I agree with you. Even if you never touch it, it’s nice to know what the libraries you’re calling are doing under the hood.

maybe this will work

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linting and unit tests

Yeah, the goddamn wooden spoon. I remember being noisy in a crib and my mom storming into the room screaming and busting the spoon in half on the side of the crib. She’d already hit me with it so I knew exactly what it meant. I got spoons, open hand, and hairbrushes for most of my childhood. Hair pulling, pinching, and ear-twisting too if we were in a situation where she couldn’t just haul off and hit me.

The funny thing is, she called me up about a decade ago and asked if I could remember anything about my childhood that was bad. And rather than list everything off, I told her about the time she broke the spoon on the crib. That’s when I found out that it hadn’t happened at all, and in fact if it had happened it was because the spoon was old and brittle and if she’d done anything at all it would have been a light tap on the side of the crib to get my attention, and now that she remembers it yeah that’s exactly what happened. It just fell apart in her hands. We didn’t talk for a few years because of that and other things.

After my daughter was born, she sent us a package that included two beautiful olivewood spoons from Israel. I use the fuckers when I’m making pasta. She calls or texts every once in a while warning me about protecting my daughter dark, evil things in the world. This usually happens when she sees a picture of my kid playing with a toy spider or a halloween skull. And I just chuckle and agree that there are dark, evil things in the world and I’m doing my damndest to protect her from them.

Not the flex he thinks it is.

A thing that hallucinates uncompilable code but somehow convinces your boss it’s a necessary tool.

And he gets all icky when he sees blood.

J. D. Vance sounds like a men’s big & tall outlet with weird font on their sign.

Oh same, and we need more dems like her in general, but I’m not going to be too disappointed when she chases Pelosi’s job instead.

AOC wants to be Speaker, not President.

Source: how it went the first time

As someone whose employer is strongly pushing them to use AI assistants in coding: no. At best, it’s like being tied to a shitty intern that copies code off stack overflow and then blows me up on slack when it magically doesn’t work. I still don’t understand why everyone is so excited about them. The only tasks they can handle competently are tasks I can easily do on my own (and with a lot less re-typing.)

Sure, they’ll grow over the years, but Altman et al are complaining that they’re running out of training data. And even with an unlimited body of training data for future models, we’ll still end up with something about as intelligent as a kid that’s been locked in a windowless room with books their whole life and can either parrot opinions they’ve read or make shit up and hope you believe it. I’ll think we’ll get a series of incompetent products with increasing ability to make wrong shit up on the fly until C-suite moves on to the next shiny bullshit.

That’s not to say we’re not capable of creating a generally-intelligent system on par with or exceeding human intelligence, but I really don’t think LLMs will allow for that.

tl;dr: a lot of woo in the tech community that the linux community isn’t as on board with

Steps to test: “Idk try some shit”

Trump becoming president and having MUCH worse policies for the Palestinians becomes much greater.

Oh you mean Donald “Let’s try to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem because appearing neutral in the Israel/Palestine mess is hurting my chances of re-election” Trump? That guy? People actually think he’s going to be better for Palestinians? Really?

Yep. This is the way. Also, you’d be surprised how many devs don’t run through their own QA steps before asking other people to verify.

Yuck.

“I’m a specialized clerk interested in mathematics” if you don’t wanna get burned.

At some point, they’re gonna have to debug it.

Dang, Nick Hexum aged well.

If you’re trying to pull your weight, and it sounds like you are, the problem is either with the tasks, the codebase, or the teammates:

Potential problems with the tasks:

• they’re not researched sufficiently
  • is this doable?
  • should we we even be doing this?
  • have we actually thought about how hard this will be, or did someone say “well that should be trivial” a bunch?
• there’s not enough info on the tickets
  • inexperienced leads tend to just shit out tickets with zero info and underpoint them
• they’re not broken down into small enough pieces
  • are you working “implement X” tickets while everyone else is working a series of “implement X: step N” tickets?

A ticket needs: clear repro documents (if necessary), screenshots, and clear steps to reproduce. It needs more than “Title: Add X to Y. Description: We need Y in X. Implement it.” unless you’re intimately familiar with the codebase. And even if you are, you still need a paper trail to back up what you’re doing. If you’re not closing tickets, be very chatty in the comments. Share where you are, problems you’re running into, and who you’re waiting on for help. If there’s a consistent theme to the things you’re fighting, keep a list of them and bring them to your manager. Be your own advocate and be very transparent about all the research you’re doing because other people didn’t.

Potential problems with the codebase:

• someone preemptively optimized it
• it’s not documented well
• it’s spidery bullshit code that someone has deep emotional attachment to

Hey, it works. But it’s not documented, someone decided to be clever instead of elegant, the local story sucks, or it’s optimized to such a degree that you have to refactor just to add a simple option ("lol why would we ever need that data here? It’s inefficient!)

Potential problems with teammates:

• they’re not supporting you
• they’re grabbing easy tasks because you’re the “code whisperer”
• they didn’t know what they were doing either so they’re vague when you ask them questions

Everyone pulls their weight. Everyone communicates in clear, declarative sentences and provides examples if necessary. “I don’t know” is an acceptable answer. Evasiveness, vagueness, specialized jargon, or acronyms point to the dev being insecure about their knowledge in that area. Be very suspicious of the word “should”: “that should work”, “that shouldn’t be hard”, “you should be able to…”

And, as an aside, I’ve seen this happen a lot. A new dev or contractor comes on, blows through tickets, gets good marks, and an existing dev or two get called out for not contributing with the same frequency. One of two things are happening here: the new devs are getting softballs, or they’re creating a lot of subtle tech debt that someone else will have to fix because they don’t have a full picture of the codebase. Eventually, those devs will be where everyone else is, but it’s still frustrating.

Hang in there.

It’s funny how soon they realize they want a good one.