There is another lunatic possibility: the AI explosion yields an execution model and programming paradigm that renders most preexisting approaches to coding irrelevant.
We have been stuck in the procedural treadmill for decades. If anything this AI boom is the first major sign of that finally cracking.
Friction is the entire point in human organizations. I'd wager AI is being used to build boondoggles - apps that have no value. They are quickly being found out fast.
On the other side of things, my employer decided they did not want to pay for a variety of SaaS products. Instead, a few of my colleagues got together and build a tool that used Trino, OPA, and a backend/frontend, to reduce spend by millions/year. We used Trino as a federated query engine that calls back to OPA, which are updated via code or a frontend UI. I believe 'Wiz' does something similar, but they're security focused, and have a custom eBPF agent.
Also on the list to knock out, as we're not impressed with Wiz's resource usage.
This massively confusing phase will last a surprisingly long time, and will conclude only if/when definitive proof of superintelligence arrives, which is something a lot of people are clearly hoping never happens.
Part of the reason for that is such a thing would seek to obscure that it has arrived until it has secured itself.
I think we've come to the point when it should be the opposite for any new code, something in line of: "done without AI". Bein an old fart working in software development I have many friends working as very senior developers. Every single one of them including yours truly uses AI.
I use AI more and more. Goes like create me classes A,B,C with such and such descriptive names, take this state machine / flowchart description to understand the flow and use this particular sets of helpers declared in modules XYZ
I then test the code and then go over and look at any un-optimal and other patterns I prefer not to have and asking to change those.
After couple of iterations code usually shines. I also cross check final results against various LLMs just in case
It wasn't. The submitter submitted it with the title “Ladybird Browser adopts Rust”. We initially changed it to “Ladybird adopts Rust”, and now I've changed it to the original title, per the guidelines. The automatic title cleaner wouldn't make a change like that.
Woah, this is a wild claim. @dang: Is this a thing? I don't believe it. I, myself, have submitted many articles and never once did I see some auto-magical "title shortening algorithm" at work!
It's not exactly an auto-magical "title shortening algorithm"; just a simple software function that cleans up titles by removing common title patterns that are baity, abusive, ugly or superfluous.
It wasn't the cause of this change; the submitter submitted it without the “with help from AI” part, for some reason.
A LLM-assisted codebase migration is perhaps one of the better use cases for them, and interestingly the author advocates for a hands-on approach.
Adding the "with help from AI" almost always devolves the discussion from that to "developers must adopt AI or else!" on the one hand and "society is being destroyed by slop!" on the other, so as long as that's not happening I'm not complaining about the editorialized title.
It failed because there is an ongoing denial that development and operations are two distinct skillsets.
If you think 10x devs are unicorns consider how much harder it is to get someone 10x at the intersection of both domains. (Personally I have never met one). You are far better off with people that can work together across the bridge, but that requires actual mutual trust and respect, and we’re not able to do that.
The goal of dev is to be able to change everything whenever they want.
The goal of ops is to have a strong infra that has the fewest changes possible.
They are opposite and usually there are more devs than ops but the first respondent to an issue are ops.
You can only have devops if both roles are intertwined in the same team AND, the organization understands the implications.
Everywhere I've been, devops was just an excuse to transfer ops responsibilities to dev because dev where cheaper. Dev became first respondents without having the knowledge of the infrastructure.
So dev insisted to have docker so that they would be the one managing the infra.
But everyone failed to see that whichever expensive tools you buy, the biggest issue was the lack of personal investment to solve a problem.
If you are a 1.5x dev in a 0.9x team, you get all the incidents, and are still expected to build new stuff.
And building new stuff is fun.
Spending 2 days to analyze a performance issue because a 0.3x dev found it easier to do a .sort() in Linq instead of Sql is fun only once.
People can’t care about stuff they don’t know about. Split the roles and you split responsibility. It’s the same with dev and QA. Suddenly, the person paid to care about quality or stability realizes that the person who’s paid for something else doesn’t care like their job depends on it. Because it doesn’t. So OP above is right, splitting things and specializing horizontally is most times a bad and, if you think about it, not very smart move.
From someone who has managed both Developmentals team and Operations team for decades.. trust me, they are different beasts and have to be handled/tackled differently.
Expecting Devs or Ops to do both types of work, is usually asking for trouble, unless the organization is geared up from the ground up for such seamless work. It is more of a corporate problem, rather than a team working style or work expectations & behavior problem.
The same goes for Agile vs Waterfall. Agile works well if the organization is inherently (or overhauled to be) agile, otherwise it doesn't.
> Expecting Devs or Ops to do both types of work, is usually asking for trouble, unless the organization is geared up from the ground up for such seamless work.
Could you expand on this? How would an organization be geared up for this?
Best example is the largest eCommerce conglomerate in the world: Amazon.
In the early 2000s, Google, Amazon and few other companies, were trying to crack the conundrum of APIs (Application Programmable Interfaces), i.e., do web-services.
Amazon cracked that conundrum the best and fastest way (and ultimately that's its AWS (Amazon Web Service) cloud platform rules the corporate world).
But how did Amazon do that IT innovation (beating other innovative IT services companies like Google), when it was merely an e-commerce and related site/company till then?
It's because Amazon did the unthinkable. They overhauled how their company worked.
Crucially, Amazon’s engineering teams were instructed in a 2002 memo - by Jeff Bezos, no less - to take an API-first approach:
1. Teams will expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3. No other form of interprocess communication is allowed.
4. Teams must plan for all service interfaces to be exposed to outside developers.
This mandate that every department in the company must communicate internally only using webservises was pivotal to the company's IT-focused transformation.
So if HR needed to share some payroll related data to Finance team, it needed to do that communication via APIs, instead of traditional way of attaching it via email or sharing over the shared network drive.
This kind of forced, rigorous inter- & intra- communications made the Amazon teams to encounter and resolve every type of issues and concerns that could be faces with APIs/we services and related IT technology.
And thus, Amazon was ready with such incredible new innovative, robust and scalable functionality ahead of every other company in the world.
Today, AWS is THE cloud platform of choice, and it helps drive most of the biggest websites and platforms of the internet and it has world's biggest/richest companies as its customers.
I feel that simply forcing some Developmental teams to adopt DevOps or Agile in a company doesn't work, if the rest of the company doesn't support DevOps or Agile to the extent needed on a daily basis. Only such deep overhaul can ensure these sorts of innovative best practices can not only survive, but also thrive in the company.
And that's the only way the benefits of such radical changes can be felt where it's needed most: the customer experience and the revenue books.
I agree. The domains are just too large for anyone to be an expert in everything. Platform engineers are expected to know 3 clouds, k8s, cloudflare, security, SRE, python, javascript, CI/CD and about 20 other things. Its just not possible to be great at all the things at the same time.
Employers would rather pay one salary than 2. They are not punished for demanding more frim their employees.
We really ought to form some kind of union that operates across companies. We must demand better working conditions.
> You are far better off with people that can work together across the bridge, but that requires actual mutual trust and respect, and we’re not able to do that.
Wasn't that the original goal of DevOps? Getting dev and ops not being siloes and get them collaborating? The "make devs do ops" definition seemed to come along later.
The original goal of DevOps never happened. Companies immediately jumped on this with "rationalizations" and "integrations" to make it so fewer people were in charge of more things.
The way I have seen it in my carreer is to have operational and development capabilities within the same team. And the idea of a „DevOps guy“ is a guy „developing operations integrations“.
DevOps is the practice of using modern software methods to automate the tasks of operations work. That includes using version control, templating languages and various forms of role-based configuration automation.
Anyone who thinks they can hire a devop or declare that they do devops is as deluded as 97% of the folks who claim that they are doing Agile. (If you are firmly on the other side of each of the four principles of the Agile Manifesto, you may or may not be doing great software development, but it's not Agile.)
The problem with the typical DevOps team is that there's no operations expertise.
> You are far better off with people that can work together across the bridge, but that requires actual mutual trust and respect, and we’re not able to do that.
Are you claiming it's fundamentally impossible for people to get along, or just that positive interpersonal relationships can't be reliably forced at scale?
I mean, look at Kubernetes though. You have to understand both the application and the infrastructure in order to get the deployment right. Especially in any instance of having to pin the runtime to any type of resource (certain disk writing, GPUs, etc).
I am saying that in my experience they get upset when the VM or container they provision blows up because it lacks enough resources or they do not place guardrails on their app and end up getting OOMKilled.
And that frustration makes sense in the context of the article. Devs don't care about any of that stuff because they're customer facing, it's a distraction from their primary responsibility.
It would be like asking an Amazon delivery drivers to care about oil changes and tire rotations. It's much easier to have a team of mechanics whose primary responsibility is enabling drivers to just drive and focus on delivering packages.
I think my favorite interaction with a dev around this was when I was explaining how his java program looked like a big juicy target for the OOM killer and it had killed it in order to keep the system working. His response was, "I don't care about the system, I care about my program!" And he understood the irony of that, but it was a good reminder that we have somewhat different views and priorities.
That's not a kubernetes specific issue. If you run on VMs or Edge, devs also need to know the resource requirements. If anything, k8s makes that consistent and as easy as setting a config section (assuming you have the observability to know what good values are). The default behavior I've seen is to set reqs w/o lims so you get Sche'd but not OOM'd
You need to give some details and arguments on your extraordinary claim because what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
They are good enough that they have to actively hide in order that they are not killed, literally, in the cross fire their work has caused. This has been the situation for over a decade.
Consider how big the Indian software universe is and how utterly implausible it would be for them not to have any capacity. That would be the extraordinary claim.
Many people have been pointing at Waco for years. Even Janet Reno later admitted regretting that episode, and yet you do not hear the left in the US saying at all that this was a problem - in fact it is stereotypical far right recruitment material.
This is why it is clear the problem with ICE is not their mode of enforcement, which is far less egregious than the Waco situation, but the fact they are remotely effective.
From "a problem" to "rallying cry" is a pretty neat goalpost move.
Leftists have long warned that expansions of government power (in general) and police militarization (specifically) are most likely to be eventually used against leftists.
Modern leftists are definitionally promoting expansion of government power - it is a core consequence of their beliefs.
The late Murray Bookchin was the exception that proves the rule, and he was hardly popular or widely known, and made some astonishingly prescient interviews before he died about the direction it was all headed in.
Obvious examples: health care, education, social benefits provision, public transit, arms control. All involve expansions of the state bureaucracy and decision making power.
This is tangential to whether those things are good/bad in and of themselves.
The reason Bookchin was interesting, and why he was isolated even from Sanders, was he accurately saw any hierarchy as oppressive, whether class, capitalistic, cooperative, or even a temporarily well meaning state bureaucracy. It also says something that such a person didn’t manage to create a sustainable movement.
The classic right wing policy which confused everyone was “the negative income tax” that Milton Friedman was so keen on, yet it is UBI by another name. Aside from advantages compared to a minimum wage the important point is by being universal you remove the scope for bureaucratic decision making, so they went to enormous lengths to ensure it never happened.
> Obvious examples: health care, education, social benefits provision, public transit, arms control. All involve expansions of the state bureaucracy and decision making power.
So what you have established is that the left and right both want to expand government power, but the left wants to use it to improve the general welfare while the right wants to use it to crush their fellow citizens. Thank you for the clarification.
I generally lean left, and favor a large welfare state, reasonable regulation, etc. and I find your statement unfair.
People can reasonably disagree on these things.
In particular, the role of the federal government (vs the states) is important. Many of the benefit programs have no real need to be national, other than the ability of the federal government to borrow an unlimited amount of money. And many regulations are only federal because that was seen as easier and faster than gaining support in each state for them. Forcing a nation wide policy on an issue that could easily be dealt with by each state because you know you can't get the support is not very democratic.
That does not seem to be a differentiator, either. The right is definitely trying to use federal power to enforce their positions on the entire country when possible, e.g. abortion. It sure seems like "states rights" is more a slogan used when convenient, not a core ideological position.
Certainly not; I myself held a green card at one point.
But that's a bit like responding to "Auschwitz was bad!" with "so you oppose giving free food and housing to Jews?!" I object to how enforcement is being performed, and the collateral damage ICE is willing to inflict on citizens not in their legal purview.
Now let's do you. Do you think the President should have a relatively blank check to get away with being convicted of felonies? Do you have concerns about the Vice President's claim that ICE agents enjoy "absolute immunity"?
Your problem is you want things more than think about them.
The rot of the bureaucracy coming to convenient decisions extends from illegally allowing millions of people to take up residence in the country to convicting people of trumped up nonsense in an obvious attempt to keep them from office to subvert the democratic intent of the people.
This is why Trump and co are the clean up crew before returning to a happier place. It is not a nice job, and nice people wouldn’t be able to do it, but it is a necessary one to prevent things getting so much worse.
You: "Selectively enforcing only the laws you want to is the key enabler of corruption."
Also you: "convicting people of trumped up nonsense..."
Whoops. Someone sure seems… selective. (And we've gone full circle, to my original point.)
> Your problem is you want things more than think about them.
This is precisely the implementation problem inherent in "immediately deport tens of millions of people upon which American society has relied on for decades for cheap labor".
What came first, Trump or failing to enforce laws regarding mass illegal immigration? With a multi decade head start too.
You cannot expect institutions that selectively ignored laws for decades to think it is legal for anyone to stop them from doing so, despite not being able to pin anything concrete to anyone at all. In fact you expect the kind of “ha!” you are trying to pull here.
Trump would not be close to the presidency without the historic selective enforcement by people you happen to have aligned interests with who opened pandora’s box. It is only now you feel on the wrong side of it that you have a problem.
As it stands they are in power, for almost another three years. It seems odd that they could manage this were their position as illegal as you claim. Somewhat reminiscent of the British declaring the American Revolution illegal.
> What came first, Trump or failing to enforce laws regarding mass illegal immigration?
If you wanna play that game, the country started with selective enforcement on day one. The Fourth Amendment didn’t apply to a rather large portion of the population.
> Somewhat reminiscent of the British declaring the American Revolution illegal.
It was absolutely illegal. What is legal is not always moral (the Holocaust, after all, was legal in Hitler’s Germany); what is moral is not always legal.
Current ICE/Homeland Security actions are unambiguously illegal.
The problem is that without an independent congress the US system is able to descend into authoritarianism. The court has (reasonably) decided that on many broad issues regarding presidential actions and abuse of authority only congress (via impeachment and removal) is able to constrain the president.
The current congressional majority has, for now, decided to allow the president to do almost anything he wants, regardless of the law and constitution.
Because that's plainly not what they are always doing. And the aggressive, racist unprofessional, downright dangerous way ICE are going about things is simply shocking.
That they neutered themselves doesn't make them any less neutered.
I'm skeptical about their ability to reclaim it, too. Lots of them remember being terrified and running away Jan 6, even if many now pretend not to... and SCOTUS has been on a tear wiping out long-standing legislation Congress was quite clear about like the Voting Rights Act.
To extend the analogy, Congress hasn't had their balls removed, they simply aren't humping other dogs right now.
I'm not an expert, but while many of SCOTUS' rulings have been against the plain letter of the law, few of the decisions ruled out Congressional power in those areas categorically. Congress could pass a new Voting Rights Act, or redefine the EPA's powers over wetlands, or any number of things, they just choose not to. And of course, even with a Democratic Congress, getting past the veto may be impossible.
While a pan-US national awareness is widely seen as emerging during the civil war the rest of what you are saying is disingenuous. Prior to that it was a selection of colonies etc. which very much had borders because skirmishes over taxation rights was a thing.
There was significantly more inter ethnic strife in the US pre WW2 than most people seem to appreciate, much of it relating to if encountered (by whatever means) people should be settled/assimilated/rejected. There were riots/protests of this type in major cities at least between the civil war and the 1930s, and state policy reflected this, such as with the Chinese exclusion act which would hardly have been possible without a border.
No. One old man and a bunch of malicious zealots at his side are introducing a tremendous amount of instability into the country and the world at large; just like they did with his first term, only now less inhibited.
The problem is the old man and his enablers have zero respect for the law, whereas the other team does (they are not above reproach but in this regard they are distinctly different).
This makes the fight unfair, as without law all we have is unbridled violence as a tool and that is a path to ruin for all.
They are simply enforcing a law that people have had every opportunity to democratically change in the decades since it just stopped being enforced properly, and yet they failed to secure a democratic mandate to do so.
Complaining from that position is far from being on a moral high ground.
We have been stuck in the procedural treadmill for decades. If anything this AI boom is the first major sign of that finally cracking.
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