So you don't like writing "the boring code". What do you expect from writing a CRUD? What would you like to write? What "interesting problems" would you like to focus on? Great sadness will fall upon the industry when the last graybeard dies, who had this arcane knowledge of "writing code". I have bad Player Piano vibes nowdays.

Around me devs are beginning to warm up to the idea, that they are not coders (and neither should I be), but "prompt engineers". When I take too much time on a task, when I can't solve a problem with a push of a button, when I muse about copilot hallucinations in my PR - someone usually comes helpfully to tell me, I need better prompting skills. Have you tried this expression? Have you tried more context? Have you tried with this copy pasted magical formula?

No creative worker in human history was so overjoyed to devalue his or her work and knowledge in such haste.

Other side of the equation:

I remember learning C++ with something like valgrind. I would write stupid code, validate, fix stupid issues.

Others before me learned the harder way.

With LLMs right now I'm learning frontend by just generating the UIs I want.

I'm getting the code/mocks and experimenting.

It's bad code, i will need to adjust, but it helps immensely as a starting point same as valgrind helped in the past.

Trying to learn via searching for info just doesn't work as well with all the flood of spam.

I do not think that all LLMs are evil; they are valid tools, but it's not a hammer with meta glasses attached to render everything into a nail. I also find it very useful in certain situations - but not in all situations.

Two more things. Bad code (in work, in reality, not in a hobby project) is rarely converted into good code. And the last one: in my twenty plus years of being a dev, this is the first year job offers simply just dried up. With bad code being good enough (hey, it compiles! it mostly works!), hopefully you and I will be the lucky few to still be in the business five years later.

> Bad code (in work, in reality, not in a hobby project) is rarely converted into good code

Most code everywhere is bad code. Nobody cares unfortunately.

> And the last one: in my twenty plus years of being a dev, this is the first year job offers simply just dried up.

Actions of the US gov have caused a recession.

It's hard to find jobs in that environment

Put the blame where it's due.

AI is an excuse.

No company is going to hire now because of that.

There is also heavy bloat of incompetent software developers that needs to be shed.

Edit: Side note of shedding incompetent people

At work, I have a budget for tools, in the past this was handed over to contractors (think accenture).

They would come back with estimates of 1+ months, multiple developers and a manager for something I could do in a week.

They would deliver very poor quality and I had no choice.

With LLMs I can do the same quality of work in 30 minutes, then clean it up for a day and have a much better tool.

That budget is now used for other things and probably will be cut due to economic uncertainty.

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. The amount of time I've spent debugging other PRs (and mine) around hooks is just unruly, then React turned its attention to the server, something that I (most of us? we?) never ever asked for; but I guess that's what Meta, a company of cancer needs. I sure don't need it. Never have I imagined during the last 15 years that I'll be happy to say I'm using the mountain of enterprise spaghetti called Angular, but now I am. For years I hoped I'll be able to get back to React projects one day; that hope is long gone.

This is a description that turns on every red light in my head: "netflix for", "binge watching", "turning into", "keep you hooked", "but smarter" etc. - probably I'm not the target age demographic or maybe this is an American thing? Also, the meaning of literal, here, would be something like having a hamster named Duolingo and you built a gun to kill the animal. That's a literal killer appliance.

I respect China (in fact, in this stupid timeline more than the U.S.) but China is already huge. The whole world would be a much better place if China just chilled the fuck out and would just stop harassing border countries (I know, I know, this is true for at least two quarters of planet Earth). Let them have Taiwan if that would make them shut up, but it won't. Tributary system? Allowed to keep? Pressure Japan? How much more do you want and how long will you go back in history to justify your greed for power and territory? China is trying to look nice and they succeed in many places, they are very close to something of a heavenly kingdom in my book, but this behavior always makes me ask which face is real. The power hungry bully, or the wise emperor?

I think you’ve nailed it perfectly. China definitely has its imperialist side, but the way it operates is completely different from the US style. I often feel China’s foreign policy is kinda “dumb” in execution, but that’s just our national character at work. Take Myanmar as an example: if we were the US, it would be simple – send in troops, install a pro-China regime, done. But we’re not America, and we can’t do that without the entire Western media tearing us apart. So China’s approach is: “You guys fight it out yourselves, whoever wins, I’ll do business with them. Just don’t touch the projects and interests I already have.” This naturally makes ordinary people in those countries dislike China – they genuinely believe China is the root cause of many of their problems, and they think importing Western systems will let them solve everything and stand on their own. In reality, that probably won’t happen most of the time. But there’s no helping it; I don’t know what a “better” Chinese foreign policy would even look like. All I can say is China has been really lucky – thank Trump, thank Sanae Takaichi – they’ve helped us way more than people realize.

> Take Myanmar as an example: if we were the US, it would be simple – send in troops, install a pro-China regime, done. But we’re not America, and we can’t do that without the entire Western media tearing us apart.

The way to do it, is to propose a UN coalition invasion. Or to quietly provide arms to the side you like more (which never backfires).

A secret agent running in the background, with my data stolen from the foreground? How queer! I see the battlegrounds shift from large networks to the personal computer, where malware, hand in hand with AI will steal the virtual crown jewels day after day, slurping and leaking PII data non stop.

AI will be baked in so deep into the Windows eco- and subsystem, that it's a wet dream come true for hackers and nation state adversaries. It's a huge win for everyone selling hacking and security, virtual cops and robbers, black hats and white hats: only the end users and already piss poor facilities will suffer, but they're just collateral damage in a war of numbers and terabytes of leaks.

Is it any more "secret" then other background services like search index?

Probably. Apart from the pun about a certain good looking employee of MI6 and his gadgetry, at this point I'm relatively sure not even Redmond knows how many different products they have called Copilot Something, let alone how to kill them with a single switch, but of course we will see.

Copilot has neither eyes, nor feelings.

I wouldn't dare to call an app with a webview approach (be that tauri or electron), react, typescript and the whole frontend Pandora's box "sleek", but each to his own. I find using the adb bridge for such operation a bit of an overkill, but fortunately I don't own Apple made devices this year so I don't face such problems; maybe drastic times call for drastic measures: Apple's and Google's hatred towards end users is palpable these days. I took a quick look at the source and the naming convention is not "conventional" and the lack of eslint/prettier made me raise my eyebrows (raised it high enough to not want to touch this project with a ten foot pole), just like the 2452 line main App.tsx and the rampant useEffect abuse in it - but again, I'm not the target audience, maybe this is super useful for the poster and aesthetics have always been subjective.

Appreciate the code review eyes and honesty . Yeah the current App.tsx is admittedly dense.. refactoring and adding linting/prettier is next on the list. The choice of React and Tauri was pragmatic to move fast with technologies I’m comfortable with, but I’m open to suggestions to improve code quality and maintainability.

The general consensus around here is that web and sleek/native will not mix, Swift probably is the way to go if we are talking about modern, appealing MacOS applications, but that may be outside your comfort zone with or without the help of AI tools.

I call this the AI theater. If a company can (still) look good AND decrease dealing with pesky flesh and bone humans, that's not collateral, that's a win. On the surface you act caring, concerned, rendering investors and HR both happy while you decrease "human complexity" - then you are winning the AI game. Mozilla always wanted to join the big boys, but while yearning for their soft power status the yearn bore the fruits of a rotten soul they will also have to embrace. There is no light without shadows and AI's shadows are drawn long and deep.

English is not my mother tongue, so all I can say is no, that's not how communication works (of course you can think whatever you want or your neurons conjure up, I can't argue with what you think). Discourse analysis revolves around the dynamics of speaking, speakers and conversations: gender, age, empathy, attention there are lots of factors in play that decide who speaks and how or when the other party or parties can take turn (or whether the turn is given). Taking turns is not a social contract; it's a rule in your head. You're free to decide to punish people for violating rules in your head, but depending on the level of punishment, you may end up in court.

Raising my hand is not punishment. People are free to fear I will slap them but I didn't do it until I do.

Yes, the settings play a roll of course. The joke is best with other males of the same age. It's not funny with kids or woman.

Social contract, rule in my head? I don't know if there is a difference.

Glorify? This seems way too serious a take on a game that young males play because of a common, innate fascination with guns and soldiers. 99.9999% of them do not turn into manic killers who just love to kill and glorify it.

> because of a common, innate fascination with guns

Your brain after 200+ years of american propaganda... it's innate in the sense that you're bathed in it from birth through movies and games, and that a good chunk of your economy relies on producing weapons and using them.

I feel like young males in all times would be innately fascinated with equivalents like bows and arrows and swords.

Yet most computer games employ firearms and the targets are other humans, rarely (but of course not never) you hunt and gather food for survival. Don't get me wrong, I played my fair share of games from the earliest 8bit machines in the eighties to modern day shooters but in my opinion glorification comes unintended and killing is a cheap game mechanic, and has always been: here, in backwater European country, middle of nowhere, we have zero domestic gun violence, maybe even 0.0001% is just too much.

And yet the US does have a serious problem with (mostly) young males turning into manic killers.

I'm reminded of that scene in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine where he's asking a concerned adult where the violence comes from, and the concerned adult looks sad and confused and says he doesn't know, even though he's standing in front of a nuclear-tipped missile being assembled at the local nuclear-tipped missile plant.

Financialisation is indirect personal violence instead of physical violence. The US doesn't have a problem with that at any scale, as long as the right kinds of people are doing it.