> I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue.

It’s not for me. Being a middle manager, with all of the liability and none of the agency, is not what I want to do for a living. Telling a robot to generate mediocre web apps and SVGs of penguins on bicycles is a lousy job.

[GitHub] platform activity is surging. — https://twitter.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878

"I want to argue that AI models will write good code because of economic incentives. Good code is cheaper to generate and maintain."

This is possibly the dumbest version of an "economic incentives" argument. Current code is the result of current economic incentives. It is a mystery to me why making code generation cheaper will make it more "good" in any way, instead of being either more of what we have now, or worse.

Sam Altman made his stake at the table with a shady and failed location data harvesting app (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt). That's who he is, that's what he does, and we're all better off paying less attention to the sounds he emits, and more to the things he does.

> the things he does.

The things he does is convince investors to give him billions of dollars to build what he wants. Where exactly does that leave us?

A fool and his money shall soon be parted. Sam is a face. If it wasnt him, it would be someone else.

> unless they manage to turn things around, my next laptop won't be an apple.

Meh. I ran Linux on a PowerBook back in the day, because Apple made the best hardware and behind-the-times software, before deciding that Mac OS X was "Unix with decent office software" and wholesale switching. I'm fine going back to FVWM on a MacBook if macOS 27 is as bad as 26.

> And “once they sell ads, they’ll lose all their users!” As if that happened to FB, Google, YouTube, or Instagram…

Enshittification only works for the middleman in a two-sided market, which is what those things are. LLMs are a commodity, so their path to monopoly profit is very different.

I will check back on this comment in a year to see who was right.

The only people that care about enshittification are a few crazies on HN.

Google has 90% market share.

> I can't think of anything else since the invention of the internet that has had this much of an impact on people's lives.

If you reach a bit farther back, there's opium, an impactful product with limitless demand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

Good point: RTFM and (wall of slop) are two ways of telling someone that responding to them is not worth your time that are both ruder and more time-consuming than simply saying nothing. Explaining the culture of RTFM, i.e. "if there was any way you could possibly have found the answer otherwise, you should never have asked the question" to non-tech friends usually results in disbelief.

But the slop-wall is even worse, as it wastes the questioner's time in figuring out that they're just getting slop. At least RTFM is efficient.

The NYT is comically bad. Most of their (paywalled) articles include the full text in a JSON blob, and that text is typically 2-4% of the HTML. Most of the other 96-98% is ads and tracking. If you allow those to do their thing, you're looking at probably two orders of magnitude more overhead.

> Especially as the cost of producing code drops, the value of libraries decreases.

Does it? If the cost of slop that (1) no one understands, and (2) no one can be sued for if it misbehaves drops to zero, what have we gained? A "library" is code plus reliability and accountability. (Yes, GPL disclaims liability, but that's why consultants exist.)

Reliability is important for sure, but as you noted, there is no accountability for library maintainers.

I'm not saying all libraries will go to zero values, just that their value is decreasing.