We need better distributed connectivity. It wouldn’t be that hard to build a project management system (issues, etc) on top of Git, but DVCS only gets you so far without a way to connect directly to the other contributors.

They’re different signals. The default handling is the same - terminate - but they’re triggered by different things and (if the process handles them) handled by separate handlers.

I tried for a good 20-30 minutes to get it to generate something that worked. It just gave me a sequence of garbage. Each one looked plausible but as soon as I really read the code it was clear there were issues. Different issues each time. I wasted more time trying to get it to produce correct code than it took to write it myself, once I gave up on the AI.

For me the most productive way to use AI is to ask it to suggest a strategy and to implement that myself. If the code is simple enough for the AI to get it right, I can often write it myself with less effort. If it’s something that requires multiple reprompts to get right, I can almost always do it faster myself.

Or something more complicated than it can handle. Ask it to implement an ASN.1 floating point parser. It looks good but the closer you look at the code the more trash it is.

A good teacher will do that. And even the best teacher can’t force you to learn if you don’t want to. LLMs can be a powerful tool for learning if you’re sufficiently motivated.

AI is an extremely useful tool. I’m on the other end of the career track, but it seems to be that it’s almost like having a personal tutor. And as with any other teacher, if you use it as an aid to figure things out yourself I imagine it would help immensely, but at the same time if you use it as a crutch to do your work for you, you skills will be as weak as someone who cheats off their friends in school. I attribute a large part of my skills to spending lots of time reading other people’s code and understanding why they wrote it the way they did (usually because some library didn’t do what I wanted so I figured out how to beat it into submission out of pure stubbornness). If you use the AI as an aid and spend the time to really understand the code it’s producing (and the flaws in that code), I think you’ll build up your skills well.

My rant about code monkeys was inspired by people I’ve interviewed and worked with who had to be told exactly how to solve a problem since they apparently had zero problem solving skill themselves. The “programming is just writing code” attitude drives me up the fucking wall and “LLMs are going to make programmers obsolete” is just the latest iteration of that bullshit.

Knowing how to write code has only ever been half (or less) of the job. A real programmer solves problems with code, especially problems that aren’t like any they’ve seen before. Someone who can write code but can’t solve problems or can only ‘solve’ problems they’ve seen before is just a code monkey. AI can regurgitate code it’s seen before (that is, code it was trained on) and it can do some problem solving but it falls on its face quickly if you ask it to do anything complex (at least for my metric of what is complex).

The core bug was that they were reading from a map without checking if the map entry existed. Given a non-nil var m map[K]V, m[key] always succeeds (never panics). If the given entry doesn’t exist, it returns the zero value for the type, i.e. var v V. If V is a pointer type, accessing a field or method will panic (because the zero value is nil). If V is a struct or other value type, it can be used normally. That bug is on them. Any Go developer who isn’t a novice should know how maps and value types behave.

Seniors should know their shit. If a junior doesn’t need help they’re either not doing their job or not a junior.

I think you haven’t met “problem solvers” as creative as the ones I’ve met. My first job out of college I built an inventory system for a small engineering firm. One of the engineers tried to solve his problem instead of asking for help. Once he gave up and called us, it took us an entire day just to figure out how he had managed to screw things up as badly as he did.

That’s preferable to people who don’t ask for help until everything is hopelessly fucked because they kept trying to solve their problem different git commands, none of which they understood.

Flash was awful. I was contracted to un-fuck a custom video player and that experience convinced me that Flash was a dumpster fire that needed to die. Fortunately it did.

Almost any language is ok but some ecosystems make me want to turn into a murder hobo (looking at you, JavaScript).

Keep your Rust to yourself. I don’t care what language someone else uses for their projects but Rust is an unreadable mess that I don’t want anywhere near my projects.

Any function can be written in any Turing complete programming language. That doesn’t mean a sane person would use malboge or brainfuck for a production system. Language choice can have a huge impact on productivity and maintainability and time is money.

Indentation-driven control flow is one of the most cursed things ever invented, excluding things explicitly designed to inflict pain or death.

If you own the company, no one can force you to sell shares.

Devs who are devs for no other reason than money and who don’t give a shit about the quality of their work are a problem.

In my experience VSCode on Windows runs like dogshit. I blame Windows for that. VSCode on Linux runs like a dream. I can have four different sessions open and it still runs great (I haven’t tested more than that because I’ve never had a reason to).

I make my code open source and public so people can use it if they find it useful, not because I expect anyone to contribute.

And there’s a big fucking difference between actively hostile and “I’m not interested in accepting this change”.

This is the only one I subscribe to that has memes. I was not being precise but I know I have seen this before, recently, more than once.