The tenacity part is definitely true. I told it to keep trying when it kept getting stuck trying to spin up an Amazon Fargate service. I could feel its pain, and wanted to help, but I wanted to see whether the LLM could free itself from the thorny and treacherous AWS documentation forest. After a few dozen attempts and probably 50 KWh of energy it finally got it working, I was impressed. I could have done it faster myself, but the tradeoff would have been much higher blood pressure. Instead I relaxed and watched youtube while the LLM did its work.

Plug a new chromecast into one of the HDMI ports and use that and only that and weld the setting shut so that you never have to deal with the TV’s default UI ever again.

I use an Amazon FireTV Stick on my old non-smart LG TV. And the advantage is that the FireTV has a simple cute little remote control device. There is a nifty Setting in the Amazon FireTV UI to allow its remote to turn on/off the TV too.

So it's been a long time since I had to wrestle with the TV's built-in OS.

I just use the pleasant UI of the FireTV Stick to watch Netflix, Prime, Disney+, etc. on that decade+ old TV. That FireTV becomes sluggish if I keep multiple apps open, so I have learnt to exit out of an app before switching to the new one.

I may get a new FireTV stick this year, rather than splurging for a new TV, since the old TV is still doing well.

As the Americans say: If it ain't broken, don't fix it.

I have this setup, and the Firestick UI is horribly slow. Sometimes it takes 30 seconds or more for it to give any response to a button press. It's worst when I'm trying to watch something on Amazon Prime, to the point that I hardly watch that anymore because the UI is so annoying.

This sounds like either your FireTV stick is too old or your TV is.

My LG TV is more than a decade old (non-smart LED TV), the FireTV stick is around 6 years old.

But apart from the FireTV stick (whose remote controls the TV too) taking 15 seconds for a cold start (the TV tends to go to deep sleep mode after idle for long time or when switched off via remote), or 5 seconds for a warm start, the FireTV GUI is quite snappy thereafter (I can briskly move the cursor/selection across icons/thumbnails, menus and apps), till I switch it off again. Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Discovery+, Apple TV - they all work well on this old setup.

You may want to uninstall some apps on the FireTV stick to give it some breathing space when it runs.

Try the FireTV stick on a PC monitor having HDMI input. If you face same issues there, then it may be time to buy a new FireTV stick or Chromecast, or splurge for a new smart TV.

Though you still have to turn off the frame generation on the TV.

I advocate for AppleTV but the principle is similar.

Which of the two devices/companies is getting enshittified quicker?

The chromecast is much cheaper, so that’s a straight win.

I haven't used AppleTV in a while but I assume it's very similar. The latest chromecast devices have very low latency and have worked well for me.

There are some things it's really great at. For example, handling a css layout. If we have to spend trillions of dollars and get nothing else out of it other than being able to vertically center a <div> without wrestling with css and wanting to smash the keyboard in the process, it will all have been worth it.

Not to be cheeky, but isn’t this just

display: flex; align-items:center;

now?

Yeah, exactly. Go price the equipment it takes to rig out a new upstart plumbing biz (trunk/van, all the hardware, insurance, etc). Startup web businesses is insanely cheap, even with a couple grand on a domain.

You believe brick and mortar shops put money down on a location with no plan at all? This is what OP did, your analogy is pretty weak.

Yes, I have seen it happen many times.

Oh the horror!

I am probably going to get downvoted to oblivion for this but if you’re going to have AI write your code, you’ll get the most mileage out of letting it do its thing and building tests to make sure everything works. Don’t look at the code it generates - it’s gonna be ugly. Your job is to make sure it does what it’s supposed to. If there’s a bug, tell it what’s wrong and to fix the bug. Let it wade through its own crap - that’s not your tech debt. This is a new paradigm. No one is going to be writing code anymore, just almost like no one is checking the assembly output of a compiler anymore.

This is just my experience. I’ve come to the conclusion that if I try to get AI to write code that works and is elegant, or if I’m working inside the same codebase that AI is adding cruft to, I don’t get much of a speed up. Only when I avoid opening up a file of code myself and let AI do its thing do I get the 10x speed up.

What is the time of the longest-lived actively developed and deployed codebase where this approach has been successful so far and your co-maintainers aren't screaming bloody murder?

about 1 year

My friends and I have always wondered as we've gotten older what's going to be the new tech that the younger generation seems to know and understand innately while the older generations remain clueless and always need help navigating (like computers/internet for my parents' generation and above). I am convinced that thing is AI.

Kids growing up today are using AI for everything, whether or not that's sanctioned or if it's ultimately helpful or harmful to their intellectual growth. I think the jury is still out on that. But I do remember growing up in the 90s, spending a lot of time on the computer, older people would remark how I'll have no social skills, I won't be able to write cursive or do arithmetic in my head, won't learn any real skills, etc, turns out I did just fine and now those same people always have to call me for help when they run into the smallest issue with technology.

I think a lot of people here are going to become roadkill if they refuse to learn how to use these new tools. I just built a web app in 3 weeks with only prompts to Claude Code, I didn't write a single line of code, and it works great. It's pretty basic, but probably would have taken me 3+ months instead of 3 weeks doing it the old fashioned way. If you tried it once a year ago and have written it off, a lot has changed since then and the tools continue to improve every month. I really think that eventually no one will be checking code just like hardly anyone checks the assembly output of a compiler anymore.

You have to understand how the context window works, how to establish guardrails so you're not wasting time repeating the same things over and over again, force it to check its own work with lots of tests, etc. It's really a game changer when you can just say in one prompt "write me an admin dashboard that displays users, sessions, and orders with a table and chart going back 30 days" or "wire up my site for google analytics, my tag code is XXXXXXX" and it just works.

The thing is, Claude Code is great for unimportant casual projects, and genuinely very bad at working in big, complex, established projects. The latter of course being the ones most people actually work on.

Well either it's bad at it, or everyone on my team is bad at prompting. Given how dedicated my boss has been to using Claude for everything for the past year and the output continuing to be garbage, though, i don't think it's a lack of effort on the team's part, i have to believe Claude just isn't good at my job.

I was going to try having an AI agent analyze a well-established open source project. I was thinking of trying something like Bitcoin Core or an open-source JavaScript library, something that has had a lot of human eyes on it. To me, that seems like a good use case, as some of those projects can get pretty complex in what they're aiming to accomplish. Just the sheer amount of complexity involved in Bitcoin, for instance, would be a good candidate for having an AI agent explain the code to you as you're reviewing it. A lot of those projects are fairly well-written as they are, with the higher-level concepts being the more difficult thing to grasp.

Not attempting to claim anything against your company, but I've worked for enterprises where code bases were a complete mess and even the product itself didn't have a clear goal. That's likely not the ideal candidate for AI systems to augment.

Frankly, the code isn't messy whatsoever. There's just lots of it, and it's necessarily complex due to the domain. It's honestly the best codebase I've ever worked with - i shudder to think what nonsense Claude would spew trying to contextualize the spaghetti at my last job

As context size increases, AI becomes exponentially dumber. Most established software is far, FAR too large for AI. But small, greenfield projects are amazing for something like Claude Code.

This is why I argue that the impact of LLMs is in the tail. Its all the small to midsize shops that want something done, but don't have money to hire a programmer. Its small tasks, like pushing data around, writing a quick interface to help day to day jobs in niche jobs and technical problems. Its the ability to quickly generate prototype logos and scripts for small scale ad campaigns, for solving Nancy's Excel issue, etc. Big companies have big software and code stacks with tons of dependencies. Small shops have little project needs that solve significant issues facing their operations, but will unlikely become large enough that things like scaling issues, maintenance, integration, are ever a problem at all. Its a tail, but its long in small to midsize businesses. In research labs, which I have personal experience, AI is rapidly making feasible more ambitious projects, quicker timelines, and better code, generally.

My home is in the woods. Took me a while to switch to Starlink because it was difficult to get line of sight. Eventually, Xfinity pissed me off so much that I was willing to move heaven and earth to move to Starlink. I ended up running a 300 foot cat6 cable through a pond to the back of my property to the only place I'd get line of sight and it's been working great. If you have to pay someone to climb up a tree and mount the dish so it's above the tree line, it's well worth it.

It's not more expensive, I am paying $40 / month for 100 Mbit, which is fine for me.

Yep, I knew this was Comcast/Xfinity just seeing the title. I had the exact same problem, for years. Intermittent disconnects for a few minutes at a time, multiple times a day. I must have had upwards of 50 technicians come to my house, all insisting there was some problem with the wiring in my house (there wasn’t) or the router or whatever (hardware all replaced multiple times including the wiring). Eventually after years of complaining that the issue isn’t in my house, they finally sent a bucket truck a half a mile up the road and the problem was fixed in about 30 minutes. It worked well for about a year and then started happening again. They started giving me the run around again. I had appointments scheduled for technicians to come, three times in a row they just never showed up. To “apologize” to me they said they would provide a credit on my account. The amount? 1 penny. I took a screenshot and saved it in case anyone thinks I am making this up. Luckily, by this time starlink was available in my area. I switched to that, turns out it’s much cheaper anyway and since then have not had any issues. The sooner Comcast goes out of business, the better.

Tip to anyone reading this: After I cancelled and closed my account, they billed me one last time for double my monthly bill ($200). No idea why, probably they thought they'd try to get away with it. I had little to no interest in participating in their customer support circus again, so I just went online to my bank and submitted a dispute of the charge. The bank instantly ruled in my favor and closed the case, issuing a permanent credit. I have never seen that before. They must be getting tons of Comcast chargebacks to do that.

I also submitted a complaint to the AG office and my local commission but I'm not expecting anything to happen.

I lived on the west coast for 15 years, mostly in California, and in my experience Comcast/Xfinity is one of the worst companies I have ever encountered as a consumer. Not only is the service unreliable, the company tries to slap you with charges when you call to report a problem. One day I saw a Comcast technician working outside my apartment, and as he was leaving, my internet service went down. I called Comcast, they sent someone out a few hours later, the internet was restored... and then, when I got my monthly bill, there was an additional charge for $29 or something, iirc. When I called customer service to ask them to remove the charge, they transferred my call several times and put me on hold for several minutes every time they transferred the call. Finally, after a hour on the phone, they agreed to remove the charge.

Since then, I have moved to Austin, where there are two large Internet Service Providers competing against each other. I mostly use Spectrum; it is not perfect, people here complain about it, but it is incomparably better than Comcast.

Of the ~40 or so businesses I do general IT work for in New England, the ones with Comcast as the ISP are the least reliable. They experience significantly more downtime than any other provider.

The cost of disgruntled customers is that they might work for a competitor or a company you have to work with, like a bank.

> The bank instantly ruled in my favor and closed the case, issuing a permanent credit. I have never seen that before. They must be getting tons of Comcast chargebacks to do that.

I did the same thing, except I disputed a collections record on my Credit Report from either AT&T or Comcast. They also ruled in my favor quickly, and I was quite surprised that it wasn't a more difficult process.

The government wasted its time harassing Google when it should've been persecuting Comcast.