what a brilliant blog. the Lotus 1-2-3 screen brings so many memories of my childhood.
My father was a power user of Lotus back in the late 80's. He extensively used it as his job at GE. When we moved back to Pakistan, he setup a girls school and tracked everything from students to accounting to results in Lotus. In many ways, Lotus showed him the power of computers and made him buy a home computer when hardly anyone I knew had it.
Late in his life the world moved onto Excel and reluctantly he had to do it too but his love for Lotus never went away.
I've faced the same but my conclusion is the opposite.
In the past 6 months, all my code has been written by claude code and gemini cli. I have written code backend, frontend, infrastructure and iOS. Considering my career trajectory all of this was impossible a couple of years ago.
But the technical debt has been enormous. And I'll be honest, my understanding of these technologies hasn't been 'expert' level. I'm 100% sure any experienced dev could go through my code and may think it's a load of crap requiring serious re-architecture.
It works (that's great!) but the 'software engineering' side of things is still subpar.
We switched to solar in 2021 expecting a 3.5-year payback. Electricity prices rose so fast that we recovered the investment in under two years.
Also the national grid is notorious for it's frequent blackouts (load-shedding) since the early ’90s. Solar allowed us to have uninterrupted supply in the mornings and longer backups during night.
All these coding agent workflows really drive home how important a solid test suite is but who’s actually writing the tests? In my case Claude Code keeps missing key scenarios and I’ve had to point out every gap myself.
Also reviewing LLM generated code is way more mentally draining and that’s with just one agent. I can’t imagine trying to review code from multiple agents working in parallel.
Finally I’ve shipped a bunch of features to prod with Claude writing all the code. Productivity definitely went up, but my understanding of the codebase dropped fast. Three months in I’m actually struggling to write good prompts or give accurate estimates because my grasp of the code hasn’t really grown (code reviews only help so much).
Curious if anyone else has run into the same thing?
Finally someone emphasized upon the cognitive load of AI-assisted coding.
It definitely makes me faster but it's consistent prompt->code-review->prompt->code-review->scratch->prompt-code->review cycle which just requires extreme focus.
We setup a solar on in our home in Pakistan back in 2023. Our primary driver was cost since it was getting extremely expensive during summers when the ACs were on. We expected to get the return in 4 years but inflation went so high in subsequent years that it took just 2 years.
I remember back in the summer of 1996 in Pakistan our household was one of the first few to have to internet.
At that time angelfire.com used to give free webspace. My brother got hold of a pirated version of CorelDraw and setup a fan website of his favorite rock band Junoon, which incidentally is still online: https://www.angelfire.com/pa/JUNOON
And then when my brother met the band at a concert and they actually recognized him due to the website. I guess first time we realized how impactful internet is going to be.
How are the odds for bringing your remote employees to US using the L1 visa? They've worked for us for more than 5 years in management role.
Also the startup got acquired sometime ago, does that impact the L1 application?
- automated tests are the pre-req of feature flags. kindly make sure that you have good test coverage. otherwise the team loses confidence in code & feature flags which defeats the whole purpose.
- as part of code review guidelines we added one major feedback item: can this PR be merged right now? why not? what can be done to merge it right away? as part of a cultural shift the code reviewers played a critical role. they kept engineers on the their toes at all times.
- feature flags should be part of user stories. in many cases you can't expect engineers to add a feature flag at the end of implementation. the product team should know this at the time of writing user stories.
- as mentioned in many other comments try to clean up code after feature flags become stale. otherwise the code (and respective automated test cases) becomes a huge mess.
- in our case we decided the granularity of feature flags (per-user, per-customer, per-region, per-server etc). we started with per-customer and went from there. worked out fine for us.
- feature flags have major two benefits: "release often, release small" & "decouple releases with big launches". please make sure to instill this in your team every day. mindset changes takes repetition and emphasis. if at anytime you feel that you are not achieving any of these please take a step back and figure out why.
Yes. Feature flags changed the mindset of my whole team. I absolutely love the fact that it pushes the whole team towards release-small-release-often mentality. It's a technical solution with many benefits but I love the cultural impact the most.
In Safari you can set reader mode turned on for specified websites. I have done it for all the sites which I visit frequently. Unfortunately there is no way to to turn it on at global level.
The only minor gripe I have is the slide-above animation when reader mode turns on. It's jarring when you keep getting that on each navigation.
Personally I learnt to be less judgmental of people. From media you compartmentalize everyone into neat little boxes to make sense of the world. We find other people's values ridiculous when we hear/read about it but only when we go and live with them we find out it makes sense. It may be wrong but it makes sense. And there is a good chance if you were brought up in that same society you may have had the same behavior. I've learned to empathize only when I experienced this first hand.
would love to look into it if any part of it is open source