oraphalous

Learn to code wasn't just about careers though. It was also about individual empowerment. Everything goes through computers, and having the power to understand that domain increases agency.

For a lot of people, they have no need to ship production grade software that scales to babel. But a custom script that solves an immediate business need is a common thing.

I think that aim is more important than the harm learn to code might have caused our profession. And for similar reasons, I feel the agency AI brings to individuals is something that shouldn't be discounted either. No idea what the total calculus on cost benefits turns out to be, but I would hope this benefit is not missed.

Great comment... and I feel after reading it, you're probably a pretty great person to work with. Acknowledging the pain / difficulty of a task, but inspiring folks, and giving them the opportunity to perservere is rare to find these days.

> Yes, starting with tests without market fit can also be fatal. But calling anything done without tests is just a slower poison.

I think we are pretty close to agreement here. I'd be interested in what you have experienced in the realm of front-end testing though - whether you think things are just as cut and dried in that realm (that's another discussion though).

And I'll also accept the point about skill in test writing that improves the cost-benefit analysis. I'll also cop to not having that kind of practiced ability at testing to the level I would personally like. But it's chicken / egg. A lot of folks get their start at scrappy start ups that can't attract the best talent. And just can't afford to let their devs invest in their skills in this way. Hell - even established companies just grind their devs without letting them learn the shit they need to learn.

I feel a victim of this to some degree - and am combating it with time off work which I can afford at the moment. One of the things I'm working on is just understanding testing better - y'know, so I can in the future write a SKILL.md file that tells Claude what sort of tests it should write. lol...

I think maybe - this conversation is more about giving some more acknowledgement to the other side of this issue.

It's not that I disagree with you essentially - or particularly with respect to your analysis of your specific examples. 100% in the cases you describe. Those sound like beneficial tests. Particularly because your example SPEAKS to the business case - users were using the help docs (I think you mean users anyway). So yeah - that's important.

But I don't know why it's so hard extracting a simple acknowledgement of what I'm pointing out - specifically that the decisions like implementing tests IS a cost-benefit decision dependent on business context.

Funny you mention auth testing though. One time both me and the tech lead broke one of the auth flows in production within the space of a week of one another. Yep - no tests. Feel free to judge us insane. But here's how we thought about it - and when I say "we" that includes the business. First of all the auth flow was not actually used by any active users, so damage was low. Two man dev team. Complexity up until that point had been low, pre-product market fit, sales were dogshit, and cash had been low for some time. Feature shipping was the 110% priority. Ok - but these bugs were a sign complexity had increased beyond what we could manage without some tests. And given the importance of auth, it was now easy to make the case to leadership that implementing an e2e test suite was worth it. So we did.

If you still think a decision making process like that is insane - because we didn't immediately implement tests for every shipped feature. Well - I just think you're wrong.

> I did not actually call the author insane...

If you think this distinction really matters wrt the point I'm trying to make, then it's time for you and I to bug out conversationally. Sometimes two individuals have such different ways of communicating that the pain of exegesis isn't worth the squeeze. No hard feelings. I'm sure 50% responsibility is at least mine, but it's not going to be worth it for either of us figuring out exactly what.

Did anyone here actually look at the product they were actually building? It's an AI agent bug discovery product. Their whole culture is probably driven at a fundamental philosophical level about the problems of bug discovery. As he says: he wanted to rely on dogfooding - using their product as the way of spotting bugs.

That may have been spectactular naivete but it's not insanity.

The point I keep coming back to here that everyone is fighting me so hard on is that these blanket statements of: NO TESTS IS NUTS... absent of an understanding of the business context... is harmful.

Hard disagree. It's both. Choosing one way or the other comes with potential risks and rewards to the business and it's up to business leadership to choose what risks they want to take. Your job as an engineer - if you are not part of leadership is to explain those risks / rewards, and then let them make the call.

>He did not edit

He edited his reply to me multiple times... which is what made me suspect an edit to the original comment. But whatever, I'm happy to acknowledge his original intent even if he did state it more harshly.

>What we really don't need is paragraphs of someone arguing because their own definitions differ slightly from the OP

This is unnecessary. OP came out with "AUTHOR IS INSANE" even on the most generous of interpretations. Even if we allow for nuance OP is claiming, there is little constructive about his contribution. I feel fine about calling it out.

Again - that's a business decision that needs to be made in the context of that business. The fact that testing was forbidden isn't in itself good or bad. It depends on that business context. THe post says nothing about how that decision was made, whether it was discussed, or if it was just his absolutist ideal he imposed without consideration of the broader cost-benefit.

And I still feel the original comment doesn't give this point enough weight.

Did you edit the wording of your original comment slightly to emphasise the "actively disallowing them" in every situation? Anyway... if that is what you meant, then ok. It's less awful a statement than what I felt I originally read.

I'd still push back on your hyperbole though. I don't think the author was insane - and we don't know what the broader business context was when they started growing the team and decided to persist without building out the test architecture at that point. They made a call that dogfooding was going to be enough to catch issues as they grew the team. There are a lot of scenarios where that is going to be true.

One scenario where it wouldn't - the most likely - is that the team isn't actually dogfooding because they personally don't find the product useful. Leadership lambasts them to use the product more... but no one does cause it sucks so much it impacts their own personal productivity.

Even there I wouldn't use the word insane... just poor leadership.

I think your comment is just as "insane" as the practice you are railing against. Although I wouldn't use the word "insane" - it's hyperbole. What's the right word here? I'm not sure... "dogmatic" isn't quite right.

If you are a two man startup, burning through runway and pre-product-market fit... then spending a lot of time on tests is questionable (although the cost-benefit now with AI is changing very fast).

What I find "insane", "dogmatic"... about your comment is the complete elision of this process of cost-benefit analysis, as if there should never be such an analysis.

I've worked with a lot of people like you. When a discussion begins about a choice to be made, they just stampede in with "THIS IS THE RIGHT WAY". And the discussion can't even be had.

This sort of "dogmatism" is so rife if engineering culture, I wonder if this is why the c-suite is so ready to dump us all for AI centaurs that just fucking ship features. How many of them got burned listening to engineers who refused to perform even the most basic of cost benefit analyses with the perspective of the business as a whole in mind and forced the most unnecessary, over-engineered bullshit.

I worked at one startup where the tech lead browbeat the founders into building this enormous microservice monster that took them years. They had ONE dev team, ONE customer, and the only feature actually being used was just a single form (which was built so badly it took seconds to type a single character in a field cause the React re-renders were crazy).

Now THAT's insanity.

What corner is there left to be backed into when the the US is trying to assassinate you?

I've heard analysis that a significant proportion of middle east water and food supply - in the form of desalination plants, and cargo through the Strait of Hormuz - is within reach of Iran's capabilities. The logic is that you use this to collapse middle eastern economies which blocks the flow of the investment from Arab states into AI infra that is propping up the US economy.

The prediction that there will be greater demand for specialist frontend and backend engineers is the one that surprises me. How do folks think about it? I've been assuming the opposite - that demand for specialists will decline because expectations around what a single person should be able to do will grow.

I'm a frontend specialist developer currently taking some time off to reskill - and trying to decide exactly which direction to go. My thinking was that I would need to lean into design and product - leverage my technical knowledge in building interfaces to be able to inform the product side. Knowing what is easy or hard to build hopefully would speed up the product side.

But it's a loss if it's forced into risky investments that aren't productive.

Maybe a societal foundation of: magic man in the sky - wasn't so great a foundation after all?

That's interesting - but I guess we need to understand better what innovation counts as a good example of Chinese incipient superiority.

If China is leap frogging the west technologically, then it can still only be a very recent fact. It stands to reason that their current innovations will be developed on top of much of what they learnt from the west.

That doesn't mean that a particular innovation does not deserve to be counted as an example of their progress, just because that innovation was on the shoulders of western tech. Most progress is done on the shoulders of others anyway. So I don't feel examples like this should be discounted.

But also - there are a lot of dimensions to think about here. For example, one dimension is the raw development of a technology. Maybe China has not developed so much newer tech (although I'm reading much to the contrary in this respect also). But another dimension is the economics involved in implementation. With scale comes so many advantages. Business models that just aren't economical in Western countries can thrive in China.

There was one example that really struck me. I was at a mall with my partner and her friends (who live in Guangzhou). Those friends wanted to order something to drink. One of them got out their phone, ordered those drinks and had them delivered outside the mall. This was less effort and cost in their minds than actually wandering around the mall trying to find the drinks they wanted. Heaps of people just get their morning coffee delivered.

You might not think this example is a good demonstration of technological superiority. Every country has the phone and internet tech for goods delivery. But that they can leverage the technology to this degree is only be possible where the cost of delivery is so low - as it is in China.

So yeah - raw innovation is one dimension, but opportunity for implementation is another very important one as well.

I think the west is in for a rude shock when it finally realises how fast China is developing technologically.

I was there a few months ago in Guangzhou, it was stunning to see how many EVs were on the road. You can tell too - because they have a distinctly coloured license plate.

The scale that China can achieve is just mind boggling. We went into a giant mall - 7 levels. And it was all just jewellry. A whole mall! Blew my mind. Apply that sort of scale to technological development. They can do things other countries just can't because of that scale. Here's another example of a data center they just built:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUVF8crDZ7g

I get the sense that some people are just starting to really cotton on about what China is really becoming - for example that recent review from Marques Brownlee of the Xiaomi EV.

But still - most of the narrative in the west seems to be doomerism about their demographics and real-estate over investment. We will see.

It's going to be interesting to see if China can offset its oncoming demographic challenges with their technological progress.

I bought the book - looks good! Would be keen to know which magazines they were originally published in. I feel you should include those references in the book (forgive me if I've missed them.)

I don't even understand why it's everyone elses problem to opt-out.

Eventually - for how many of these AI companies would a person have to track down their opt-out processes just to protect their work from AI? That's crazy.

OpenAI should be contacting every single one and asking for permission - like everyone has to in order to use a person's work. How they are getting away with this is beyond me.

How does an average joe evaluate the claim that their content moderation was bad? Cause folks on the left seem very upset that it's being replaced by notes, and folks on the right seem very glad that it's going. How do I judge this for myself?

I too would like to hear some examples.

On the one hand you have gurus claiming that AI agents are going to all make all SaaS redundant, on the other claiming that AI isn't going to take my coding job, but I need to adapt my workflows to incorporate AI. We all need to start preparing now for the changes that AI is going to cause.

But these two claims aren't compatible. If AGI and these super agents are that bonkers amazeballs that they can replace entire SaaS companies - then there is no way I'm going to be able to adapt my workflows to compete as a programmer.

Further, if the wildest claims about AI end up proving to be true - there is simply no way to prepare. What possible adaptation to my workflow could I possibly come up with that an AI agent could not surpass? Why should I bother learning how to implement (with today's apis) some RAG setup for a SaaS customer service chatbot when presumably an AI agent is going to make that skillset redundant shortly after?

I'm going to be interviewing for frontend roles soon, and for my prep I'm just going back to basics and making sure I remember on demand all the basics css, html, js/ts - fuck the rest of this noise.

Pro tip - shrink your window to a tiny box and the dvds really bounce like crazy.

The whole world seems dedicated to the goal of extracting value rather than creating it.

Our men are running from the battlefield! Shameful display!

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Good times...

> If you think there are others, please exhibit one.

If everyone like you attempts to rail road the imaginative process at the beginning of hypothesis formation, then we'll never get to the point of being able to exhibit one, should one be possible.

The demand for rigour at this point in a discourse - which was pretty clearly signalled by the commenter to be offered at a stage prior to substantive hypotheis formation - just shuts down the imaginative process. It's not constructive.

...and no incentives for publishing negative results, or doing replication work...

Still these people are criminals and clearly need to be treated as such. To say there are larger problems doesn't at all diminish the need to deal with criminals as we do in ALL walks of life.

There is one thing I wanted out of VR... TO BE TRANSPORTED... That's what all the initial hype was about. You go in VR, and you supposedly get this feeling of presence that blows your mind.

Instead the whole thing seems to have gone in the direction of lofi social stuff - which only the relentlessly computer bound will ever desire. I don't get the argument at all that this is THE mainstream path to mass adoption. Who thinks that if they really succeed in siphoning off a significant portion of REAL world interaction into this simulated lofi hell that this is going to be a great way to live? I mean really.

There is only one VR experience that really blew me away. It was a free demo of Deckard's apartment in blade runner. You could go out on the balcony and see the city with a flying cop car going past on a loop. Vangelis playing in the background... It was breathtaking. I setup my area so I could sit on my couch, on this balcony, with a glass of whiskey in reach, watching that cop car fly past for ages.

Rights holders made the demo maker take it down.

Reminds me a quite a bit of the plot line from Liu Cixin's The Dark Forest. When aliens are set to wipe out humanity in 400 years, the idea of a small number of elites escaping in generation ships is so abhorrent to the masses that would be left behind, that 'Escapism' is deemed a crime and banned.

I wonder if among civilisations generally in the universe, this resentment is so common, it could be counted as a "hard step" in Robin Hanson's grabby aliens model.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.01522