I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian

React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity – Baldur Bjarnason

An insightful and incisive appraisal of technology adoption. This truth hits hard:

React and the component model standardises the software developer and reduces their individual bargaining power excluding them from a proportional share in the gains. Its popularity among executives and management is entirely down to the fact that it helps them erase the various specialities – CSS, accessibility, standard JavaScript in the browser, to name a few – from the job market. Those specialities might still exist in practice – as ad hoc and informal requirements during teamwork – but, as far as employment is concerned, they’re such a small part of the overall developer job market that they might as well be extinct.

Let’s reinvent the wheel ⚒ Nerd

Vasilis gives the gist of his excellent talk at the border:none event that just wrapped up in Nuremberg. The rant at the end chimed very much with my feelings on this topic:

I showed a little interaction experiment that one of my students made, with incredible attention to detail. Absolutely brilliant in so many ways. You would expect that all design agencies would be fighting to get someone like that into their design team. But to my amazement she now works as a react native developer.

I have more of these very talented, very creative designers who know how to code, who really understand how the web works, who can actually design things for the web, with the web as a medium, who understand the invisible details, who know about the UX of HTML, who know what’s possible with modern HTML and CSS. Yet when they start working they have to choose: you either join our design team and are forced to use a tool that doesn’t get it, or you join the development team and are forced to use a ridiculous framework and make crap.

Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots

Chat is rarely a suitable interface for most tasks. Here, Maggie Appleton explores and prototypes some alternatives.

Why ChatGPT Won’t Replace Coders Just Yet

I’ve been using Copilot for over a year now, and this is more or less how I use it: To help me quickly blast through boilerplate code so I can more quickly get to the tricky bits.

There’s a more subtle problem with ChatGPT’s code generation, which is that it suffers from ChatGPT’s general “bullshit” problem.

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

A handy round-up of recent wrtings on artificial insemination.