I agree with most of the points on the article although it doesn't really have much to do with vim (which the author acknowledges).
I too have often compared AI usage to vim in the past months: AI enthusiasts seem to spend most of their time tweaking their setup; creating custom agents, skills, mcp servers, writing custom tools for their agent to use, customizing their harnesses, loops and whatnot. Similar to how us vim users keep updating/rewriting our config. It makes you feel productive while you really aren't and while in the end it might help you better stay within the flow the author talks about it the article the gains are typically very minimal if one is honest with oneself.
True. I used to really enjoy playing casual chess as a kid. Analyzing the positions and try to come up with strategies on the fly was a lot of fun. When I realized that "proper" chess was mostly about memorizing positions and plays and sort of have it all pre-computed I lost all interest in playing.
I agree. The further I have progressed into my career the more I have been focused on the stability, maintainability and "supportability" of the products I work on. Going slower in order to progress faster in the long run. I feel like everyone is disregarding the importance of that at the moment and I feel quite sad about it.
The current models had lots and lots of hand written code to train on. Now stackoverflow is dead and github is getting filled with AI generated slop so one begins to wonder whether further training will start to show diminishing returns or perhaps even regressions. I am at least a little bit skeptical of any claim that AI will continue to improve at the rate it has thus far.
The internet used to be controlled in large by Microsoft. Then it wasn't. It does not have to continue to be controlled by Google in the future. Not using Chromium based browsers is a first step.
In my opinion, if you care about the open web, then you should not be using a Blink (Chromium) based browser like Brave. The less control Google has, the better for the web.
Only slightly related but on the topic of barcodes and security I'd like to recommend this excellent talk by Felix Lindner, it is quite a few years old but I'd guess stuff like barcode scanners are not the most frequently updated things:
I think part of the problem is that there seems to be a widespread sentiment among software developers to prioritize our time above the user's. Ease of development trumps ease of use and features are made to be easy, or rather fast, to build rather than easy to use and performant.
As a young developer I was taught to take the extra time to make things better for the user. Even if it might mean spending two days on a feature rather than a few hours, the cumulative time saved would end up much more than the extra time I spent since users use your software more often than you write it and there are many users. Unfortunately this view is not widespread enough.
I got 10/10 without having any idea who any of the people (except pg) were. The comments always made it possible to link to the companies of the posters somehow.
Interesting experiment to try to figure that out but I'm left wondering if I should be familiar with all those people and what they do.
I think you are sort of abusing the github logo above the "Closed Source - for a sustainable business model" text. Most people associate it with open source, it doesn't even make any sense there!
Like GP I was also confused and tried looking for a pricing page but failed.
Seems like there isn't a link to it from https://app.codecrafters.io/catalog which is the site you go to if you click the big CodeCrafters logo in the top left of the page.
There is a "Subscribe" button which takes you to https://app.codecrafters.io/pay but I wasn't savvy enough to notice it or realize what it was.
Only after starting a course did I begin to suspect that I needed to subscribe since there were a bunch of locks all over. However, it was not clear that the locks actually did anything since I could still click on those links.
I guess I would have found out after completing the first step and not being able to progress. This appears to be by design, which strikes me as slightly dishonest.
Agreed. And another large part of "media", which didn't exist in the 80s: social media.
I think that much of social media has become more blatantly sexual. In the earlier days of Instagram people would post pictures of themselves in scant clothing or somewhat "compromising" positions but always under pretense of something else. It would be accompanied by text in the form of a "thought provoking" quote and/or refer to something in the background of the image. The poster would be trying to say "this is not a picture of my bottom in a small bikini at the beach, it is a picture of the beautiful sunset and I just happen to be in it in a small bikini". People would poke fun at others for posting "thirst traps".
Today it is done blatantly and people often refer to their own posts as "thirst traps".
But perhaps the case could be made that this horniness has been taken out of advertisements, which seem a lot more timid today.
Where I work we have two code bases. The older of the two in TFS and the newer in git. In TFS we use trunk-based development and in git we do pull requests.
I must say that I very much prefer having a formal, tool-protected, review process, doing integrations and testing on a separate branch from the main branch to allowing developers like we do in git to the added ease of being available to commit directly to trunk.
Even with CI to run tests upon committed code you never want to leave your mainline branch in a broken state. No matter how fast the feedback is, because you don't really know how fast your developers will be to act on that feedback!
They can still follow you, comment, like and retweet your posts. You can block them but if you are popular enough it might be a problem. They also make search a lot worse and the hashtag system for some tags completely useless since all the posts you'll find under that tag are spam posts.
I think that adding a (permissive) license is the missing step from this "tutorial". If you want people to use your project you are going to need to give them permission to do so.
I too have often compared AI usage to vim in the past months: AI enthusiasts seem to spend most of their time tweaking their setup; creating custom agents, skills, mcp servers, writing custom tools for their agent to use, customizing their harnesses, loops and whatnot. Similar to how us vim users keep updating/rewriting our config. It makes you feel productive while you really aren't and while in the end it might help you better stay within the flow the author talks about it the article the gains are typically very minimal if one is honest with oneself.