I love photography and I'm intrigued by what you are doing with this. I'm not annoyed that you are talking about photography on this post. I think there is room for judicious use of AI in photography. The fact that it was disclosed and still accepted means they were at least curious.
I can think of so many times this has happened before. People getting used to MVC, Dependency Injection, ORMs. Sometimes the code is so large you only work on a part of it, so you have to get used to a lot of not knowing.
So how do we build confidence anyhow when we can't know everything?
I think first, standard checks - does it compile? What do static analysis tools say - code quality, passes SAST analysis? Linters? Style checkers?
Do the tests run? I'm not comfortable with the tests I write let alone the AI.. by adding fault injection (fuzzing, chaos), and mutation testing, I have a better degree of confidence in the tests and code.
Spend even more time getting to know the product instead. Maybe I don't know the code as well as I used to, but I know the product backwards and forwards. That helps me have some new confidence that I didn't really have before. Knowing the greater whole.
Your comment made me think that people have been happily importing hundreds to thousands of dependencies into their projects that were written by some random guys on the internet, but they've just now started to become concerned they don't understand the code they're shipping.
Exactly right. Many never check the release notes of those libs on bump either. To this add copy & paste from Stack Overflow we used to do. People are just afraid of losing their jobs now, so naturally we all got defensive.
exactly right but think about it a bit, the responsibility is kinda off shored to the library owner and the library is used by many and battletested meanwhile
with ai the only one that use that code is only him and the reponsibility is still on him
Yes this is essentially my take I posted. We have been working at various levels of abstraction for a long time using framework, packages, and even programming languages themselves.
I'll take a look at your post. I think it's really good to point out that abstraction is something that we have sometimes accepted / sometimes struggled with our entire careers (lives?)
I think the real question here is how we rebuild some confidence and perhaps remove some fear.
Something that made MVC, dependency injection, and ORMs more palatable is that there is typically a well-structured interface between "our code" and "their code". The current state of agentic dev rarely has AI doing its thing behind some abstraction layer. It's really more like a new coworker that needs to be steered toward team norms very quickly.
I think the main challenge is pressure for more productivity with AI. I often go back and forth about if I am scrutinizing too much (and not being as productive as I could be) or not enough (and shipping slop). Building the additional QA harnesses and feedback loops for agents seems like the best known path forward to accelerate with some safety, but it is still pretty challenging to context-fiy all of the nuanced judgements a seasoned dev team makes.
I like fault injection (fuzzing, chaos), and mutation testing. I think introducing these helps the AI write better tests and helps having some confidence in the tests that are written.
Democracy isn't dead, but in the US, it's sure in troubled water. The two-party system encouraged people not to think for themselves but instead have to choose between two parties that, at least initially had common ground but now are diametrically opposed to one another. Now one of the two parties is pretty weak, having lost ground, giving the impression that it had lost touch with the common people and focused on loud but semi-fringe issues. One party owning the system has the same look as Democracy is dead.
Not to mention that even with a strong leader in both parties, we are on a race to the bottom, each election oscillating between the two parties, each spending lots of money and focus undoing what the other party did. When the two parties had common ground, this was much less of an issue.
In the end, this isn't going to get fixed, the US is going to just keep printing money, blowing up the deficit until the last few countries outside the US who trust us no longer do. We'll be in too many wars, in too many places, with too few friends. End up the same way the USSR was when they were in Afghanistan for too long.
I don't think even if you pulled money out of politics, banned stock trading for elected officials, no foreign wars, universal health care - that we would right the ship. Our problems are fundamental. Our early leaders warned us against a two-party system, trying to show us the problems it would lead to, and we ignored it.
Yes, US will print money to inflate debt until it can no longer do so. Yes, the realignment after it cannot get treasuries sold externalkyexternally, will be painful. But this has happened before (in the world) and will happen again. The country doesn't have to fail in the way of the USSR.
And once the dust settles the long term state will probably be better for many countries, US included. My 2c.
Perhaps it is too pessimistic, but it's the default state to fail, die in some sense, just like any other organic thing. The world doesn't have a good record of these things we've created lasting very long.
The hopeful part of me thinks that what will emerge from the disorder will be better, just like anything else that survives today that was once part of something else.
Not to mention that with WINE you can install Microsoft Office - I could be wrong, but I think OS and Infra are the focus, Microsoft Office is orienting and tolerable. Its bloated but people know it. Besides office, everything important really is a web app now.
Microsoft is now charging monthly fees.. It is not about tolerance, it is like countries are paying rent to USA for something that their own people can provide at far lesser cost and there would be less bullying too and more independence to top it off. Once there is a momentum worldwide to transition away from Microsoft or American centric suppliers, the there would be more diversity too and more interoperating tools.
They probably saw it when they were pretty young, nostalgia beats anything. For me, that scene with the dark doll and Mia Sara dancing by the firelight will go down in history as one of the best scenes in any movie.
