This doesnt fit either the peaceful nor prosperous except Malaysia/Indonesia maybe.
UAE directly finances the sanguinary RSF in Sudan and CTS in Yemen, Saudi Arabia/Qatar has financed institutions behind the expansion of the Muslim Brotherhood/Salafism in the worlld and Turkey has a shaky economy with a large underbelly as well as engaging in their own brand of imperialism abroad.
Worlds collide. Jack is a hack. Literally. He does not review books in any meaningful capacity, he takes other people’s reviews and restates them. He doesn’t read most of the books. He is, unfortunately, the perfect example of a social media something. Entirely performative, zero substance. The article hand waves it away as online abuse (“Edwards is subject to copious online abuse”) but doesn’t interrogate it. Maybe, if he is so often accused of plagiarism and not reading books… there is something to it? You only need to actually watch his videos (and not these fawning articles) to realize the complete absence of any literary critique. There are thousands of thoughtful literary critics on TikTok and YouTube, it is sad to see Jack stealing their work and credit. He has great agents though.
I’m not anti-AI but it isn’t part of my workflow. You’re describing yourself as someone unable to achieve your ideas without AI. That’s fine. But there are many people who have spent years building the skills necessary to be able to realize all of their ideas, and that their ideas are inextricably linked to the process. I wouldn’t have the ideas I have today if I didn’t spend years of my life in my editor. I could defer to Claude code for all my work, and I’d be frozen in time, never to progress again, losing everything that makes my work my work.
Perhaps something will change, but right now, Claude code does not change anything for me. If what I do is ancient and quaint, so be it. I’m not competing for who can churn out the most code, never have, never will, because that’s not what software development is about.
>> You’re describing yourself as someone unable to achieve your ideas without AI.
I did not say that.
>> But there are many people who have spent years building the skills necessary to be able to realize all of their ideas, and that their ideas are inextricably linked to the process.
I have been designing and building software for 35 years and have many open source projects.
You are implying that I don’t know how to program and I need AI to build stuff. Evidence to the contrary is on my GitHub.
It’s typical anti AI to suggest that you must love AI because you have no real skill.
If a skilled developer can achieve something in 1 week with 1,000 lines of code but it would take you 1 year and 1 million lines of code, is the issue that you don't have enough time, or that you don't have the necessary skills?
There is no shame whatsoever in using AI. You've edited your comment since I replied. I am not anti-AI. If you can build great things with or without AI, whether it takes 1 day or 1 week, or 1 year, it doesn't matter: good software is good software. Many very talented developers are using AI. There is also no shame in not having certain skills.
I am responding to "can’t get my head around why a developer wouldn’t want to use AI assisted programming". I explained that there are many developers who have a process that doesn't benefit from being able to generate lots of code very quickly. You said AI enables you to create "things that previously I’d have known how to design but not build in any reasonable timeframe". I'm happy for you, I'm glad AI has given you that, but there are many types of developer, many for whom that isn't a benefit of AI.
Reddit is filled with vibecoders sharing how vibecoding is a panacea because it enabled them to build an idea they've always wanted to build but never had the time. When pressed, they reveal an idea that could be achieved very simply but their vision for how it should be built is very complicated and unsophisticated. They needed AI to achieve it because their design needed millions of lines of code. I assume you're one of those people. And that's okay.
I am bad at math. Asking AI to do math for me will always be faster than doing it myself. However, unlike you, I can get my head around the reality that mathematicians are more efficient at doing math themselves.
> I wouldn’t have the ideas I have today if I didn’t spend years of my life in my editor.
You are confusing abstraction with implementation.
Abstraction is the tool that allows you to build bigger and better architectures. Implementation is just putting knowledge into practice. And that can be automated away. Compilers, code generators, DSLs, interpreters, and template languages are all examples of automating practical implementation details.
I would wager most people learn about computing top-down (start with a high level language like Python before exploring C or C++, or getting into kernel or embedded systems firmware development) rather than bottom-up (learning Maxwell's equations, Boolean algebra, logic gates, digital circuit design, CPU architectures, machine language, operating systems, C++, Python, ...)
Exploring the levels of abstraction is great for an inquisitive mind. But it isn't for everybody. Knowing all of the great designs for digital circuits doesn't give you any great ideas for software design. No one has to know anything about operating systems or memory models to build an OpenAPI client or server interface. That's the power of abstraction.
> I could defer to Claude code for all my work, and I’d be frozen in time, never to progress again, losing everything that makes my work my work.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What makes you believe you would never be curious enough to explore a new knowledge domain with Claude?
You're telling me that whatever motivated you to spend years in your editor would strangely evaporate the moment you begin using a new tool? Why? Are you just confident you that you _want_ to give up on being interested in new things? I'm really having trouble rationalizing the claim. It would have to be self-sabotage.
“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is trained using human-created content. If humans stop producing new content and rely solely on AI, online content across the world may become repetitive and stagnant.
If your content is not AI-generated, add the badge to your work.”
Software is a manifestation of someone’s knowledge of and experience in and ideas about how a thing should work. We learn from the software we use, we benefit from everyone else’s ideas, we benefit from the hundreds and thousands of hours other people put into understanding a problem to design a solution. My workflow is better because of the incremental improvements made by developer after developer year after year. Would we have Claude Code if our foredevelopers hadn’t spent thousands of hours deep in thought, obsessing over every last detail?
Building all the software you use yourself, whether by hand or by vibe coding, cuts you off from the world.
I have no philosophical objection to vibe-coding apps for yourself, but personally, I wouldn’t be 1/10th of the engineer I am if I wasn’t constantly exposed to the work of others.
For some, this trend worries software engineers — who needs software if they can vibe code it themselves? — but I am much more optimistic. I think people will start valuing good software a lot more. Claude code can deliver the first 90%, but we all know it is the last 90% that differentiates.
I like to say "my code is 200% vibe-coded; the tricky bit is figuring out which 100% to keep".
Decisions matter, both technical and product ones. LLMs don't make as good technical or product decisions as I would, and the way I work with them tries to maximize my strengths and the LLM's strengths. I don't know if I succeed, but it's better than "make me an app like X" as a prompt.
Your quote caused me to consider vibecoding through the analogy of an LLM-human system as a subtractive synthesizer: the LLM is the oscillator, and the human is the filter.
> I think people will start valuing good software a lot more.
How will people determine what is good software and what is not? Even experienced engineers can't tell just by looking at the final product.
Some of the most solid rock-solid applications I see were built years ago and still look primitive (native Windows 7 controls, etc). Many of the worst, bug-infested anti-user software looks slick and modern.
> Claude code can deliver the first 90%, but we all know it is the last 90% that differentiates.
My experience with trying to complete that last 10% of a CC generated project is that it's all very alien looking; very uncanny-valley vibes, and I have serious velocity issues because of the lack of coherence.
> Building all the software you use yourself, whether by hand or by vibe coding, cuts you off from the world.
No one is doing that. In foreseeable future I don't see people making their own OSs, browsers and drivers. Workplaces never ditched Offices and Windows for the open source counterparts and they are certainly not going to do that for vibe coded solutions.
Making your own software is a good way to escape enshittification and influence.
I switched from Spotify to buying MP3s and using my own audio client, because I'm fed up of a company telling me which music I should listen to every single time I open the app. It costs more, but I own the music and I escape the constant redesigns, price increases and influential behaviour.
Most apps are very simple and there isn't too much to learn, especially if you're building it to scale to a userbase of yourself. I can't see the need for a ton of CRUD apps which demand subscription fees personally. If you build them yourself, you get to keep your own data, build it out the way you want it, keep it that way, and use computers as a person using a tool as opposed to a customer buying a product.
I did MP3s on my plex server for a while but with endless new music added to my playlists it became a hassle and Apple Music was just convenient and Shazam adding any song I hear and like is just too easy...it also plays perfectly on my Apple Watch over cellular when I go for a run, but everyone has their own use case and where they want to spend their time...
That's understandable. I have quite minimal music taste so my setup worked for me. I only listen to music at home when I'm not doing anything else and it's mostly classical so there doesn't tend to be too much to add at any given time.
A minimal web client audio player with some basic database tables in the back for organising and searching does me fine.
Your entire post is self selection bias and survivorship bias.
SWE field is one of the most cognitive dissonant social groups; cries foul at the slightest whiff their free speech and agency is being put upon; seeks to reduce blockers to their productivity, fewer PMs! Less management!
Now complains about users using their machines without having to block on an SWE.
Insert that quote about how someone will not see the obvious if their paycheck relies on them ignoring the obvious.
Here come LLMs and all they can accomplish with a few arithmetical rules instead of the arbitrary semantics of an SWE; watch as SWEs block social evolution away from disrupting software engineers.
As an example; "protected memory", among many other individual software problems, is an access control problem mired in old semantics relative to OS monoliths.
Didn’t see you all halting as you decimated travel agent jobs, retail jobs, etc etc. Technology advancement must now stand still after centuries of evolution? The self selection bias is as obvious as Trump's.
That said, to address your broader point: me, personally, I am thrilled that the barrier to entry for building software has been all but eliminated. The joy of creation belongs to us all.
you couldn't have missed GP's point any more if you tried. ignoring the ad-hominems about SWE greed:
these tools have been trained on decades of people "obsessing over every last detail". what GP is arguing is that we're detaching from that: you prompt, you get something that works, it doesn't matter how it got there. we're now entering the world where the majority of code will be vibed. So whatever our foredevelopers came up with, that will be the the final chapter of craftsman-produced, understood, code. whatever the previous generation actually learned about software engineering, that's at an end too, because why bother learning when i can prompt.
there's no stopping this transition, obviously. the next generation of tools will be trained on the current generation of tools' generated code. we're passed the "termination shock" of sofwtare understanding.
Oh I got it just fine. I was knocking their point artisanal software will make a comeback.
Am an EE and have argued against all the developer gibberish and self aggrandizement for years. It's just electromagnetic geometry of the machine to me.
Most software out there is all the gibberish devs need to do their job. Burns a lot of resources clinging to it. Completely useless to using a computer how most users will.
Vectors as a uniform layer of abstraction, rather than arbitrary namespaces a programmer finds cheeky, will obsolete a bunch of gibberish.
>Didn’t see you all halting as you decimated travel agent jobs, retail jobs, etc etc.
You have to remember that SWE's are the same group that screams "communism" the first moment you mention the word union and they should have the right to make as much money as possible with no restrictions.
This of course leads to the obvious lack of self reflection in their responses when something threatens their future income.
"Transportation, like software, is accumulated knowledge. The horse embodied centuries of breeding, training, and hard-won understanding about terrain, endurance, and failure. People learned from the horses they rode. Travel improved through incremental refinement, generation after generation. The automobile didn’t appear in a vacuum.
Building all your transportation yourself—whether by breeding horses or assembling a Model T—cuts you off from that accumulated experience. You lose the benefits of thousands of hours spent by others thinking carefully about the same problems.
I have no objection to Model Ts for personal use, but I wouldn’t be one-tenth the traveler I am without constant exposure to well-bred horses.
Some worry cars make horses obsolete—who needs breeders if anyone can buy an engine? I’m more optimistic. As cars proliferate, people will value good horses more. A Model T gets you the first 90%; it’s the last 90%—judgment, robustness, and adaptability—that differentiates."
Germany is your problem. If you’re open to looking outside Germany, there are many options. You can open a U.K. company same day, an Estonian company with e-residency in a couple of days. Germany is uniquely nightmarish.
Seems like a broader version of what Estonia are already doing with e-residency[1]. Registering a company online in a few hours is already easy in a few jurisdictions around the world (e.g: the U.K.[2]) so this isn’t a particularly revolutionary but the intent it signals is good.
> business operation across different countries, a real bottleneck for EU SMEs
Is it actually a "real bottleneck" for EU SMEs? Granted, I've only participated in help growing 3 companies from the scale of 3-4 developers > ~100-150 and from national sales to international, but "going worldwide" or "EU wide" was never the bottleneck we had. The most tricky part was figuring out exactly how to do VAT for every single country, but after a session with a accountant + setting up the guidelines + creating a .csv, that's basically it. Besides that, it was basically smooth sailing.
Today I'm sure there even are hosted services that does all of that stuff automatically for you, probably with Stripe integration as well.
What exactly is that bottleneck you're referring to?
There's a reason I rarely see local subsidiaries of cool small companies from other EU countries - it's too complicated to open them, have a couple of local employees on a payroll, handle notarization, translations of documents, not to mention labor laws etc.
The bottleneck is having a standardized SAFE for Europe. Global investors must be able to invest without having to understand Italian and Polish corporate law
That's a different thing all together, but a good point nonetheless. Always been dealing with local investors when building startups, because of that.
The claim was that "business operation across different countries" is a "a real bottleneck for EU SMEs" currently, I don't think that has anything to do with investors?
Soft deletes are an example of where engineers unintentionally lead product instead of product leading engineering. Soft delete isn’t language used by users so it should not be used by engineers when making product facing decisions.
“Delete” “archive” “hide” are the type of actions a user typically wants, each with their own semantics specific to the product. A flag on the row, a separate table, deleting a row, these are all implementation options that should be led by the product.
> Soft delete isn’t language used by users so it should not be used by engineers when making product facing decisions.
Users generally don’t even know what a database record is. There is no reason that engineers should limit their discussions of implementation details to terms a user might use.
> “Delete” “archive” “hide” are the type of actions a user typically wants, each with their own semantics specific to the product.
Users might say they want “delete”, but then also “undo”, and suddenly we’re talking about soft delete semantics.
> A flag on the row, a separate table, deleting a row, these are all implementation options that should be led by the product.
> Users might say they want “delete”, but then also “undo”, and suddenly we’re talking about soft delete semantics.
I've worked for a company where some users managed very personal informations on behalf of other users, like, sometimes, very intimate data and I always fought product on soft deletion.
Users are adults, and when part of their job is being careful with the data _they_ manage and _they_ are legally responsible for, I don't feel like the software owes them anything else than a clear information about what is going to happen when they click on "CONFIRM DELETION".
"Archive" is a good pattern for those use cases. It's what have been used for decades for OS "Recycle Bin". Why not call it Delete if you really want to but in this case, bring a user facing "Recycle Bin" interface and be clear than anything x days old will be permanently deleted.
Right, but I think that the Recycle Bin is exactly what is causing the issue here. Users have been taught for decades that if they delete something, it is not really gone, as they can always just go back to their Recycle Bin or Deleted Items folder and restore it. (I have worked with clients that used the Deleted Items folder in Outlook as an archive for certain conversations, and would regularly reference it.)
So users have been taught that the term "delete" means "move somewhere out of my sight". If you design a UI and make "delete" mean something completely different from what everyone already understands it to mean, the problem is you, not the user.
> Users have been taught for decades that if they delete something, it is not really gone
There are stories all over the internet involving people who leave stuff in their recycle bin or deleted items and then are shocked when it eventually gets purged due to settings or disk space limits or antivirus activity or whatever.
Storing things you care about in the trash is stupid behavior and I hope most of these people learned their lessons after the one time. But recycle bin behavior is beneficial to a much larger set of people, because accidental deletion is common, especially for bulk actions. “Select all these blurry photos, Delete, Confirm, Oh, no! I accidentally deleted the last picture of my Grandma!”
Recycle bin behavior can also make deletion smoother because it allows a platform to skip the Confirm step since it’s reversible.
End users do all kinds of stuff, but as a developer you're supposed to gather (even elicit, at times!) requirements from users or stakeholders who act as proxies for actual users.
Store something so you can read it in a year or even after a blackout is a user requirement, which leads to persistence.
And if this is a user requirement, deleting ("un-storing") is a user requirement too.
"I want to delete something but I also want to recover it" is another requirement.
Of course,you could also have regulatory requirements pointing to hard-deleting or not hard-deleting anything, but this also holds for a lot of other issues (think UX - accessibility can be constrained by regulations, but you also want users to somehow have a general idea of the user experience).
Why would implementation details be led by product? “Undo” is an action that the user may want, which would be led by product. Not the implementation in the db.
I believe that was the point. Soft delete isn't a product requirement, it's an implementation detail, so product teams should talk about the user experience using language like "delete" or "archive" or "undo" or "customer support retrieves deleted data".
Yeah: You don't "delete" a bank account, you close it, and you don't "undo", you reopen it, etc. The processes have conditions, audit rules, attached information, side-effects, etc. In some cases the same entity can't be restored, and you have to instead create a successor.
"Undo" may work as shorthand for "whatever the best reversing actions happen to be", but as any system grows it stops being simple.
> most people who hate Slack are probably using it because their org says so, and their org doesn't think it sucks
I agree in part but you are underestimating the power of inertia. A lot of organizations use Slack because they use Slack. Moving from Slack to something else is a headache. The OP could build an objectively better product than Slack by every single measure as accepted by every single stakeholder in a business, and still not take business away from Slack.
The current positioning is probably the best for right now. The people launching new startups who don’t love Slack might come across Dock and the pitch may resonate. As a mature product with thousands of paying customers, positioning as “Slack that doesn’t suck” won’t work to steal away Slack’s customers and Dock will need to mature their positioning, but that’s a future challenge for a different stage in growth.
Yes, but they can also do the same with a group chat on WhatsApp, and email. And, XMPP was the protocol to do this before people found money in extinguishing it.
That's probably accurate in the US with the AI tech push to 996. You know, start at 9 on Monday and finish at 5 on Sunday.
I'd also love to see some Slack interoperability. We use and pay for Slack, only because our customers use Slack.
It is a competetive advantage to reach our customers via their chat platform. Slack being the walled garden that is, it's basically a Slack-tax we pay.
but that’s not really true. You’re not paying, you’re bidding. You are competing against thousands of other advertisers for eyeballs. If you are the only advertiser targeting a group of people, you will spend almost nothing to advertise. If you are targeting a group of people that everyone targets (e.g: rich people in their 30s) you will pay through the nose.
Facebook, Google etc. are the most “fair” forms of advertising. We can dislike advertising, their influence, product etc. but when you compare them to almost every other type of advertising, they’re the best for advertisers.
The reason they generate so much revenue is because they are so accessible and because they are so easy to account for. The reason LTV and CAC are so widely understood by businesses today is because of what Google, Facebook etc. offer.
No financial market would be able to run the way Google and Facebook run their ad markets. They are the supplier, the exchange, and the broker all at the same time. This is not a competitive market. It's a captured one where the supplier effectively gets to set their price, and the exchange and the broker incentivize and advise you to trade at that price.
Google has famously and repeatedly rigged this bidding system in anti-competitive ways and has had to pay billions in fines because of it (which I am sure were less than the amount they profited from)
reply