1. AI is exposing the harsh truth that 99% of the code out there has always been throwaway code. Yet good developers, void of any engineering skill, treated it like the 1% that wasn't and called their hygiene and practices engineering.
2. Way too many developers that have made their careers or internet fame out of their technical proficiency understand that the shift is unavoidable. See Antirez implementation of Arrays in Redis or his Dwarfstar project. Virtually every line of these projects has been AI authored. And yet they are terrific projects with extremely strong architecture. And not a single line was edited in vi (his favorite editor).
> Virtually every line of these projects has been AI authored
There's a difference between everything being vibe-coded where you don't look at the code and don't understand anything and using your agent like a very fast pair programmer.
> In the first month I just wrote the specification document...Thanks to AI, the specification evolved a lot, via back and forth of feedback, intellectual challenges about what was the best design, what was the right compromise, what was too engineered and what not.
> You know what was the biggest realization of all that? For high quality system programming tasks you have to still be fully involved
Judgement will be required even moreso now. There will be critical parts of the system where it's important that engineers know them well. But there's a lot of work around the core that isn't that critical to know in detail. For these types of things, I've found it's just important to understand the gist to make sure things aren't going off the rails. But for the core pieces, it's important to understand the details of what's happening.
I agree that we have to keep understanding our code and we have to understand the systems we build.
I think the deeper issue is that AI can generate so much code that reading it simply doesn't scale.
Even if AI were to produce perfectly written code that didn't have any bugs that human review needed to catch, it would still be too much code to read in order to understand everything. The machine can write much faster than I can read.
Extending this argument further, it also becomes impossible to onboard young people to codebases if we maintain an expectation that reading all the lower level source code is how they come up to speed. I don't think this was ever an actual expectation in the industry, although we may have short-handed it that way in conversation.
So IMHO we need to come up with higher level visualizations and other ways to compress the knowledge that we used to get out of reading source code. We basically need to create new higher level projections off of our semantic understanding of the project.
The first two seasons are great, watch it with subtitles (fun fact: in Italy it was also shown in tv with subs because most people cannot understand neapolitan dialect).
it is absolutely critical to watch Gomorrah in Italian. The English dubs are comically poor quality (think of how MS Word used to emotionlessly read text aloud).
It doesn't work that way in Italy. A popular referendum can only abolish an existing law, partially or fully. The general public cannot vote to adopt new legislation.
I am not debating the benefits of democracy, rather how there's no democracy at all if a referendum is not legally binding and a government can disregard the result.
The referendum is obviously legally binding, the laws they were about were abrogated as the vote requested and it's been 15 years since the last one.
Since then politics shifted, technology changed, the geopolitical situation changed, 10 million people died, 9 million people became adults that weren't before
If people are still against nuclear the same mechanism to call for a referendum to reject this law still exists and there's elections next year anyway.
As an European I always found your left very conservative.
In the most recent years I feel the same about our lefts.
But imho left/right don't make any sense any more and have very little connection to their historical roots.
Look at how the conservative party went into ballooning the debt and spending, something they have been historically very against. Or how European rights are more financially supportive of the poorest parts of the society than the lefts.
Policies and trends are changing.
Yet we're stuck in this nonsense bipolarism when every other adult has many thoughts on many topics that don't really overlap with either of the two poles.
That's because we don't really have a left, not since Ronald Reagan. Clinton was more conservative than Nixon, and Obama was more conservative than Clinton.
Not sure how are we supposed to thrive in a world where cars are very simple and our know-how is borderline useless.
Imho cars are a dead race-to-the-bottom business, that was true in ICE world, that will be even more true in the electrified/autonomous driving one.
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