Hasn't AI been annoying the piss out of us for well over a year now? I've definitely been hearing "10x productivity" for that long.

So - where is it all? Where's all the 10 years of software dev that happened over the last year? Where's the companies blowing their competitors out of the water by compressing a decade of production into a year?

The proof is in the pudding. Or lack thereof. If the claims were anything like they say, we'd see something by now.

I think agents and claude code was only last summer. It does feel like a long time though.

I'd use digital ocean over AWS for any SMB or lean startup (so... anyone not attached to an infinite money hose that has to either scale to NEED AWS, or die trying) just because of 1) their UI not being broken glass you have to crawl over and 2) not having eight trillion features that make doing simple things hard and 3) pricing

Same. For small projects, I always recommend Vultr or Digital Ocean. Vultr has some neat network features, like BGP support.

This is more because the barrier to entry is so much lower.

Android: have laptop that can do virtualization (...so basically ever laptop that can also do this:) and have enough ram to do run Android studio. Then you theoretically also need an Android device but even that's just because I assume you want to use the app you're making. That's it.

iOS: $100/yr entry fee, plus you need Apple hardware, plus a "server" mode Apple hardware (Mac mini?) if you want to alt store and I assume your main device is a laptop.

Just the money thing and the hardware thing is a huge stumbling block. I know it's rounding error for any even semi serious business but also let's be real, a ton of very important software is basically run on the budget of "the software devs main job and/or EU welfare state benefits".

The www wins. All you need is something that can run a browser. You edit a line, save, refresh and there it is, the real finished product, not emulation.

Apps have terrible reliability too. I just wanted to order a pizza, the restaurant website offered a button for the play store and app store.

There it said the app was for an outdated version of Android.

Perhaps it had been like that for a long time? But lets imagine it happened today. Where are you to get your orders from? Ahh yes, the website.

If apps didn't get the icon on the home screen 90% wouldn't have a reason to exist.

Bunch of pictures with descriptions and an add to cart button. One shouldn't even need to write code, it should be as simple and obvious as serving a document. In stead you need a full time carpenter to keep the store running. The counter and shelves spontaneously collapse, doors regularly get stuck, light fixtures rain down from the ceiling.

People trying to sell pizza deserve better, we can do better.

Unfortunately, the people who are "pro-AI" are so often because it lets them skip the understanding part with less scrutiny

The good news here is that their code is of such a poor quality it doesn't properly work anyway.

I have recently tried to blindly create a small .dylib consolidation tool in JS using Claude Code, Opus 4.5 and AskUserTool to create a detailed spec. My god how awful and broken the code was. Unusable. But it faked* working just good enough to pass someone who's got no clue.

> The good news here is that their code is of such a poor quality it doesn't properly work anyway.

This is just wishful thinking. In reality it works just well enough to be dangerous. Just look at the latest RCE in OpenCode. The AI it was vibe-coded with allowed any website with origin * to execute code, and the Prompt Engineer™ didn't understand the implications.

> it works just well enough to be dangerous

Excellent. I for one fully welcome Prompt Engineers™ into the world of software development.

I assume you don't understand some of the words in the rest of my comment. Or you're a nihilist and enjoy watching everything burn to the ground.

It's all fun and games until actual lives are at stake.

I'm watching the voters around the world electing charismatic leaders and then cheering the consequences.

Thus companies electing to replace software developers with AI slop are not of a much surprise to me.

It doesn't matter whether people will die because of AI slop. What matters is keeping Microsoft shareholders happy and they are only happy when there is a growing demand for slop.

Why did Minneapolis end up getting more ire than Chicago? I thought it was Chicago that Trump wouldn't shut up about this whole time

Because of the fraud scandal and the concentration of cases among the Somali community there (that those people are generally citizens and not immigrants or refugees is besides the point to the administration). The MN fraud story is a huge big deal in conservative media.

And the ringleader of the fraud was a white woman who is awaiting sentencing, but they ignore that part

What other fraud? The Feeding Our Future fraud is the biggest case and they got caught and prosecuted. 80 people have been convicted

Out of the 78 convicted, 77 were of Somali or African descent. So saying the ringleader was white doesn't discount or minimize that fact.

Yes it does, when she was the one recruiting people to participate.

Are you suggesting there is something inherent to being Somali that means they are more likely to commit fraud?

No, but the premise of the ICE/CBP flood to MN is that the fraud is being conducted by deportable people. Note that ICE/CBP has no statutory authority to enforce fraud laws.

Nobody claimed that "committing fraud protects illegal immigrants from deportation", and I don't understand how that even makes sense.

Might have to do with the size of the city - I've heard through the grapevine that even Minneapolis is too big and they're thinking of shifting to some city in Maine or New Hampshire.

"Too big" supposedly meaning orchestrating something that allows them to have the optics without the potential for fallout. This is really speculation though.

They found a weakness to justify an increase in violence to their base: the day care corruption. Despite the fact that most of that was found and prosecuted years ago, right-wing influencers were successfully able to bring it back to the forefront, and the administration jumped on it to justify an increased ICE presence, naturally leading to the violence we see. They didn't get the same thing in Chicago, where ICE avoided most of the areas likely to see violence in the first place. And they didn't leave Chicago, they just aren't publicizing it like they were.

Would George Floyd have anything to do with it? Or is that just coincidence?

I'm convinced k8s is a conspiracy by bigtech to suppress startups.

So its the EJBs of this age then?

I think the main problem with online recipes is that there's a lot of stuff that "cooks" and "people who cook" learn that carries over VERY STRONGLY from dish to dish that is just totally absent from online tutorials. Things like what done (but not dried out) chicken looks like, and how to position chicken in a pan so the thicker parts get more heat, and why your chicken went right from "looks plain" to burned with no maillard reaction.

I think foods/culinary courses should be mandatory in high school. I took one as an elective, expecting it to be a blow-off class, but I ended up being shocked by how much I - honor student and all that - didn't know about browning hamburger, much less actual cooking. I ended up taking the subsequent 3 classes in the "foods" line.

For all the effort we put into science education, cooking is applied science we do every day. We should start in elementary school and keep at it through high school, in my opinion.

This is how I feel too. Let me try to itemize it:

how AI speeds me up:

- no longer have to remember how to set up unit test boilerplate in each of the 6ish programming languages i commonly use

- can often vaguely gesture at an existing pattern and have AI "copy-paste" it into new code. "do that read-through cache pattern like you see there and there but do it for this table and this proto msg type."

- can quickly answer questions like "does anyone in the code seem to build this string manually instead of using the library/helper method for it"

- can quickly generate code like "all I want is a gosh dang PKCS-formatted key, why is that so hard for this library" which the docs did not provide

which is really cool. it absolutely speeds things up by 10-100x in some scenarios. a lot of the sucky parts of programming are being mired down in these kinds of messes.

how AI slows me down:

- have to explain to jr dev why, even though it has unit tests, the AI-generated bespoke mutex async cache is not going into our production codebase

- have to explain to PM why I cannot let them vibe code new features into the hot path of our prod services when they are not on-call to be forced to clean it up when it explodes at 3am

- have to explain to senior dev who should REALLY know better why you cannot _just_ ask someone to review a 2000 LOC PR

- have to explain to CEO in tremendous itemized, evidenced detail why [big project in eye of sauron] did not go noticeably faster than it did 2 years ago even though the team was hand-picked to be full of people he knew would use AI as much as he wanted them to.

- have to explain to CEO why I really wish he would stop playing with AI and bothering the crap out of the engineers and go back to actually doing whatever it is the CEO gets paid 10-100x what a software engineer salary to do. [actually still trying to figure this one out without getting fired.]

I'm as interested in AI use as anyone can be, when I have to put up with sycophantic "believers" who really wish they could replace me entirely with the chatbot.

Also, this shit is expensive and still being sold at a loss. I signed up for Amp and blew through my $10 of signup credit getting very little done. I'm certainly not paying my own money for that.

I don't like it. It lets "management" ignore their actual jobs - the ones that are nominally so valuable that they get paid more than most engineers, remember - and instead either splash around in the kiddie pool, or go jump into the adult pool and then almost drown and need an actual engineer to bail them out. (The kiddie pool is useless side project, the adult pool is the prod codebase, and drowning is either getting lost in the weeds of "it compiles and I'm done! Now how do I merge and how do I know if I'm not going to break prod?" or just straight up causing an incident and they're apologizing profusely for ruining the oncall's evening except that both of them know they're gonna do it again in 2 weeks).

I really don't know how often I have to tell people, especially former engineers who SHOULD KNOW THIS (unless they were the kind of fail-upwards pretenders): the code is not the slow part! (Sorry, I'm not yelling at you, reader. I'm yelling at my CEO.)

Is this the last way that was vaguely easy to access? Can you still run the OOBE command or use the XML unattended install method?

Would like to know this as well.