At one point in my life I was working on a massive Android AOSP fork that itself had lots of variants for different downstream devices. Custom drivers, specialty services, etc. Thousands of people were actively working on all parts of it, and it had been around for at least a decade.

There was incredible tooling around onboarding, local dev, testing, PR management, CI/CD, and post-release telemetry. Almost everything was automated. All code was reviewed at least once, and sometimes more for critical components. It was an immediate rejection if there wasn’t sufficient test coverage. Big subsystems took months to architect, build, and deploy.

Nobody got to cowboy things and just push to release. It was much slower than a solo or a few people at a startup. The whole point was consistency and predictability, and you could see why.

Github actions and docker containers. A match made in heck.

I’ve always appreciated the feature of AI coding tools, where they confidently tell you they’ve done something completely wrong. Then if you call them on it, they super-confidently say: “Of course, here’s what needs to be done…”

Then proceed to do something even worse.

My first tech job out of college, I was told to go talk to “Dave,” the guru old-timey programmer and learn the lay of the land. He turned out to be this crotchety old guy, with low tolerance for idiots, but a soft spot for someone who actually paid attention.

A few months in, I was told to go fix a feature in the company’s main product which was sold to power utilities. This was a MASSIVE code base, with a mix of C, C++, assembler, and a bit of Fortran thrown in. I spent a week poring through all the code trying to figure things out. Then I hit a mystery workflow that didn’t make sense.

I walk over to Dave’s office and ask a specific question. Now, mind you, he had worked on this years ago, and had long moved on to new products. He leans back in his chair, stares at the ceiling, then without looking at the screen once tells me to go look at such and such file for such and such variable, and a list of functions that were related. I go back to my desk and damn if it wasn’t EXACTLY as he described.

Now, I’m probably as old as he was then. I don’t remember what I wrote an hour ago. No matter what I build, I’ll always be in awe of Dave and what he could keep in his head.

Getting less programmer_humor and more “I didn’t get the promo” angry vibe from this.