There are a wide number of small problems for which we do not need bridges.
As a stupid example, I hate the functionality that YouTube has to maintain playlists. However, I don't have the time to build something by hand. It turns out that the general case is hard, but the "for me" case is vibe codable. (Yes, I could code it myself. No, I'm not going to spend the time to do so.)
Or, using the Jira API to extract the statistics I need instead of spending a Thursday night away from the family or pushing out other work.
Or, any number of tools that are within my capabilities but not within my time budget. And there's more potential software that fits this bill than software that needs to be bridge-stable.
But the person I replied to seemed to be talking about a task agenda for their professional work, not a todo list of bespoke little weekend hobby hacks that might be handy "around the house".
You assume they were talking about a single product. at my job there is essentially endless amounts of small tasks. We have many products and clients we have many internal needs, but can't really justify the human capital. Like I might write 20 to 50 Python scripts in a week just to visualize the output of my code. Dead boring stuff like making yet another matplotlib plot, simple stats, etc. Sometimes some simple animations. there is no monstrosity being built, this is not evidence of tagging on features or whatever you think must be happening, it's just a lot of work that doesn't justify paying a bay area principal engineer salary to do in the face of a board that thinks the path to riches is laying off the people actually making things and turning the screws on the remaining people struggling to keep up with the workflow.
Work is finite, but there can be vastly more available than there are employees to do it for many reasons, not just my personal case.
Why? It turns out that I try to read people who have a different perspective than I do. Why am I trying to read everything that just confirms my current biases?
(Unless those writings are looking to dehumanize or strip people of rights or inflame hate - I'm not talking about propaganda or hate speech here.)
Personally when I go to the grocery store I pick fruits and vegetables that are ripe or are soon to be ripe, and I stay away from meat that is close to expiration or has an off putting appearance or odour to it.
Louvre get sort of boring, since the time period they cover stops at the time when art gets more and more interesting (mid 1800s). Before that every painting is basically Jesus or boobs.
This year they made a brilliant thing: they put haute couture one-off fashion items on display throughout the royal wing.
Who knew Loubutin and Alexander MacQueen shoes or Dior and Gucci handbags would feel so absolutely natural among the dresses and tapestries and jewellery :)
Other than the theme, what's the difference between typing what you want into Slack and maybe getting it can typing it into ChatGPT and maybe getting it?
> Can "AI" in its current form deliver value? Sure, and it absolutely does but it's more in the form of "several hours saved per FTE per week" than "several FTEs saved per week".
Yes but...
First, what we're seeing with coding is that it is just exposing the next bottleneck quickly. The bottlenecks are always things that don't lend themselves to LLMs yet.
Second, that still can mean 4 hours a week for 20-50 bucks. At US white collar wages, that might mean 8 people are needed rather than 9. In profit centers that's more budget for advancing goals. At cost centers, though, that's a reduction in headcount.
It's more nuanced. If I even have a few lines I can prove are mine, those parts are copywritable in the same way Pride and Prejudice is public domain but pride and prejudice and zombies is copyrighted.
It's much harder on many surgeries. They come in with "it depends" and completely avoid discussing it. The doctors often do not even know, and those who know will refuse to discuss. On top of that, consultations are not free and often expensive.
We have a price for the total infrastructure spend per dev, and that includes things like AWS prices and all of the tooling like jira and github.
But you absolutely shouldn't have to pay for your own tools. (That said, blue collar people often have to, unlike us, and that's also awful.) But also, it's their productivity. If you are all laboring under the same constraints, it's their choice to make if they care about your productivity.
We are getting to storage solutions already. But I think many of us think nuclear for base load and massively overbuilt solar and wind so that we can handle the full electrification of our system would be a net economic win as well as an environmental one.
Also, consider that we have a connected grid outside of Texas and that the weather is not usually bad everywhere.
The problem is that there isn’t any ”base load” when you’ve introduced renewables.
Take a look at the South Australian grid for a peek into the future. How would you introduce a nuclear baseload to this grid? Turn it off for days on end when renewables deliver?
That was my first thought as well, but interfaces that take care of pluralization with an i18n framework can handle all of these.
It just takes longer and is at the expense of another feature. In truth, it mostly takes more skill - once you have that skill, it's another 5 minutes. There are a few edge cases, but you largely have the necessary context to translate a string. You have to translate the string in its entirety instead of relying on composition of translated chunks. (This is already best practice.)
As a stupid example, I hate the functionality that YouTube has to maintain playlists. However, I don't have the time to build something by hand. It turns out that the general case is hard, but the "for me" case is vibe codable. (Yes, I could code it myself. No, I'm not going to spend the time to do so.)
Or, using the Jira API to extract the statistics I need instead of spending a Thursday night away from the family or pushing out other work.
Or, any number of tools that are within my capabilities but not within my time budget. And there's more potential software that fits this bill than software that needs to be bridge-stable.
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