Well, imagine racing car manufacturers competing on making better, faster engines. At some point engines are so strong that other parts become the limiting factors, such as tires for traction. Now someone invents superfuel, but cars are still only marginally faster because the additional engine power didn't change the bottom line much.
That's what's happening in software. We knew that coding is only a fraction of the overall work, and even completely automating it away won't increase productivity by an order of magnitude.
Yes, the job is changing, but only parts of it. High-level engineering best practices still apply even without the coding part. And there is no free lunch.
"The overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used" - Amdahl's Law
IMO it's a lot more like a new more powerful engine is now available. Sure, faster drivers/teams will run faster lap times, no doubt, and it'd be a bad idea to not use it. But, less mature teams/drivers aren't going to catch those faster teams by just slapping the new engine in and going. They are still largely held back by the myriad of other things that go into being fast on track consistently IE (driver + datalog review, and just good ol seat time), vehicle [other than engine] setup, aero tuning, pitting practice (esp fueling for endurance stuff), etc etc. All those same things that were making them slower than the fastest teams before. And even still, if you give only the slower teams the new engine, they probably still won't be competitive with the faster teams and, quite honestly, the not great drivers will probably just make the same mistakes they were making before that slowed them down, except faster.
But, even if the new engine is the golden egg, now what? You're still competing against every other team that has the golden egg... And it's right back to the driver mod, vehicle setup, etc.
That's not to say that the slower teams have any choice but to run the engine too to not be even less competitive. It's just to say that having the engine isn't gonna fix the underlying problem, no matter how much of the team you lay off to fuel the new, more power, engine.
It's not, because even the best teams aren't shipping 10X faster. Execs keep demanding it and no one - not Anthropic, not Google, not Walmart or whoever - is actually delivering customer value visibly faster at anywhere near that scale.
Except the problem with this is an engine designer doesnt want to pivot to designing a stronger driveshaft, or strengthening the gears of a gearbox, or designing more efficient brakes. They're an engine builder.
Same goes for software. 20 years ago I got into software development for the love and passion of solving problems and writing code. Now I've been forced to pivot to a glorified BA/Products Manager. It sucks.
Bide your time. When the eventual hangover arrives your talents will be in short supply. AI providers are essentially making a long bet: that they will be able to improve faster than the messes that they make are growing. But that can't keep going forever. AI is an accelerator: it will accelerate you if you were careful before towards something better and it will accelerate you towards something much worse if you were not. Just like any other power tool.
I've recently talked about how it makes almost zero sense to ever delegate anything again at work. 3-6 months ago, that was not a thing. 12 months ago, that would have gotten me laughed out of the room. Wherever we are headed, we are not even close to the steady state
> Wherever we are headed, we are not even close to the steady state
That I agree with, but the messes are already catching up with some early adopters and I've been watching a couple of these up close with the roughly same level of interest that you'd bring to a road accident if you were part of the technical investigation team. It is more than a little interesting to me how the difference between the initial conditions seems to be a fairly good predictor of the outcome. Great teams are doing quite well with this new tech, others, not so much. And great teams were rare to begin with.
The flip side of that is as someone who got into software development 20 years ago because I love to design and make products... Well this is pretty great. I feel for my colleagues, though. And it's not like the "coding problem" is solved, much to the dismay of the hype machine.
Exactly. For many of us, designing and writing code has always been the fun part; reviewing and whatnot, the parts that are still left for us meatbags, was more of a chore.
Or we could just recognize these llms crank out poorly architected bug infested slop. The coding work of these llms is just as garbage as all the other bland, flat, wtf writing they crank out with prose. Even worse because there's no logical mind behind the garbage. With bad human written code there was at least one human there thinking about it.
That's exactly what big tech executives and AI bros don't get: It would be useful to use AI for the grudgy but verifiable sub-steps of such a task, e.g. have it help with the email search, and have it suggest a reminder. Or even better, suggest creating a reminder when receiving/reading the email. But leave the user in control, and provide evidence and transparency. Instead, many companies put their bets on the long-shot, do-it-all assistent AI, but technology is just not there yet, or maybe never will even.
I could definitely imagine using a system where I could type in Spotlight "that message about early release from school", hit enter, and have the e-mail or SMS or Signal message or whatever show up in front of me. Boring, non-sexy "better search" style "AI" which is actually useful but doesn't appeal to investors.
Did you go into Siri and join the waitlist for Apple Intelligence?
If not, you’re still using spotlight so the behavior is 100% expected.
Yes, Apple could do a better job making it more obvious but then again Apple Intelligence is Beta so I can see why they require a positive action right now to enable it.
I first read the title as "oldest letter", and kept waiting for an explanation or twist in the article, getting increasingly confused. I just felt like sharing this, thanks for reading my comment.
The obsession with ACs in some places (or rather people I guess) is something I will never sympathize with. Just wear reasonable clothes for the weather, no need to cool down below 20° C. And yes, I'm going to die on that hill.
That's true, although having 19° inside when it's 30° outside is bad for several reasons. My office (in Europe) gets cooled down in summer to like 23°, and that's already inconvenient when wearing appropriate summer clothes. And no one is expected to wear formal clothing.
I never set my AC to lower than 25°C. Why would you need below 20°C? Is it something about having only a single unit for the hole house/office, where it's then uncomfortably freezing in one area, just to have a normal temperature in the distant areas? Crazy.
I don't know if this is a genetic thing, but as a scandinavian who wears shorts down to like 12C, I am unable to function in >30C humid weather. Anything more labour intensive than drinking sangria on ice is not getting done. This year we had up to 37C in Denmark. If you're able to tolerate heat well, I'm happy for you, but my sleep was ruined for months this summer. Not to mention the people who literally died.
I'm investigating my options for at least cooling down the bedroom at night, because I'm not going through this nonsense again. Plastic straws are banned now and we're sorting garbage in 42 different bins, so I'm thinking that about evens it out, environmentally.
I see the heat pump hype shaking my head thinking how people long ago use to build with mud and made walls 2-3 meter thick. It takes the entire winter/summer for the climate to get in.
The Amish hang wet bed sheets in front of the window (with a tob under it to recycle the water) not sure how well this works in the Netherlands with 95-99% humidity, it certainly wont raise humidity but evaporation might be shit.
Not every bathroom is fit for it but if there is no AC and things become unbearable I put the shower head upside down so that the ceiling and walls get wet and it rains everywhere. Then I daisy chain fans to "tunnel" the air into the bathroom. The temperature drops like a rock.
Not everyone can tolerate 20C, you know. I know people who freeze at anything below like 25C, but I myself have trouble not sweating my ass off above like 18C. I don't wear additional clothes in winter (though maybe that's simply because winter here hasn't actually reached below freezing in years).
6/230 seems closer to 3%. And while the number is relatively low, it seems to be a niche where they might lose customers to other platforms. It must have been unprofitable/very expensive to maintain that they killed it.
OTOH, it's Apple, so users would rather buy a bigger iPhone and complain than switching brands (see other comments here), in which case Apple loses nothing.
Google also has millions of lines of code in several languages written over decades. Probably access to more non-public (quality) code than most other companies in the world.
Most devs choosing Macbooks has a lot to do with culture. It's boutique, cool, and all the other successful people have it. Yes, officially it's always for technical reasons, but no one would ever admit to get something just because it's shiny.
A large majority of windows devs choose Apple hardware has to major challenges for MS.
If devs just want shiny flashy then MS has failed at providing that directly or through their partners. If devs are able to make credible technical reasons, year after year, that sustain IT & budgetary scrutiny, that also is a failure from MS.
Personally “being able to run docker without this bs” was credible for many years, tech that now is a de facto expectation for most .NET dev jobs and well-integrated-ish into windows and WSL.
That's what's happening in software. We knew that coding is only a fraction of the overall work, and even completely automating it away won't increase productivity by an order of magnitude.
Yes, the job is changing, but only parts of it. High-level engineering best practices still apply even without the coding part. And there is no free lunch.
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