There's another camp that don't care about the craft AND also don't care about the product. This camp, wielding power of AI, is making life worse for the other two camps.
I've been getting so many code reviews that are generated by AI, but the author does not even has the decency to self review the generated code before they send out pull requests. It feels like an insult sometimes. For example, unit tests that basically assert if `a = 1` after setting a to 1.
Every PR now has lots of unit tests, but they test the implementation details, not the spec. So now every change that breaks their implementation details causes false positive test failures. This creates a self enforcing negative loop. Every PR now comes with tons of unit test fixes.
People start responding to PR comments with something along the line of: I ask AI but it was not able to solve the problem, if you have a solution, LMK. Or another variant I see often is: I think this is wrong, but AI says this is fine, so I'll leave it as is.
I see craft lovers or product people using AI effectively. I use AI daily too. But the above camp is making my day to day job sometimes unbearable.
if someone really want to have single keystroke, there's always F<number> key that they can map to their frequently used movements, such as last edit, next function, special marker (such as `m`), etc.
I can see how that could work depends on the setup and the context. For example: People might use `. to jump to the last edit, or to a mark they set manually. Or simply `ciq` to edit inside the next quote without any manual cursor movements. I see people use plugin like harpoon to jump to their favorite location quickly. If you don't know about such setup, seeing people type <leader>1 to jump not just within a file, but across files, seems magical.
> LLMs are okay at coding, but at scale they build jumbled messes.
This reminds me of the day of Dreamweaver and the like. Everybody loved how quickly they could drag and drop UI components on a canvas, and the tool generated HTML code for them. It was great at the beginning, but when something didn't work correctly, you spent hours looking at spaghetti HTML code generated by the tool.
At least, back then, Dreamweaver used deterministic logic to generate the code. Now, you have AI with the capability to hallucinate...
> I think what we're witnessing isn't just an extension of the attention economy but something new - the simulation economy
Is it really new? We've been replacing real human connections with online connections/friendships for quite a while now. Social media companies have been giving us a world full of simulated relationships and making profits off of it. As quoted in the post, the average American adult has 3 friends. Look how many friends they have on FB.
> Turns out though information is like water; you need enough, but too much and you drown.
How do we slow down or control the flow of information ? Genuine question. I'm just asking to see if there are any studies or proposals that already exist out there.
I've heard people talk about education. But this seems to be part of a long term solution. How can we solve this problem now so that in the next election (next 2 or 4 years) people will not vote against their own best interests ?
Convincing people to quit social medias or stopping listening to TV pundits ? So far that hasn't worked. Facebook/Tiktok just keeps growing.
This reminds me of a PBS interview I saw recently [1]. In the interview the guest, Robert Putnam, gave the example of Francis Perkins, who was having tea with friends when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire broke out in 1911. 146 women died in the fire, and Perkins was so shocked by the tragedy that she decided to become a social reformer. She eventually became FDR's Secretary of Labor, the first woman Cabinet member in American history.
I think that people like Zuckerberg and Bezos fit this profile, but look whom they are supporting now. Simply being part of the scientific community may not be a sufficient criterion. Other factors, such as wealth or power, may have a greater influence on their political affiliations.
> how they are about to get candidates at the top of the funnel under these circumstances
Is there any data on the percentage of software engineers "at the top of the funnel" who lean left? This is a genuine question. I’ve always assumed that most do, but lately, I’ve been wondering if I’m in a bubble.
"Berkshire would not have achieved its results in any locale except America whereas America would have been every bit the success it has been if Berkshire had never existed."
-- https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2024ltr.pdf
Not just a great investor, Buffet is a great man. Not many "self-made" billionaires think like that.
I feel like we, SWEs, have been over-engineering our interview process. Maybe it's time to simplify it, for example, just ask questions based on the candidate's resume instead of coming up with random challenges. I feel like all the new proposals seem overly complicated, and nobody, interviewer or interviewee, is happy with any of them.
I think it's the lack of trust in employees that companies want to increase utilization as much as possible. It's like if employees are not working on assigned work, they would not do things that benefit the company in any way.