Xean Connery hates this simple trick.

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Because starting with ‘X’ does not guarantee the ‘sh’ sound. See ‘xylophone’, ‘Xavier’, ‘Xenon’.

Xitter looks like ‘exiter’ to me.

A true Debian user would never tell us that they use Debian. They would say they use Debian Testing’. BTW.

His newest social media venture is focused on a niche of extreme exploration, named the Xtreme Network for Xtraordinary Xploration. You can find it at xnxx.com.

I’ve worked for startups too; everyone does everything all at the same time! Let the chaos reign! But it is fun in its own way.

I work for a large company now after the startup I worked for was acquired. Hierarchy, bureaucracy, layers, we’ve got it all. For worse and for better though, it allows me to focus and specialize on what I’m awesome at and furgeddaboddit (ahem! delegate) the stuff that I suck at to those who excel at those tasks.

No, this is incompetent management.

Senior engineers write enabling code/scaffolding, and review code, and mentor juniors. They also write feature code.

Lead engineers code and lead dev teams.

Principal engineers code, and talk about tech in meetings.

Senior Principal engineers, and distinguished technologists/fellows talk about tech, and maybe sometimes code.

Good managers go to meetings and shield the engineers from the stream of exec corporate bs. Infrequently they may rope any of the engineers in this chain in to explain the decisions that the engineers make along the way.

Bad managers bring engineers in to these meetings frequently.

Terrible managers make the engineering decisions and push those to the engineers.

Agreed.

It’s not a fair comparison then is it? $80/hr is an expensive but not outrageously so handyman, plus they have their own tools to purchase and maintain and other business operating overhead (fuel and transportation maintenance) etc.

DIY—if you’re able—is always less expensive.

It’s a for-profit service that people use to rent-out, and rent-in their tools. Not a true library so to speak but seeks to accomplish the same. Except that people charging $20/day to rent their battery-powered Ryobi drill is absurd.

There is a “tool library” sort of service (for profit) operating in my area. The prices are absurd—people are charging like $20/day for a tool that would cost $100 new, or half that used on craigslist. My projects often span multiple days, especially if there’s an unforeseen delay—which there always is because I’m a good engineer but a shitty carpenter.

I don’t use the service. I’m all for communal ownership but it still has to make sense.

Hmm. Attorney charges by the hour and at least 3 discovery hours will be attributed to the time spent learning to exit vim let alone exit with preserving changes.

Still some paperwork in a divorce so you’d probably want :wq!

You were always cool.

Don’t forget to use a one-time pad.

That’s why Nintenfux is suing. They have no other way to be competitive in mobile gaming now.

You were born to deploy K8s clusters.

OMG my sides. kubectl delete --all --all-namespaces

Yeah I get it 100%. But that’s what I’m saying. I’m already working on and with models that have entire codebase level fine-tuning and understanding. The company I work at is not the first pioneer in this space. Problem understanding and interpretation— all of what you said is true— there are causal models being developed (I am aware of one team in my company doing exactly that) to address that side of software engineering.

So. I don’t think we are really disagreeing here. Yes, clearly AI models aren’t eliminating humans from software today; but I also really don’t think that day is all that far away. And there will always be need for humans to build systems that serve humans; but the way we do it is going to change so fundamentally that “learn C, learn Rust, learn Python” will all be obsolete sentiments of a bygone era.

But that’s not what the article is getting at.

Here’s an honest take. Let me preface this with some credential: I’m an AI Engineer with many years in field. I’m directly working on right now multiple projects that augment and automate code generation, documentation, completion and even system design/understanding. We’re not there yet. But the pace of progress in how fast we are improving our code-AI is astounding. Exponential growth in capability and accuracy and utility.

As an anecdotal example; a few years ago I decided I would try to learn Rust (programming language), because it seemed interesting and we had a practical use case for a performant, memory-efficient compiled language. It didn’t really work out for me, tbh. I just didn’t have the time to get very fluent with it enough to be effective.

Now I’m on a project which also uses Rust. But with ChatGPT and some other models I’ve deployed (Mixtral is really good!) I was basically writing correct, effective Rust code within a week—accepted and merged to main.

I’m actively using AI code models to write code to train, fine-tune, and deploy AI code models. See where this is going? That’s exponential growth.

I honestly don’t know if I’d recommend to my young kids programming as a career now even if it has been very lucrative for me and will take me to my retirement just fine. It excites me and scares me at the same time.

Also by design. Tech companies collude like this all the fucking time.