The last several years have been monotonically busier for me, year over year, and I've been a principal contributor in this game for many years. Sure, I can push out 1000 PRs a year by riding 4 concurrent agent hoards, but at some point our heads will simply explode. There's a human limit here, at some point.
I got a new boiler installed recently. $20K. I looked up the _retail_ price for the components/fittings/consumables, ~$6K. Even with overhead, that plumber made a good take for 2 days work. I'm only half kidding when I suggest the kids of today should be destined for the trades.
I don't think everyone will easily make the jump to coding at warp speed. Pushing 6 agentic sessions at once, while seeing a half dozen new features/fixes out to prod is more mental gymnastics. If you're the "add a button to a form" enterprise developer, this is going to feel like a dramatic shift in how you're used to working.
This is part of why we help defend Israel, to constrain wars to conventional means.
In the first Gulf War, we placed the Patriot batteries around Israel, as they said that if an Iraqi biological or chemical SCUD attack hit Tel Aviv, they would vitrify Baghdad.
Having nukes doesn't prevent _anyone_ from attacking you, but it does constrain those attacks to conventional means. And what if you pulled off a decapitation attack against Tel Aviv? Well their fleet of nuclear capable subs would make you pay.
> could the military use Anthropic’s Claude AI system to help shoot it down?
What a joke. I suggest folks read up on the very poor performance of US ICBM interceptor systems. They're barely a coin flip, in ideal conditions. How is Claude going to help with that? Push the launch interceptor button faster? Maybe Claude can help design a better system, but it's not turning our existing poor systems into super capable systems by simply adding AI.
In the age of Claude Code et al, my honest biggest bottleneck is GH downtime.
I've got a dozen PRs I'm working on, but it's all frozen up, daily, with GH outages.
Are the other providers offering much better uptime GitLab, CircleCI, Harness?
Saying this as someone that's been GH exclusive sicne 2010.
K8s absolutely reduced labor. I used to have a sysadmin who ensured all our AMI images were up to date and maintained, and who maintained a mountain of bespoke bash scripts to handle startup, teardown, and upgrade of our backeneds.
Enter K8s in 2017 and life became MUCH easier. I literally have clusters that have been running since then, with the underlying nodes patched and replaced automatically by the cloud vendor. Deployments also "JustWork", are no downtime, and nearly instant. How many sysadmins are needed (on my side) to achieve all of this, zero. Maybe you're thinking of more complex stateful cases like running DBs on K8s, but for the typical app server workload, it's a major win.
That one stumped me. Why not just encrypt with a hardcoded public key, then only the attacker can get the creds.
The simple B64 encoding didn't hide these creds from anyone, so every vendor out there's security team can collect them (e.g. thinking big clouds, GitHub, etc) and disable them.
If you did a simple encryption pass, no one but you would know what was stolen, or could abuse/sell it. My best guess is that calling node encryption libs might trigger code scanners, or EDRs, or maybe they just didn't care.
Good point, but until many popular packages stop requiring install.sh to operate, you'll still need to allowlist some of them. That is built into the PNPM tooling, luckily :)
I'm struggling to understand why Trusted Publishers is any better.
Let's say you have a limited life, package specific scoped, IP CIDR bound publishing key, running on a private GH workflow runner. That key only exists in a trusted clouds secret store (e.g. no one will have access it from their laptop).
Now let's say you're a "trusted" publisher, running on a specific GitHub workflow, and GitHub Org, that has been configured with OIDC on the NPM side. By virtue of simply existing in that workflow, you're now a NPM publisher (run any publish commands you like). No need to have a secret passed into your workflow scope.
If someone is taking over GitHub CI/CD workflows by running `npm i` at the start of their workflow, how does the "Trusted Publisher" find themselves any more secure than the secure, very limited scope token?
ProTip: use PNPM, not NPM.
PNPM 10.x shutdown a lot of these attack vectors.
1. Does not default to running post-install scripts (must manually approve each)
2. Let's you set a min age for new releases before `pnpm install` will pull them in - e.g. 4 days - so publishers have time to cleanup.
NPM is too insecure for production CLI usage.
And of course make a very limited scope publisher key, bind it to specific packages (e.g. workflow A can only publish pkg A), and IP bound it to your self hosted CI/CD runners. No one should have publish keys on their local, and even if they got the publish keys, they couldn't publish from local.
(Granted, GHA fans can use OIDC Trusted Publishers as well, but tokens done well are just as secure)
Wow, about 9 hours later and 21 of 24 Atlassian services are still showing up as impacted on their status page.
Even @ 9:30am ET this morning, after this supposedly was clearing up, my doctor's office's practice management software was still hosed. Quite the long tail here.
It feels like the root of the issue is the scoping design of JS itself, which makes tracking TDZ more costly for the interpreter, and the fact that JS is JIT rather than AOT compiled.
I laud the recent efforts to remove the JS from JS tools (Go in TS compiler, esbuild, etc), as you don't need 100% of your lang utils written in the same interpreted lang, especially slow/expensive tasks like compilation.