I’m not an AI evangelical, but I think it remains to be seen what the size of that subset is. Those that write crypto and hardware drivers are certainly a small subset of programmers. Most of us are pumping out enterprise crud and arguing with our PMs.
Depends on the problem. If the complexity of what you are solving is in the business logic or, generally low, you are absolutely right. Manually coding a signup flow #875 is not my idea of fun either. But if the complexity is in the implementation, it’s different. Doing complex cryptography, doing performance optimization or near-hardware stuff is just a different class of problems.
> If the complexity of what you are solving is in the business logic or, generally low, you are absolutely right.
The problem is rather that programmers who work on business logic often hate programmers who are actually capable of seeing (often mathematical) patterns in the business logic that could be abstracted away; in other words: many business logic programmers hate abstract mathematical stuff.
So, in my opinion/experience this is a very self-inflected problem that arises from the whole culture around business logic and business logic programming.
Coding signup flow #875 should as easy as using a snippet tool or a code generator. Everyone that explains why using an LLM is a good idea always sound like living in the stone age of programming. There are already industrial level tools to get things done faster. Often so fast that I feel time being wasted describing it in english.
In my experience AI is pretty good at performance optimizations as long as you know what to ask for.
Can't speak to firmware code or complex cryptography but my hunch is if it's in it's training dataset and you know enough to guide it, it's generally pretty useful.
Most optimizations are making sure you do not do work that is unnecessary or that you use the hardware effectively. The standard techniques are all you need 99% of the time you are doing performance work. The hard part about performance is dedicating the time towards it and not letting it regress as you scale the team. With AI you can have agents constantly profiling the codebase identifying and optimizing hotspots as they get introduced.
Fundamentally, Amazon will not promise you they will break the law. They are subject to US regulations as well as German ones (in this case). If these regulations demand your data be accessed or removed or keys compromised, it will happen. Not because of US, Germany or Amazon but because that’s how jurisdictions work. Beaides, there is no reasonably feasible method for learning what these regulations actually say on a given day, a lot of it is in bylaws and you just can’t keep track of all ministerial orders of all the applicable jurisdictions. Amazon does have an algorithm to determine course of action in case of compliance conflict, but they will not publish it for obvious reasons.
Some internal Skype versions had cat detection. When the client discovered cat-like key presses, the other side would see a cat walking animation instead of typing animation. Don’t think this feature ever made it to a public release.
If that is true, and a given history of prompts combined with a given mosel always gives the same code, then you have invented what’s called a compiler. Take human-readable text and convert it into machine code. Which means we have a much higher level language, than before and your prompts become your code.
Welcome, kids, to how all web development was done 25-30 years ago. You typed up html, threw in some scripts (once JavaScript became a thing) and off you went. No CMS, no frameworks. I know a guy who wrote a fully functional client-side banking back office app in IE4 JS by posting into different frames and observing the DOM returned by the server. In 1999. Worked a treat on network speeds and workstation capabilities you literally can’t imagine today.
Things do not have to be complicated. That abstraction layer you are adding sure is elegant, but is it also necessary? Does it add more value than it consumes not just at the time of coding but throughout the entire lifecycle of the system? People have piled abstraction on top of hardware from day one, but one has to ask, if and when did we get past the point of diminishing returns? Kubernetes was supposed to be the thing that makes managing vms simple. Now there are things supposedly making managing Kubernetes simple. Maybe, just maybe, this computer-stuff is inherently complicated and we’re just adding to it by hoping all of it can eventually be made “simple”? Just look at the messages around vibe coding…
Today you first need AI to figure ot what is the JS-framework-of-the-week and then you need AI to generate all the boiler plate code and then you use AI to debug all the stuff you created :-)
You can exercise your ankles so they are less likely to crumble if forced into an awkward position. Also look at where your feet land compared to each other: if one is almost ahead of the other (think camel stride), your foot is to the left (or right) of its hip and is thus naturally bent outwards. Having your foot land more squarely compared to how the body weight works, reduces the strain on the ankle. If the inside of your ankle/sock is always dirty after a run, this is why. Am currently going through the process of fixing this on myself.
Trail running is fun. But it’s probably not the surface but the technique change, that gets rid of the pain. I’m currently going through the process of shifting my running technique to where I push rather than pull myself forward and it’s a revelation. When your foot lands in front of your center of gravity, it necessarily brakes your forward movement. All that momentum has to go somewhere, eg get absorbed by your joints. Changing this makes you more efficient as well as reducing strain on the soft tissue.
This sounds interesting. Would you be able to share more information about this style of running? I'm having a hard time imagining how this plays out in real life.
Running barefoot forces you to improve your technique in line with this description. [0] There's also a sizeable market of "barefoot shoes" that's between being barefoot and the regular running shoes, with the manufacturers trying to convince us buying such shoes is the solution. The gait issue become more obvious (and painful) in barefoot shoes, but you can adjust your technique in mass-market running shoes as well.
I first found out about this back when Chris McDougall's "Born to Run" book came out. For anyone that does not know, he follows an Indian tribe in Mexico known for their running prowess, using non-traditional sandles to run in instead of the heavily padded sneakers most of us wear.
I switched briefly around that time to running in vibram five fingers, which trained me how to change my stride and stop heel striking. I no longer wear VFFs but do tend to favor lightweight, minimal heel-drop sneakers, and I still don't heel strike.
I'm not sure you can run with appropriate gait (stop heel striking) in modern mass market running shoes. The heels on many running shoes are 2 inches+ and make it just impossible to avoid heel striking without wasting a lot of motion picking your knees up.
Also, the chances of twisting your ankle when your heels are elevated that much from the road is far higher as well.
Best marathon runners can do it in "conventional" running shoes [0], but I agree it's easier to find the better technique barefoot or in barefoot shoes.
I made this change as well. Specifically, I switched from heel strike to forefoot strike, AKA “landing on the ball of my foot.” I changed shoes to zero-drop (Altras) which makes this easier to do.
This sort of automatically limits how far in front of your hips you can land your foot. But then the next step is to change posture and “lean forward” so that it feels like you’re just barely catching yourself with each foot before falling on your face.
The goal is to have your foot land directly under you, then use your quads and glutes to push your foot backward, to create or maintain your forward momentum.
This is why I think trail running is so valuable. You must be aware of your changing environment and how to adjust your body's movement to accommodate. You are exercising your mind to calculate your current momentum, intended placement of your next step, and it's potential impact to the rest of your body. You are running your own mental physics simulation as you work the trail, nothing like running on regular roads.
AI could make me probably more productive in, say, Word. If it would be integrated into Mac Word the way it’s there in VSCode. Which it isn’t. But while they do that, the writing software I’ve used for 30+ years gets worse and worse devouring my productivity. Word has had zero new features in a decade and yet it looses diagrams, messes up formatting, converts diagram labels into static text, breaks references or does other undesirable things with increasing frequency? That’s not a technology issue, it’s a leadership issue.
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