Go team!

If you asked the president of the United States to point to Denmark on a map, you would be lucky if he hit the correct continent so… I’m going with “plausible.”

Any idiot can write code. “Vibe coding” is just the new pasting code from stack overflow. For that matter, a lot of LLM generated code probably came from stack overflow.

Your value as a developer is not in your ability to rapidly pump out code. Your value is in your ability to design and build complex systems using the tools at your disposal.

As an industry, software engineering has not yet been forced to reckon with the consequences of “vibe coding.” The consequences being A.) the increasing number of breaches that will occur due to poor security practices and B.) the completely unmanageable mountain of technical debt. A lot of us have been here before. Particularly on the tech debt front. If you’ve ever been on a project where the product team continually pushes to release features as fast as possible, everything else be damned, then you know what I mean. Creating new code is easy. Maintaining old code is hard.

Everything starts out great. The team keeps blowing through milestones. Everyone on the business side is happy. Then, a couple years into the project, strange things start happening. It’s kind of innocuous at first. Seemingly easy tickets take longer to complete than they used to. The PR change logs get longer and longer. Defect rates skyrocket. Eventually, new feature development grinds to a halt and the product team starts frantically asking, “what the hell is going on?”

A question to which maybe one or two of the more, senior devs respond, "Well, uh, we have a lot of technical debt. I mean A LOT. We’re having to spend tons of time refactoring just to make minor changes. And of course, unplanned refactoring tends to introduce bugs.

The product team gets an expression on their face like Wyle E. Coyote as the shadow of a falling ACME anvil closes in around him. At this moment, they have two choices. Option A.) develop a plan to mitigate the existing tech debt and realign the dev teams objectives to help prevent this situation again by focusing on quality over quantity. Option B.) ignore the problem and try to ram feature development back on track by sheer force of will.

Only one of these options will achieve meaningful outcome and it’s not “B”. Unfortunately, in my experience that’s often the chosen option. The product team does not understand that while Option A impedes feature development, it’s only temporary. Option B impedes feature development permanently.

We’re going to see a very similar cycle with vibe coding. It just takes time to materialize. Personally, I think the tech debt for vibe codes projects will be compounded due to the sheer verbosity of LLM’s and the fact that no one actually understands a vibe coded project well enough to fix it.

That said, these issues are rooted in hubris and ignorance. Failure to appreciate the “engineering” part of software engineering. This is not something you alone can change.

The AI hype is going to disappear. Probably sooner than later. Just like every other tech hype cycle before it. But, LLM’s are probably here to stay so we have to make the best of it. I don’t usually use LLM’s for code generation. There are better tools for that already. I do use them frequently for research. Honestly, using an LLM with search incorporated is often a lot faster than scouring dozens of websites to figure out how to do something. You still have to take the information with a grain of salt as much as you would with anything on the Internet because LLM’s have no understanding of the text they spit out and will feed you incorrect information without missing a beat.

If I were you, I would focus on quality over quantity. Closing tickets faster is pointless if you’re introducing a bunch of new bugs. If your bosses don’t know that already, they will learn it soon enough.

Residents of Northwest Arkansas: “First time?”

You mean social media in general?

Typically, social media serves one purpose: to make money. This is done primarily in two ways: selling user data and selling advertising. Both of these require user engagement and unfortunately the philosophy of all the major players has been engagement at all costs.

The impact on society at large has been overwhelmingly negative. I could go on at length about the numerous ways I believe social media has been a detriment but that would make for a very long response.

I remember before Facebook started tailoring their algorithms to maximize engagement. Your feed was just in chronological order. It wasn’t too bad. After the first algorithm change – 12ish years ago if I remember right – it started to go downhill very quickly. My feed became extremely negative in a relatively short time. That’s why I ditched Facebook and pretty much every other mainstream social media platform.

So the main problem with mainstream social media is that it’s driven by greed. That has created a whole host of other problems.

It’s a bold strategy, Cotton.

Second Protectli. They are solid little x86 boxes with no moving parts.

It’s got wheels and everything. You can literally just roll it right to the scrap yard.

I saw a job posting the other day that had a hard requirement of 7+ years of experience with a specific IDE. It was phrased as an absolute must have.

That’s how you know an organization is totally clueless. TBF, not all IDE’s are created equal but it would be kind of like a construction foreman refusing to hire a anyone who didn’t have 7+ years of experience with DeWalt power tools.

“Mooommm! He hit me back!”

People, especially younger people, need to get on board with the idea of supporting quality journalism financially. The decline in traffic is concerning in and of itself but print journalism as an industry has been circling the drain for years because advertisers and subscribers have increasingly abandoned the medium. Good quality reporting is an art. One that LLM’s are wholly incapable of.

I recently cancelled my Office 365 subscription because I’m no longer willing to financially support Microsuck’s bullshit. It was hard too. There isn’t another groupware solution that works as well as Exchange. It was important enough for me to make the move despite that. I’m not completely cured of my Windows dependency yet but I’m working on it.

Mad Men. It’s one of the TV GOAT’s for good reasons.

Next week, we will spend 3 days trying to get the product team to pick out a dress only for them to insist that the one that is way too small “will fit” and that the dev can just “alter it real quick and it will be fine.” Even despite loud protests from the dev team that they cannot alter it and it will not be fine.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t fine.

Ohio missing the “good old days” when their rivers were flamable.

“I slipped on my beans.” > “Say my name.”

From now on, I will [continue to] not use ChatGPT.

“Success” is relative. Don’t believe the lie that you have to have lots of money and stuff to be successful.

Also, I’ve heard it said, “if you find yourself in a room where you’re the smartest person, you’re in the wrong room.”

I’ve been very fortunate, at times, to work with people who were incredibly good at their jobs or just wise people in general. I don’t think any of those people saw themselves as anything special. They just knew something I didn’t and were happy to share. I learned a lot from them. But I have so much more to learn. I’m ok with that. It keeps things interesting.

Aaaannnnnddd the server crashed.

I feel this. I started playing the piano again early in the pandemic. I did not appreciate it when I was a kid and my mom made us each practice for an hour a day but I appreciate it now.