Does this mean that year over year people actually lose money to inflation if the only way to get an increase is with a job title change? That sounds pretty damn horrible to me.
That’s been the norm for most jobs forever. It’s why the average software job tenure has been ~2 years for over a decade. You only get an increase in salary by finding a new job where companies have to actually compete for talent(sans the past 2 years of this market).
Getting a new job is onerous in tech with how we interview and companies made the bet that they’d do better off not increasing their labor costs across their employee base and dealing with a higher per position recruitment cost for a smaller number of roles.
In Estonia you can easily do banking via the website on all the banks (LHV, Swedbank, SEB). That said, we do have it all integrated with our digital-ID (which every ID card has private keys encoded into with a PIN you know) so it's not like you can access it with a simple password (our online voting works the same way).
Voting, much like all other things in Estonia such as getting married/divorced, doing taxes, signing documents, starting/closing companies, notary dealings, bank dealings, selling/buying vehicles, and many more things I can't even think of right now are entirely done via the digital ID that every citizen has. This means that you authorize/sign actions with it, including voting, because only you have your private keys (either in your personal ID card, in your phone's sim card, etc) that you yourself know the PIN for, which then authenticates you as being you. I think we're now at a point where there isn't a single government or business dealing you can not do entirely online (https://e-estonia.com/solutions/).
Phones and sim cards a lot more temporary than ID cards. I don't know of a lot of theves that target ID cards for their authorization uses. Phones... people will steal those.
You can close your Mobile-ID when your phone gets stolen so the security keys on it will be useless, and even if you don't close it, nobody can use your security keys without your PIN, which is in your head.
There’s also digi-ID (similar e-signature certificate on a card, but without any ID features), Mobiil-ID (e-signature on a SIM-card, no idea how it works), Smart-ID (in app, tied to secure storage in Android/iOS, cross-signed by the server which is supposed to check the device somehow) and probably something else I don’t remember. All of these are independent options, so you can, for example, revoke your Mobiil-ID if you lose your phone, and still use the your main ID card to sign things.
Wow, that is definitely more sophisticated than we have in the states. It seems like you can use it for things that one would otherwise need a notary for, that is such a timesaver.
It costs as much as your ID card costs by the government, and lasts as long as well. They are one and the same. Applying for a new ID card / national ID document in Estonia costs 35€ and the document is valid for 5 years. If you forget your PIN code, you can reset it with your PUK codes, but if you also lose your PUK codes you need to apply for a new ID card. The process for getting a new ID card from the moment you applied for it takes no more than 30 days. You can also have it fast tracked for 250€ and get it in 2 days.
But, like the parent said, you have many other options other than the physical ID-card as well. Most people these days use Mobiil-ID or SmartID, which works on your phone and even smart watch. SmartID is completely free and Mobiil-ID is tied to your phones carrier, so the cost varies, but it's a one-time set-up fee of around 5€. Mobiil-ID certificate also lasts 5 years.
Why are so many Americans trying to move to the EU? Turns out people have different wants and needs in life, and so they move to where they like best. I for one would never set foot in USA in fear of being shot, kidnapped by ICE (or shot by ICE), fear of being bankrupt by the healthcare options there if something happens to me, fear of the poison you call food, and the absolutely ignorant populace that seems to roam the streets there. I swear half the times I can't even tell if USA is a real place or some really bizarre reality TV show.
More and more reason for Europe to become decoupled from USA. This is not an attack on USA, merely my opinion that you should not have your eggs in one basket.
Seems like the author has a case of all or nothing. The real power in agentic programming, to me, is not in extremes, but in that you are still actively present. You don't give it world-size things to do, but byte-sized, and you constantly steer it. It's to be detailed enough to produce quality, and to be aware of everything it produces, but not so detailed that it makes sense to just write the code yourself. It's a delicate balance, but once you've found it, incredibly powerful. Especially mixed with deterministic self-checking tools (like some MCP's).
If you "set and forget", then you are vibe coding, and I do not trust for a second that the output is quality, or that you'd even know how that output fits into the larger system. You effectively delegate away the reason you are being paid onto the AI, so why pay you? What are you adding to the mix here? Your prompting skills?
Agentic programming to me is just a more efficient use of the tools I already used anyway, but it's not doing the thinking for me, it's just doing the _doing_ for me.
I am with you and fully agree with your "it does not have to be an all or nothing" stance. A remark on one part of your comment:
> What are you adding to the mix here? Your prompting skills?
The answer to that is an unironic and dead-serious "yes!".
My colleagues use Claude Opus and it does an okay job but misses important things occasionally. I've had one 18-hour session with it and fixed 3 serious but subtle and difficult to reproduce bugs. And fixed 6-7 flaky tests and our CI has been 100% green ever since.
Being a skilled operator is an actual billable skill IMO. And that will continue to be the case for a while unless the LLM companies manage to make another big leap.
I've personally witnessed Opus do world-class detective work. I even left it unattended and it churned away on a problem for almost 5h. But I spent an entire hour before that carefully telling it its success criteria, never to delete tests, never to relax requirements X & Y & Z, always to use this exact feedback loop when testing after it iterated on a fix, and a bunch of others.
In that ~5h session Opus fixed another extremely annoying bug and found mistakes in tests and corrected them after correcting the production code first and making new tests.
Opus can be scary good but you must not handwave anything away.
I found love for being an architect ever since I started using the newest generation [of scarily smart-looking] LLMs.
Yup, totally! I'm also not against the evolution of software engineer to a software architect. We were on that direction already anyway with the ever increasing amount of abstraction in our libraries and tools. This also frees up my ability to do other things, like coordinate cross team efforts, deal with customer support issues, etc. As a generalist, I feel more useful and thus valuable than ever, and that makes me very happy.
> unless the LLM companies manage to make another big leap.
Why is it a big leap? If the behavior you want can already be elicited by models just with the right level prompting, it's something that can be trained toward. As a simple mental model you could for instance imagine training a verifier-type model of Claude that given a problem spits out a prompt detailing "its success criteria, never to delete tests, never to relax requirements X & Y & Z, always to use this exact feedback loop when testing after it iterated on a fix, and a bunch of others." Also things like specific feedback loop or agentic harnesses will also end up being trained in, similar to how Claude is specifically trained for use with Claude Code.
Thinking of "prompt engineering" as a skill is a fools game, these are language models after all. Do you really think you will hold an advantage over them in your ability to phrase things?
> If the behavior you want can already be elicited by models just with the right level prompting
As mentioned upthread, it's not an all-or-nothing. "Just the right prompting" did get me farther than a few other people but I am very sure it's only a temporary advantage as you yourself alluded to (in a rather emotionally loaded way for reasons unknown).
LLMs can't do everything; they need a good feedback loop where they can ascertain if what they did works. There is a LOT of work out there that is not that (f.ex. game development, firmware / embedded work).
The LLM companies are already putting better feedback loops and agentic harnesses; even the upgrade from Opus 4.5 to 4.6 clearly demonstrated that to me. They don't want their GPUs to burn because people can't be bothered to think of an obvious edge case so they'll make the models smarter to compensate for deficiencies in the human operators.
> Do you really think you will hold an advantage over them in your ability to phrase things?
Regardless of your seeming snark the answer is yes, I do. But as said above, that's not going to last long. Who cares though, I make money in the meantime.
It's difficult to describe just how many people are using Windows not because they choose to, but because they have to. Whether it is because the corporations they work at only give them Windows PC's or because whatever software that they need only runs on Windows. Being able to choose your operating system that you also do work with is largely a luxury of software engineers, I think, but for your average Joe you get what you get, even if it sucks.
Microsoft has an amazing sales team forcing vendor lock-in at corporations, schools and governments all over the world, no wonder they get tons of users.
If we are going by the numbers, then casual gaming on mobile phones and tablets is even higher.
> Mobile gaming generated USD 140.53 billion in 2025, accounting for 48.50% of the video game market share. Console revenue followed at USD 56.2 billion, slightly ahead of PC’s USD 46.3 billion. Cloud-gaming services are the fastest-rising category; the segment’s video game market size is projected to reach USD 24.68 billion by 2029 on a 26.25% CAGR. Wider 5G rollout and aggressive platform bundling are converting non-traditional gamers who do not own dedicated hardware. Source: https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/video-ga...
I think PC gaming has some advantage because it casts a huge net over a lot of factors: games big and small, lots of genres, lots of input types, ancient weak hardware to the latest extreme can all be viable, can be tinkered with, developers of all types can produce on it, shared with non-gaming usages. The only way I could see console claiming more of that is if it standardized something similar to a CD/DVD/BD player device, under a consortium and not 'owned' by a single company (or at least easier to license).
Maybe in theory, or for power-users, or a couple niche company. In practice for the vast majority of people if it's not a Chromebook, then they're either buying a laptop or a pre-built tower, and it comes with Windows. It should be cheaper to buy a linux machine, but try and find a computer without an OS at Walmart.
Right. I was thinking what I expect most people to do. Walk into Walmart or Best Buy and just grab whatever looks nice to them at the price point they’re willing to pay.
Chromebooks I forgot about. But every time I’ve seen them at a store they’re not mixed in with the “computers“, they’re “othered” into their own little section of the computer area. A bit like Macs in the late ‘90s or early 2000s.
As a Clojure developer I have the opposite experience. The more they ignore my open source work, the more they never call up any of my references, the more they give me useless test jobs and assignments unrelated to the actual work, the more it's a signal of a place with poor engineering culture and generally also not that great salaries.
However the places that actually do read my open source work, do contact my references, and where the interview has had no tech assignments of any kind other than a simple discussion about a variety of topics, perhaps just going over some of my OSS projects, the higher the salary has been.
This is in Northern Europe though, your mileage may vary.
Vibe coders who enjoy code? I thought the whole idea of vibe coding is that you don't enjoy code, don't want to ever see code, and just let AI do everything YOLO mode?
I love coding, but I love vibe coding even more. I look at the code, do proper git commits manually and review the changes mostly. Vibe coding helps me do in a few hours what would have taken me weeks to make/debug/document.
That's crazy. Notarization in Estonia can be done entirely online using a digital signature, just like everything else here is done (including voting, getting married, getting divorced, filing taxes, opening/closing a company, etc). From all I hear Germany is still stuck in the 90s for some reason.
More like no one is willing to stick their neck out politically to argue for the positive public policy changes, or challenge regulatory interpretation needed to make real change. Plenty of people see the problems, and even want to fix them, and get stymied by political processes that abhor actually having to argue for change to electorate.
Germany is incredibly under developed in the digitalization plus the amount of red tape to do even basic things is also very large as well. Getting rid of these things takes a lot of will power and at the moment there is very little.
Germany never thought it would be in the current situation - decaying health care, pension system, cornerstone industry in decline, lack of digitalization, the list goes on. Massive reforms are needed, action is needed, but there is too much inertia in the system to change anything quickly.
Smaller countries like Estonia have the ability to be much more nimble.
Fun fact, the Bundestag is one of the most representative parliaments in the world thanks to MMP. Is the executive dysfunctional? Is it the federal split into 16 tiny states causing this?
If it was just a matter of size, similar/larger countries would be in the same state, and at least one of your smaller states would get ahead right?
Yes somehow they believed the 90s continue despite zero public investment. They talk about the dangers of debt for future generations, but they are silent about the infrastructure debt they are saddling their children with by not investing on any serious scale.
Lots of systems are stuck in very old ways of working and using humans as cogs. My American utility bill has a typo in my name that is not there in the online system through which I opened my account; a human in a back office read text from one app and typed it into another. Maybe there was even a piece of paper involved.
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