Further to this, the quality problem is affecting the entire industry, not just FOSS. Anyone working on a large enough team has already seen some contributors pushing slop.
And while banning AI outright is certainly an option at a private company, it also feels like throwing out the baby with the bath water. So we’re all searching for a solution together, I think.
There was a time (decades ago) when projects didn’t need to use pull requests. As the pool of contributors grew, new tools were discovered and applied and made FOSS (and private dev) a better experience overall. This feels like a similar situation.
Isn’t this a form of what he labels the “human coefficient”?
Some businesses prefer tools built by other businesses for some tasks. The author advocates pretty plainly to identify and target those opportunities if that’s your strength.
I think his point is to recognize that’s moving toward a niche rather than the norm (on the spectrum of all software to be built).
It’s moving fast. Just today I noticed Claude Code now ends plans with a reference to the entire prior conversation (as a .jsonl file on disk) with instructions to check that for more details.
Not sure how well it’s working though (my agents haven’t used it yet)
I do like the idea of crowd-sourced collections of resources like skills.
It might be more useful if it was an index of skills managed in GitHub. Sort of like GitHub actions which can be browsed in the marketplace[1] but are ultimately just normal git repos.
> Paying more for programmers or parking machine processors would be a waste of money.
The rise of parking apps on mobile adds an interesting angle to this.
No doubt, many of us favour apps because the UX is so much better. Not quite sure if that affects the bottom line short-term, but long-term I’m sure it will.
I’ve wondered about this more generally (ie, simply prompting in different languages).
For example, if I ask for a pasta recipe in Italian, will I get a more authentic recipe than in English?
I’m curious if anyone has done much experimenting with this concept.
Edit: I looked up Sapir-Whorf after writing. That’s not exactly where my theory started. I’m thinking more about vector embedding. I.e., the same content in different languages will end up with slightly different positions in vector space. How significantly might that influence the generated response?
I think it’s more for Python libraries that depend on JavaScript.
Lots of packages rely on other languages and runtimes. For example, tabula-py[1] depends on Java.
So if my-package requires a JS runtime, it can add this deno package as its own dependency.
The benefit is consumers only need to specify my-package as a dependency, and the deno runtime will be fetched for free as a transient dependency. This avoids every consumer needing to manage their own JavaScript runtime/environment.
Over my 35 years of computer use, most hardware failures (very, very rare) happen during a reboot or power-on. And most of my reboots happen when installing updates. It actually seems like a very high probability in my limited experience.
Of course, it’s possible that the windows update was a factor, when combined with other conditions.
He also seems to talk to a lot of people, and he has access to pretty much anyone given his stature. Imagine being passionate about business and then being able to spend every day talking to people about their businesses and their thoughts on business. I'm surprised he retired at all!
Always worth remembering that PDFs are basically a graphic design format/editor from the 70s. It was never intended for securely redacting documents and while it can be done, that’s not the default behaviour.
No surprise non-experts muck it up and I don’t see that changing until they move to special-purpose tools.
Honestly, I’d still be surprised to learn feathers in America are produced from American poultry. Far more likely the local ones get burned and everything for sale is shipped across the ocean because cheaper.
There’s valid concern with these types of laws and scope creep. But there’s also precedent which shows they can work and be applied reasonably.