weirdhacker42

Hear, O my son, and receive my sayings; and the years of thy life shall be many. ¹¹I have taught thee in the way of wisdom; I have led thee in right paths. ¹²When thou goest, thy steps shall not be straitened; and when thou runnest, thou shalt not stumble. ¹³Take fast hold of instruction; let her not go: keep her; for she is thy life. ¹⁴Enter not into the path of the wicked, and go not in the way of evil men. ¹⁵Avoid it, pass not by it, turn from it, and pass away. ¹⁶For they sleep not, except they have done mischief; and their sleep is taken away, unless they cause some to fall. ¹⁷For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence. ¹⁸But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. ¹⁹The way of the wicked is as darkness: they know not at what they stumble. ²⁰My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings. ²¹Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart. ²²For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh. ²³Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. ²⁴Put away from thee a froward mouth, and perverse lips put far from thee. ²⁵Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. ²⁶Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established. ²⁷Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from evil. Proverbs 4:10-27

I don‘t know that we know how to fix it so well after the fact, but rather we know how to avoid it which is by writing understandable code the first time round.

But we don’t always do that and then things get rewritten and broken etc

Welcome to life in software dev 2026, not so different from 1996

Well I’m sorry you feel that way. I don’t see “great point” used often but in terms of its agreeableness I can see how one could take it that way. (In fact I had a feeling someone would say that, but it was a concise wording for what I intended so I left it in).

I see it as a multiplier (the bicycle metaphor) and yes certainly getting across town on a bicycle or across the country on a plane is less cumbersome on your health than walking every where.

I don’t ride motorcycles, I rode a scooter for a long time doing a delivery job as a younger man and the speed and instability (of two wheeled motorized vehicles) along with lack of visibility to others creates a dangerous combination.

And yes I can see the corollaries there to AI usage especially in these days when the excitement of the acceleration is being found seductive by many and without much visibility into the longer term consequences.

Great point and I think it highlights the issue with talking about this topic because the terminology is so black and white, "AI made it" or "I made it". But the truth is more like I got on a bicycle that I did not build and rode a marathon through treacherous land that I have not been through before, but I have been through other treacherous land before and I had some scar tissue that helped me through this time. Jobs was on the money when he referred to the computer as being like a bicycle. ("for the mind" ... to finish the quote)

I think their major issue is actually naming. I don't think they have issues making well factored code because you can tell them how to factor it. You can even tell them how to name it. But that takes time. People want the functionality now without having to wait. So the well factored and well named stuff is a functoin of how much time you want to spend giving overview. I don't think you're going to have many cases where its faster to type each thing yourself. You can describe the details in a prompt which can be referenced as you review.

The issue is nobody is spending time in review because the stuff coming out "just works". So if no one is reading the code, what is the big deal with naming? The big deal is we need to know what our later sessions are talking about and we need linguistic separation of concerns.

A higher level form of programming, if you will. Linguistic precision seems to be where the specificity can be lost or won. The naming will reflect that with some degradation. But humans will also degrade the spirit of the specifications as well in many cases!

Hopefully this post makes some sense to someone.

What can I buy with all of my karma?

It just eats compute! My problems are not that hard! What a waste!