at searching.

“You don’t need google for this, we have had public libraries for decades” energy.

Yeah to get the definitive answers, sure AI is quicker. Google is more like the librarian pointing you at possibly good resources to get your answers from after reading the materials and there are a lot of good learning opportunities there. LLMs just give you the answer and robs you of those opportunities.

> dogmatic thought.

Dogmatism sometimes seems like a better thing compared to mind so open that wind blows through it without obstacles.

The split is about people who care about the commerce behind software development vs people who care about the craft.

Commerce camp understands tradeoffs needed in a competitive environment. Cutting corners where possible, not being dogmatic about unit tests and clean code an so on.

If you notice - the craft people rarely think about commerce because coding is an artistic expression.

Your generalization are as useful as me saying that people in the first camp are just sloppy workers who dump their subpar code on others in hope that they’ll never need to touch it again.

You are repeating the same thing. You think having good maintainable good is important - more than the first camp.

That does not mean you are correct. This mindset is useful only in serious reusable libraries and open source tools. Most enterprise code involves lots of exploring and fast iteration. Code quality doesn’t matter that much. No one else is going to see it.

When the craft coders bring their ideology to this set up, it starts slowing things down because they are optimising for the wrong target.

> Code quality doesn’t matter that much. No one else is going to see it.

This is just false for anyone who has worked in the industry for any meaningful amount of time. Do you seriously never encountered a situation where a change was supposedly easy on the surface, but some stupid SoB before you wrote it so bad that you want to pull your hair out from trying to make it work without rewriting this crap codebase from scratch?

at least where i have worked, you need to identify the context. certain projects require good readable code and certain projects require you to iterate fast and explore.

in my experience very few projects were serious enough that required such scrutiny in code.

Sounds like you’ve never had a prototype become foundational infrastructure before, or dealt with someone else’s.

I have many times and if you spend too long over architecting a prototype you start to get annoyed looks and tons of questions from PMs who just want something that looks right today (we can fix it/optimize it later)

you can always change it later. this is exactly the dogmatism i'm speaking about - you need to prioritise pushing things. the clean up can come later.

ironically it is your camp that advices to not use microservices but start with monolith. that's what i'm suggesting here.

> You can always change it later.

People seem to think that technical debt doesn't need to be paid back for ages. In my experience bad code starts to cost more than it saved after about three months. So if you have to get a demo ready right now that will save the company then hack it in. But that's not the case for most technical debt. In most cases the management just want the perception of speed so they pile debt upon debt. Then they can't figure out why delivery gets slower and slower.

> ironically it is your camp that advices to not use microservices but start with monolith. that's what i'm suggesting here.

I agree with this. But there's a difference between over-engineering and hacking in bad quality code. So to be clear, I am talking about the latter.

> you can always change it later. this is exactly the dogmatism i'm speaking about - you need to prioritise pushing things. the clean up can come later.

Everyone that says this has not been the one that had to fix the code later. They have already moved to the next jobs (or have been fired). Engineers do know the tradeoff between quality and speed, and can do hack if that’s what needed to get the project to the finish line. But good ones will note down the hack and resolve it later. Bad ones will pat themselves in the back and add more hacks on top of that.

I think your target is the wrong target myself. Now what?

If more people think like you we won’t have jobs because company won’t make profit

If people think like you we won’t have jobs because everyone would fucking die when cars, MRI machines, nuclear power plans and ICBMs, airplanes, infra, payments start misbehaving. Now what?

this is a category error that i specifically called out in my comment.

What is the category of code that does not need quality? You need it to not interact with real world, with people's finances, with people's personal data. Basically it's the code that only exists for PMs to show to investors (in startups) and VPs (in enterprise), but not for real users to rely on.

> What is the category of code that does not need quality?

For example there exist "applications"/"demos" that exist "to show the customer what could be possible if they hire 'us'". These demos just have to survive a, say, intense two-hour marketing pitch and some inconvenient questions/tests that someone in the audience might come up with during these two hours.

In other words: applications for "pitching possibilities" to a potential customer, where everything is allowed to be smoke and mirrors if necessary (once the customer has been convinced with all tricks to hire the respective company for the project, the requirements will completely change anyway ...).

Yeah, that's what I mean - prototypes. The caveat is though that before agentic coding skills to build a prototype and skills to build a production system were generally the same, so a prototype did not only provide a demonstration of what is possible in general, but what your team of engineers can do specifically. Now these skills will diverge, so prototypes will not prove anything like that. They are still going to be useful for demonstrations and market research though.

Where?

> That does not mean you are correct. This mindset is useful only in serious reusable libraries and open source tools. Most enterprise code involves lots of exploring and fast iteration. Code quality doesn’t matter that much. No one else is going to see it.

Here? Most of those that I’ve listed IS boring enterprise code. Unless we’re taking medical/military grade.

fair, you have presented specific niche where the ~quality~ correctness is important in enterprise - not just libraries.

but most people aren't writing code in those places. its usually CRUD, advertisement, startups, ecommerce.

also there are two things going on here:

- quality of code

- correctness of code

in serious reusable libraries and opensource tools, quality of code matters. the interfaces, redundancy etc.

but that's not exactly equal to correctness. one can prioritise correctness without dogmatism in craft like clean code etc.

in most of these commercial contexts like ecommerce, ads - you don't need the dogmatism that the craft camp brings. that's the category error.

Maybe you’re too entrenched in the web section of software development. Be aware that there’s a lot of desktop and system software out there.

Even in web software, you can write good code without compromising in delivery speed. That just requires you to be good at what you’re doing. But the web is more forgiving of mistakes and a lot of frameworks have no taste at all.

Do you think more sdes work in mission critical software or the ones I mentioned?

Everyone’s scared that it would be used for war but how would they break the alignment on llm models? They don’t even allow me to generate black people on AI. How the hell will it work for war related tasks? Or would there be a separate model fine tuned for government that allows being used to kill people?

You don’t say “find people to kill and kill them” you say, “given this list of locations, which ones could be harboring terrorists or hidden military bases?” Etc. Or even more abstract constructs based on domain aliases where AI assists in pattern matching and automation but isn’t really thinking in terms of moral domains.

While I think you are not wrong, these are excuses to continue doing useless things

What useless things?

Partake in war

If you do not partake in a war when a war is waged against you, you lose, and you either get subdued, or perish altogether. This is why pacifism for some part of a society is only possible when another part of the society is willing and capable of using lethal force to defend the society as a whole.

Due to this, it's important to always have sufficient quantities of very efficient weapons, exactly so that you would never have to put them to use.

War has existed as long as humans have. If you have any ideas for how to remove fear, aggression and disagreement from humans you might just be a god or a saint.

War against someone who wants my society eradicated provides a lot of value to my people.

And much more pain, misery and suffering to people who never wished you anything bad but happen to live on the other side.

the context makes it even worse. its a strange kind of tribalism that is being promoted here. "do what you are asked to without understanding the real consequences". btw war is actual zero sum usually.

War is often times even negative sum game.

Historically, no. It's like Tennyson: Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die.

You discarded the context within which he made that statement.

i read this

> If you have a job like that, or work at a company like that, the sooner you quit the better your outcome will be.

AI will render your job to be rent seeking. Like self driving cars will automate away truck drivers - do you not think they need to be laid off because of AI?

> Like self driving cars will automate away truck drivers - do you not think they need to be laid off because of AI?

geohot is talking about AI has its limitation and that it won't truly replace the human yet. Truck drivers and some people who contribute net positive value are not rent seekers at the moment.

AI could render our jobs to be rent seeking, we don't know when.

We have unions actively opposing self driving cars mainly to protect their own jobs. In fact I think it’s much more common for a company to lay off because of real ai impact than anything else

What are you talking about. Cory literally coined the term to describe this phenomena. He is not confused by the idea of cheaper products with wider appeal. He takes issue with vendor lock-in that is weaponized first against the end-user, then against paying customers, and finally against investors themselves. This is first and foremost a criticism of online products and platforms, not mass-produced gadgets from China.