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You can easily hire a person from Ohio to work for your company incorporated in California without having a separate legal entity in Ohio. Not the case in EU.

True but you do have to register with the state of Ohio, and jump through some hoops.

It’s possible to be registered in a state you’ve never been to - how many people have actually been to Delaware or Wyoming - and employ nobody at.

Some countries play this game too - after the Cayman Islands enacted anti money laundering laws, they tried to keep companies with privacy and efficient dispute resolution.


Still a phone for over 1000€ is crazy. Iphone 17 is much cheaper, and iphones are supposed to be the most expensive smartphones in my book.

Are these comments from 2018? 'Pro' models of iPhones have been $999 or more, not adjusted for inflation, at their lowest tier since 'Pro' has been a thing. I would expect the same of a Samsung 'Ultra' flagship?

IPhones go from $600 up to $2000.

I find the same problem applying to coding too. Even with everyone acting in good faith and reviewing everything themselves before pushing, you have essentially two reviwers instead of a writer and a reviewer, and there is no etiquette mandating how thoroughly the "author" should review their PR yet. It doesn't help if the amount of code to review gets larger (why would you go into agentic coding otherwise?)

What is the category of code that does not need quality? You need it to not interact with real world, with people's finances, with people's personal data. Basically it's the code that only exists for PMs to show to investors (in startups) and VPs (in enterprise), but not for real users to rely on.

> What is the category of code that does not need quality?

For example there exist "applications"/"demos" that exist "to show the customer what could be possible if they hire 'us'". These demos just have to survive a, say, intense two-hour marketing pitch and some inconvenient questions/tests that someone in the audience might come up with during these two hours.

In other words: applications for "pitching possibilities" to a potential customer, where everything is allowed to be smoke and mirrors if necessary (once the customer has been convinced with all tricks to hire the respective company for the project, the requirements will completely change anyway ...).


Yeah, that's what I mean - prototypes. The caveat is though that before agentic coding skills to build a prototype and skills to build a production system were generally the same, so a prototype did not only provide a demonstration of what is possible in general, but what your team of engineers can do specifically. Now these skills will diverge, so prototypes will not prove anything like that. They are still going to be useful for demonstrations and market research though.

I think we should already get past pretending it's about people who just like typing words on their stupid mechanical keyboards. The real split is whether you like understanding systems and inventing new things or whether you are OK to delegate this part to someone else and are just happy to take credit for their success. With a small note that when someone else is a human, the credit can be justified if you mentored them or created conditions for their success and growth.

It's funny how "the real split" is always between the intellectually and morally superior (me) and the inferiors (them).

When one side of the discussion makes their ignorance a point of pride, defining themselves entirely based on what they now need not know, I believe you've inadvertently insulted yourself.

I don't see many on one "side" with prideful ignorance. There are a few loud ones, sure. But I love to see the many ideas I've not had the time to implement come to fruition. I don't get the same satisfaction. It doesn't seem as much "mine" as if I did it all by hand. However once the tool is built, I use it to build more things. More tools.

Not having to know the lower levels means you can free your mind for things at higher levels of abstraction. It's not a void in our brain you don't fill with other things.

But I don't know. I'm new to this.


I've noticed that too and it's not too different from political discussions. At the end of the day, I think the split is really about different values people have, their identity, and justice.

A lot of developers' identities is tied to their ability to create quality solutions as well as having control over the means of production (for lack of a better term). An employer mandating that they start using AI more and change their quality standards is naturally going to lead to a sense of injustice about it all.


I never asked for this.

As someone who likes understanding systems and inventing new things AND is happy to delegate drudgery to AI, according to you, I shouldn't exist.

Naturally, I disagree.


Disagree. I think it was always obvious to me that there are at two kinds of developers. To make an extreme example: developer A writes long, sometimes tedious, security-minded, thoroughly tested code, and has written the CI pipelines too. When tasked with some ticket, they'll develop it to the letter, not one inch further, and even if it makes zero sense from the point of view of the users. Developer B knows nothing of that, doesn't write tests, can't be arsed about security and has no idea of how to deploy stuff, but thinks backwards from what the users (or other developers, or their future self) might like a lot and tries to make that. Both have been useful, though the first kind usually much more appreciated (maybe because it's really essential, while type B's contributions are harder to measure).

Probably AI has come a little bit earlier for type A, but type B will follow soon anyway. In the meanwhile, they're enjoying the ride a bit more since AI takes care of all the tedious but essential details.


"Claude, lift these weights for me."

We have machines lift weights for us all the time. Claude is a forklift for the mind, perhaps?

That has become pretty controversial recently, but I think the difference is that in software development, building knowledge is the work. You write software and simultaneously build expertise in your team regarding what the software does that allows you to maintain it and move forward.

Some of us hate this part. They don’t want to learn the domain to that degree. It’s not always the dumb ones either.

However there’s not a lot of overlap I’ve noticed between the craftsman crowd and that one.


Using forklifts has made us overall less healthy and less physically fit than moving things by hand

Will LLMs, "the forklifts of the mind" make us less mentally fit?

Seems like a pretty likely outcome to me


Strawman. Forklifts usually do work we physically can't do (or sometimes could do if ignoring personnel risks and costs).

> Forklifts usually do work we physically can't do

Is that any different from doing work we can do, but way faster than we could realistically do it?

Change the analogy to an excavator then. I could move a pile of dirt with a shovel, or I could write code with my brain

Or I could move a pile of dirt with an excavator or write code with an LLM


This says nothing about where people find enjoyment.

I like doing puzzles.

I like it more than planning.

At the end of the day, I'll do whatever builds the best thing, but I'll enjoy it more or less depending on what that involves.


> I like doing puzzles

Meaning you like to put the pieces in, or you like to figure out where they should go? To me that’s the crux of the article.


Part of figuring out where the pieces should go is usually in trying to put them in, because you generally can’t visualize the complete solution in your mind just by looking at all the pieces and only thinking. I don’t think this is a good analogy.

Puzzles have a correct solution that is known in advance, the pleasure consists in the work you do to reach it. It's a bit different when the solution has a beauty in itself.

How about people that understand things are changing whether anyone likes it or not and want to stay relevant. What about the people who care about the end product and not rabbitholing design decisions on a proof of concept. What about someone who understands there is more nuance than assuming people with a different perspective on AI are lesser than or lower than people who resist the technology. You may feel you know the “right way” but to everyone else who is interested in operating in a world changing beneath our feet and not whining about the fact that everything will be different, and denigrating the people who want to succeed in it, this opinion is not exactly convincing. You want to cludge your way through a problem you’re welcome to but it’s not necessarily logical to suggest this is the only “right” way and infer that people who build with AI don’t like “understanding systems”.

When I build with AI I build things I never would have built before, and in doing so I’m exposed to technologies, designs, tools I wasn’t aware of before. I ask questions about them. Sure I don’t understand the tools as deeply as the person who wasted like 10 hours going down rabbit holes to answer a simple question, but I don’t really see that as particularly valuable.


Sounds like elephant problem

Elephant in the room problem: this thing is unreliable, but most engineers seem to ignore this fact by covering mistakes in larger PRs.

Then of course we are going to ask LLMs to generate specifications in this new language

I'm afraid the coalition has no idea what to do with the islamic regime in question. Unless it will be toppled from inside, the best the coalition can offer is more bombs (until it becomes too much of a strain for the budget).

Hacktivists? Looks more like state actors.

State actors can be activists. The inability for Americans to understand that has cost them wars.

That was my thought. This is 100% a state actor.

I've been editing my comments (not in English) with specialized spell-checking services, and I don't think they change my voice in any meaningful way. I suspect when people say they are using LLMs to fix their grammar, it's actually some more than just grammar.

There is quite a difference between fixing grammar and the fuller rewording that is often used especially by LLM based writing tools. The distinction is much more of a grey area when you not talking about a language you are fluent in, because you don't know the difference between idiomatic equivalences and full-on rewording that will change your perceived tone⁰ - the tool being used could be doing more than you think and not in a good way.

And if you are using the tool, “AI” or not to translate it is even worse and you often only have to do on cycle of [your primary language] -> [something else] -> [your primary language] to see what a mess that can make.

I'm attempting to learn Spanish¹ and when I'm writing something, or practising something that I might say, I'll write it entirely away from tech (I have even a proper chunky paper dictionary and grammar guide to help with that!) other than the text editor I'm typing in, and then I'll sometimes give a tool it to look over. If that tool suggests what looks like more than just “that's the wrong tense, you should have an accent there, etc.” I'll research the change rather than accepting it as-is.

--------

[0] or even, potentially, perceived meaning

[1] I like the place and want to spend more time down there when I can, I even like the idea of living there fairly permanently when I no longer have certain responsibilities tying me to the UK², and I'd hate to be ThatGuy™ who rocks up and expects everyone else to speak his language.

[2] and the shithole it has the potential to become over the next decade - to the Reform supporters and their ilk who say, without any hint of irony, “if you don't like it why don't you go somewhere else” I reply “I'm working on that”.


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