I don’t know if it’s necessary a bad thing. Presumably these people were enjoying the book until they read this. It’s kind of like the invention of the printing press. Sure, the content may not be artistically crafted any more, and there may be waaaay more slop. But I bet we will end up getting way more high quality content too.

You can’t automate these tasks without AI because anything that was capable of generalising to automating such a diverse set of tasks is AI.

Unless you’re never doing new development you can’t automate them. The kinds of tasks I’ve used this for:

• Making an HTML visualisation of some complex function inputs. One-off project. I could totally do this but it would take me way longer.
• Formatting a complex and very long SystemVerilog file. There aren’t any existing SystemVerilog formatters (and certainly none that would handle the insane level of ifdefs in this file).
• Writing a script to delete all Git branches at a particular commit. I only used this once.
• Writing an Asciidoctor custom annotation. I don’t know Ruby so…

You can’t automate any of those.

I think you’d have to be a very limited kind of developer - only working in some tiny niche - to make AI completely useless for you. Most programmers occasionally have to do tedious but simple throw-away tasks, or tasks in systems they aren’t familiar with. AI absolutely can save you time in these cases.

Even accounting for that (at least in countries with national healthcare), they’re definitely more expensive than regular employees.

The games programming industry is high stress, but apart from that it isn’t. I don’t think it’s known for burnouts any more than any other industry.

AI can absolutely save you time, if you use it right. Don’t expect it to magically be as good as a real programmer… but for instance I made an HTML visualisation of some stuff using Claude, and while it got it a bit wrong, fixing it took me maybe 20 minutes, while writing it from scratch would have taken me at least a couple of hours.

Yeah obviously. Whenever a company says “we can’t get enough X workers” they implicitly mean “at the price we want to pay”.

But that doesn’t mean they were wrong. Programming is still an amazingly well paying and low stress career. Being replaced by AI is a little worrying, but I think by the time AI is good enough to really replace programmers, it will also be able to replace most white collar jobs - HR, finance, etc. - and society will have bigger problems.

Since when are contractors lower pay? Companies waste fortunes on them.

I find the need to have an account in order to contribute to projects a deal breaker. It causes too much friction for no real gain. Email based workflows will always reign supreme. It’s the OG of code contributions.

This is dumb. I have followed the simple 12 step process to set up git send-email and it was so much more hassle than creating an account on GitHub or Codeberg or whatever, and in the end the UX is much worse.

What’s your job / where do you work then?

No developer is an island. By using an extremely unpopular VSC they increase the barrier to contribution for all external developers, miss out on support in tools and projects that only support Git, and they don’t get to benefit from the increased development effort that goes into more popular solutions.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/01/09/beyond-git-the-other-version-control-systems-developers-use/

Dead as in essentially nobody uses it. Apparently it’s used even less than SVN, which sounds kind of crazy. Doesn’t stop them developing it if they want I guess.

Facebook is relevant because they were one of the last major users of Mercurial and were big contributors to it. They’ve moved to their own VCS Sapling now though.

What what? Mercurial is dead. Not even Facebook use it any more.

It’s not a mirror. It’s the primary repository. And yes unfortunately they aren’t accepting PRs or using it for issue tracking, but it’s a start.

Interesting. I guess as long as it doesn’t have any false positives this seems like an ok idea.

Still, it would be definitely better if it could use tsc. They mention this… but don’t really say if the Go version of tsc will allow it. IMO the slowness of tsc is largely overblown.

Interesting. From the sounds of it Unity added their own API for it though.

It definitely is.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/32007523/265521

Games might be an area where it isn’t too bad since you can disable the GC while doing all your physics and graphics, and then just after you’ve dispatched a frame trigger a GC with a hard time limit.

I don’t know if Unity works like that but it should.