Agreed the tourist POV center focus is bizarre AF. it’s almost like they were afraid to ask Parisians or even other French natives regularly frequenting Paris what they thought and so they just went with tourists are happy…
I very much agree with how you’ve categorized the initial state condition that is amenable to LLM assisted SWE and works well to a greater state of beneficial order. And implicitly I also agree most of the complement to that set of applied contexts yields ~medium to not so productive results.
But what do you mean by “LLM prompting is on average much less analyzable” ? Isn’t structured prompting (what that should optimally look like) the most objective and well defined part of the whole workflow. it’s the lowest entropy part of the situation, we know pretty well what a good LLM prompt is and what will be ineffective, even LLMs “know” that. Do you mean “context engineering” is hard to optimize around ? That’s often thought of interchangeably I think, but regardless that has in fact become the “hard problem” (user facing) in effectively leveraging LLM for dev work. Ever since the reasoning class models were introduced I think, it became more about context engineering in practice than prompting. Nowadays from the very onset Even resuming a session efficiently often requires a non-trivial approach that we’ve already started to design patterns and built tools around, (like CLI coding workflows adding /compact as user directive, etc).
I’m not a software engineer by trade, so I can’t pretend to know what that fully entails at the tail ends of enterprise scale and complexity, but I’ve spent a decent amount of time programming and as far as LLMs go, I think there’s probably somewhere down the road where we get so methodical about context engineering and tooling and memory management, all of the vast still somewhat nebulous surrounding space and scaffolding to LLM workflows that have a big impact on productive use of them—we may eventually engineer that aspect to an extent that will be able to much more consistently yield better results across more applied contexts than the “clean code”/“trivial app” dichotomy.
But … I think the depth of additional effort and knowledge and skill required by human user to do this optimal context engineering (once we fully understand how even) to get the best out of LLMs… I think that quickly just converges to — what it means to be a competent software engineer already. the meta layers around just “writing code” that are required to build robust systems and maintain them, the amount of work required to coerce non-deterministic models into effectively internalizing that, or at minimum not fvcking it up… that juice might not be worth the squeeze when it’s essentially what a good developer’s job is already. If that’s true then there will likely remain a ceiling of finite productivity you can expect from LLM assisted development for a long time… (I conjecture).
Acknowledging you want a web-app browser based alternative and this won’t answer your question, feel free to ignore.
But as for general notion alternatives, and actually if you prefer to go in the other direction away from web based—Hands down would recommend Obsidian.md above any other open source alternative.
While it's not 100% "batteries included" like proprietary apps (though this gap has narrowed considerably), Obsidian truly shines if you're even slightly inclined toward customization. It's "hackable to the core" — you can build practically anything on top of it, which satisfies open source purists. Yet for practical users not looking to build their own software, Obsidian still punches above its weight — it's highly functional and polished out of the box, requiring zero setup to be immediately productive.
The integrated community plugins library lets you extend vanilla Obsidian to match most proprietary software, including Notion's "databases" functionality (arguably Notion's best feature), LLM integration, and much more. Since these plugins are themselves open source, they too can be customized beyond their original design. It's the perfect blend of freedom with valuable functionality either built-in or one click away.
What initially drove me from Notion to Obsidian wasn't the customization aspect, but the need for local storage and non-cloud syncing for sensitive data. It's egregious that Notion still doesn't support this outside their Enterprise license. I almost overlooked this by simply not using Notion for sensitive data, but the final straw came when I lost access during Notion's service outages. Even though these were infrequent and brief, being unable to access my data when needed was unacceptable. Arguing with devs about local storage and offline functionality only to face that situation made me realize how absurd it was that Notion doesn't even provide a cached version when offline. Without internet, Notion is essentially a brick — your data exists somewhere in the aether, just not on your device. That's bananas.
After switching to Obsidian and solving the local storage "problem" in 30 seconds, I gradually discovered more functionality and have since customized it as my central organization and research tool. Couldn't recommend it more highly.
I'll stop my rant now — Obsidian speaks for itself and doesn't need my endorsement, just as Notion's shortcomings are equally well-established.
This response to should have all but conclusively ended the silly debate in outlining the semantic drift of the term “Ponzi scheme” to encapsulate the relevant spectrum of linguistic variations, and yet…
I think you’re bang on. it’s a lot more subtle than the hard and fast rule manner in which the notion is most often put forth. It’s definitely myopically maladaptive to view it as a binary—in-person is always better than remote.
There’s a spectrum—how frequently and in what amount is in-person interaction for a team actually needed to result in optimal productivity and collaborative workflow as a team collective? certainly not every marginal hour/day in person is accretive to the goal of optimal collective collaboration. so there’s an inflection point or plateau somewhere… which intuitively should vary depending on the underlying dynamics of a given team, are they a well oiled machine already? or is everyone just recently starting work together for the first time? what is the nature of the work process creative or technical or a mix? what are the inherent personalities comprising the team and how does that impact things?? etc.
the relative determination of finding the right balance is an important and worth doing carefully, regardless of the corporate culture. especially if the argument is that effective team collaboration is of SUCH high importance that companies are happy to let go of human capital that isn’t on board with their proscribed mandate around remote work on the basis of its impact to their work life balance… if thats the case, then surely something that important is worth determining a bit more scientifically than “3 days in person minimum or gtfo”— applicable for all teams. all employees.
surely if it is in fact so important, then it’s not credible to be so rigidly unthinking in determining the "optimal" policy. any company that isn't inclined to fully consider that notion, and establish a mandate "just because" shouldn't get to imply the mandate serves them best on any basis related to team productivity and collaboration, because its wholly unsubstantiated andnot credible. they are however free to establish any such mandate of course, without need substantiate it, but then i think we all need to be transparent about the factthat is is entirely arbitrary... not some baseless idealized notion of "optimal"
FWIW my personal view (not suggesting it’s a universally established truth with consensus, just my opinion based on experience) is that ~some amount of in-person interaction is beneficial and optimal, even for experienced teams with well established workflows and a long standing track record of collective work. eventually if you never see one another in person, sosci dynamics will change, perhaps not always to the detriment of team productivity, but at least in a manner worth evaluating/considering.
and I think the less time a team has spent together in person prior to collaborating remotely the more important it is to prioritize in person work. lastly i think the determination of the "optimal" policy mandate will necessarily be team-dependent.
as such, i believe team managers should be empowered by the powers that be to figure out what the best strategy is for their team specifically, and be held accountable to the results perhaps... as a far more sensible approach than it being a universal corporate mandate from the top of the house.
Haha. That’s a pretty aggressive and surface level read of my comment . For starters it was mostly a joke, and explicitly a conjecture. I was saying, probably most users of a different system do so on for some reason other than, Git being objectively inferior for their purposes (and as others in the thread pointed out, the latter actual is the case at the large scale end of the spectrum for big companies concerned with scaling, not choosing Git).
Secondly, no one has disagreed with me on the matter, as I haven’t put forth a personal opinion, I’m simply impartially making referencing to the fact that Git is the de-facto standard. And from an intellectual perspective, was hoping someone might elucidate more into why that is the case, given my conception is an inferential deduction. at best).
While I’m personally relatively familiar with Git internals, by no means an expert, its the only distributed VCS I’ve ever used and I don’t know anything substantive enough about the alternatives to credibly make a relative value comparison here. They could be the bees knees for all I know, but it seems unlikely given the position Git holds as far as consensus standard choice.
Yah, I think that’s probably true. But that’s also hard to reconcile with the reality of the adoption trending consistently away from any alternative and only towards Git. And “large margins” are indeed pretty objectively the case (from the largest developer surveys the breakdown 10 years ago was like 70% Git to everything, growing to ~95% in 2022). Usually the phenomenon you’re describing, leads to other alternatives becoming more popular not less (even if the most popular standard continues to eclipse the field. Here is would seem these highly likable alternatives for those who took the plunge are nevertheless dwindling into irrelevance…
I suspect the die-hard proponents of Mercurial, or SVN, or whatever else, these few pagan heretics that might exist out there wherever they’re hiding, have found themselves in a camp different to the Git standard likely on the basis of electing to be intentionally contrarian / anti-normative as the general catalyst, and rather not, as a function of struggling with Git to the point of being so disillusioned they call it quits and head out looking for greener pastures.
I think in practice the most common result of encountering problems with Git is, fix the problems. And functionally I think that’s resulted only in furthering it’s supremacy over alternatives, despite there existing a handful of cultish weirdos who are _really_ into Mercurial and prefer not to fux with Git as a personal lifestyle choice haha)
Vim, *NIX (so Mac), monoliths, and lambda calculus all the way—FP!
jk, but FWIW I think sometimes, in rare instances, there does exist a pretty unequivocal consensus “right answer” to this sort of question … maybe such as like: Git vs any other distributed VCS ?
I echo the sentiment and think yours is likely the most pertinent takeaway having made it this far absent reaching any consensus whatsoever haha.
It was nevertheless a pretty epic journey of dialectic discourse plunging _deep_ into the esoteric and nuanced realm of expert-level technical minutiae. A mostly intellectual journey, albeit distinctly punctuated by an undertone of emotional angst that steadily progressed in its growing intensity in a manner proportional to the magnitude of your collective disagreement… epic indeed.
I mean, for most mature ecosystems / technology stacks I think the “no one size fits all, just strategic design trade-offs” theory largely holds true as an objectively accurate account of the “choosing the best tool“ situation ….
but IMO, I think it’s worth noting that occasionally, some rare unique and functionally superlative technology comes along that in practice transcends every alternative from the onset and indefinitely going forwards, sometimes even at a more prominent scale than the MySQL / Postgres projects topic of discussion (which are not small by any means).
something maybe like Git, most immediately comes to mind, as an example of the de-facto standard for distributed VCS basically since … 2005* when Linus decided to create it?
This argument taken ad infinitum though devolves into a pit of moral relativism. I happen to completely agree with your argument—ethics can be derived as a functional application of rational logic. But I think the more germane point being made was that establishing the normative sociocultural definition of collective Ethics, is ultimately an emotional determination (if guided by rational logic). There exists no metaphysical Ethics which can always be axiomatically derived on the basis of rational logical. At least I think that was the argument anyways…