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Despite the marketing, the "I" in AI doesn't (yet) stand for "intelligence". You're best off finding applications where you can easily write a rigorous, well-defined, easily evaluated acceptance criterion and then let the model, harness, etc go wild. This of course is also the case with "AI coding" technology that came before--genetic programming, NEAT, etc. It's not intelligent, and therefore limited in fundamental ways. You have to steer it to make it work. This is very fundamentally different from how factory workers operate.

Therefore I can't see how the "software factories" concept is actually feasible without a technological breakthrough. We may be no closer to it now than we were 25yr ago.

My 4x 15k rpm 1U fans I use to cool my twin AMD V620s make a horrible racket, especially how they resonate with the rest of the workstation's case fans. Similar in volume and annoyance to running an 8" circular saw. I can only imagine it would probably be as bad or worse than that.

It never ceases to amaze the lengths people will go to avoid using grep

I do hope that works out for them. Sincerely, because the alternative is extremely grim for tech, and the economy as a whole.

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/01/oracle-outl...

> The assertions he makes are not minutiae, he basically continuously says that all the big SW firms are walking corpses. He's not having a rational conversation about the long term prospects for companies who invest in AI.

...huh? How is it "not rational"? He's saying that, based on the financial information available, it appears AI doesn't actually make very much money given the capital investments. To the point that there may never be AI ROI.

I'm not sure how much this or that "prediction" matters. His arguments would be just as strong without them, perhaps stronger because they wouldn't give folks like Luu something to snipe at.At this juncture, the analysis seems sound. AI costs an absolute fortune and appears to make very little money, comparatively.

Is that irrational? IDGI. One needs look no further than Oracle to see a company in dire financial straits.

I agree rewrites are generally not productive unless the original system is so far gone that it makes sense to start over.. but that's actually very rare.

The thing I think is absolutely ridiculous is when organizations can't figure out how to get work done which improves the performance (cost, efficiency, speed, etc) of their existing features. "Prove to me it has {financial, customer, etc} impact" is just how managers who care about nothing other than rolling out new features prevent the work from being done. It makes sense, they get promoted when their underlings deliver some splashy new thing. But it's an incredibly stupid way to build software. If the thing was worth building in the first place, surely it's worth making it good, right?

> And commented how strange it is if they had spent a day at the start of the project whiteboarding out the design against hardware specs at the start of the project - and avoided months of wasted effort - that would be called "premature optimization".

Oof that hit hard. The last project I worked on suffered from a very similar disease, and it has really taken a toll on me psychologically. To work day in and day out on something that you can prove cannot work is unbelievably demoralizing. From an organizational standpoint, it makes a lot of sense to have an "internal consultant" who can deliver bad news like this. I tried to do it from the "inside" which was a huge mistake--got a negative performance review saying I had a "communication problem" because nobody wants to hear "negativity". I can come off online as kind of an asshole, so this may not seem credible, but I did actually deliver this news in a professional, measured manner. It's just that organizations are allergic to it, and their antibody response kicks in. You need someone who is not affected by the organizational hierarchy (or at least not that branch of the tree) to step in and deliver the bad news without fear of retaliation.

> The problem with optimizations is that you are competing in prioritization with other features.

I think companies often over-indulge in features nobody wants, needs, or cares about. I quit my previous company because they were forcing us to build something that had single digit weekly active users. It was utterly pointless, driven entirely by some half baked navel gazing harebrained ideas about what a "nontechnical user" might want. But nobody ever asked any real users.

I estimate the company probably blew the greater part of $10M on this bullshit, not counting opportunity cost.

> In general it's challenging to convince a non-tech crowd of the importance of addressing any tech debt unless you can demonstrate a tangible financial impact on the product, such as delayed contracts or customer churn.

People like that are problematic not just because they don't understand tech debt. They also don't understand products. There are shitloads of people in the industry who market themselves as some kind of mystical gurus, are able to deliver impressive monologues talking over everyone on the zoom call, but contribute nothing else than a sense of urgency and frustration. If you find yourself in their company, better to just leave.

> What waste products do data centers output?

Energy production consequences aside, they produce tons of e-waste

> Do you mean more earnings per share for corporations or real utility impacts on social systems (e.g., more new drugs)

I mean real utility impacts. More reliable and efficient software, better features, etc. So far we've seen none of that. In fact, it seems like the opposite--more volume but a much lower quality product.

With http you can do it elegantly with a 429 and retry-after. 100% doing it at the edge is the way to go. The machinery which determines how long to delay a client's retry can benefit from knowledge of internal services' state, but I agree the ultimate decision must lie with the serving layer. That's the only way to efficiently deal with misbehaving clients.

On that note, one of the more memorable incidents of my career was when a 10M+ node client decided to retry as hard as possible on 4xx. That was fun x_x.

[edit] that is to say, for this mechanism to be robust your retry-after enforcement mechanism needs to be capable of withstanding almost every single one of your users attempting to illegally retry as fast as they physically can without negatively impacting that one user requesting legitimate traffic. https://media.tenor.com/p3mss3YI6TcAAAAM/wat.gif

Thank you for this candid answer. In the current climate of people breathlessly, hyperbolically jabbering about how AI is "revolutionizing everything" it's extremely refreshing to hear this honest, measured statement.

It's all about what you choose in the face of P. Do you choose C or do you choose A?

This can either be a relatively short time or an eternity, depending on the upstream consequences. If that means holding a connection open for 60000 milliseconds while waiting for some downstream rpc to go through its backoff ritual, that's an eternity, and under load that connection pool will get exhausted quickly. So now a problem which should only affect maybe 1% of users has completely hosed everyone.

I've seen this happen multiple times. Someone designs some clever backoff strategy without considering how it fits in the context of the rest of the system. Hilarity ensues.

If you have something taking an entire minute on a computer, please ensure you implement it in such a way that no connections are actually held open for that entire minute.

It's easier to create a nice worst-case failure UX this way too. Rather than a page that sorta kinda loads but doesn't actually work at all you can unambiguously put up a "oops we're broken right now try again later" page whenever that top-level endpoint returns a non-retryable error.

But that of course begs the question--why is the frontend retrieving all these data from 16 different endpoints instead of just one? It would be less overhead (http, auth, serialization, compression) to just serve it all in one request even if the http layer needs to fan out 15 rpc calls... this is why we can't have nice things.

OK I'll pick C and A!

https://web.archive.org/web/20250128235041/https://codahale....

> ai code dev has enabled people to make tools for themselves that they didn't have before.

...that sounds pretty worthless tbh. The promise of AI wasn't that you can bang out your own little half baked duolingo clone. It was that every engineer was supposed to become hundreds or thousands of percent more productive. The assumption being that things generally would therefore get noticeably better.

We're seeing hundreds of percent more commits. We're not seeing that translate to any real world improvement of anything. That's the problem.

Call me "ignorant" if you want, but back it up by showing what all this "AI productivity" has actually accomplished in real economic terms. Not vaporware.

> That knowledge will be worthless 12-18 months from now when AI does everything better than you, including “understanding”.

...what? Seriously though. What grand insight into the arc of AI development do you have? Where are you getting this from? Cite your sources. Show your analysis.

Charitably, I would ask "are you high?".. If you're suffering acute psychosis from mind altering chemicals then we merely have to wait for the effects to wear off and you'll likely recover. If not, then I'm very sorry. Your road ahead is a rough one.

Don't get me wrong, I think yours is a good example. It's important for people to have an example to reference when they want to resist but don't know how to do it, or who to contact, or where to start. But I don't believe resistance will accomplish anything very meaningful anytime soon.

[edit] half baked thought: I wonder how the resistance phenomenon interacts with nuclear weapons. In all the prior wars in human history, as far as I am aware, there were small pacifist or anti-war movements. But only in the big post-nuclear great powers proxy conflict that happened in Vietnam was there a sufficiently large antiwar movement to actually accomplish something. I wonder if we humans can somehow subconsciously sniff out cowardice in our leadership. Nuclear weapons have made all nations cowards--nobody is willing to lay it all on the line and fight anymore because the consequences are too great. All that is to say, I wonder if we're all a hell of a lot more warlike and savage than we'd like to admit. I'm sure this is a well studied topic and I'm totally ignorant of the scholarship so someone please chime in and straighten this bullshit out :p

People who haven't spent much time around scientists or watched them work often have a mistaken idea of just how precise the work is. Even high precision work can be found later to be wrong! That's just the system working as designed. But impugning scientists for just doing their jobs is really a bad smell, and unfortunately on this webforum it happens way too much.

just so long as you get at least one of them before they get you, you're fulfilling your life's purpose

> I make sure to probe these things during the interview process

I absolutely plan to do so throughly when I begin interviewing later this year. But I've been fooled before, so it'll take extraordinary evidence to get my hopes up, and I don't think I'll ever truly believe it again. There's always the possibility it isn't real or I'm misunderstanding something.

If you ever trust an employer you put yourself at a profound disadvantage. Employers are not so disadvantaged by placing (judiciously earned) trust in employees. That's because employers are companies, and companies are not people.

OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, Gemeni, etc also have another escape hatch: they can arbitrarily and potentially invisibly reduce your quality of service at their discretion. They can choose to route your request to an expensive model or a cheap one. By contrast, the best Github can do is slow your request down.

My pet theory is they backed themselves into a corner with Actions. That was a step change in computational scaling effort. It also fell immediately on the heels of the Microsoft acquisition.

Something about these two factors seems to have conspired to wreak absolute havoc on their uptime in the ~7yr hence. The AI slopocalypse hasn't helped matters, but the foundations were laid far earlier.

Would love to hear from an insider, either for or against this conspiracy theory.

The resistance you're talking about only works if like 3% of the population take to the streets. Once you see police officers marching with protesters that's when they'll start to listen. That's only ever happened once. It'll only happen again if a large number of american kids (tens or hundreds of thousands) are dying in foreign lands for years on end--i.e. not soon. That's why our leaders wage low intensity wars.

The oil crisis we're talking about here is knocking on our door right now. No amount of protesting is going to stop it.

When things get bad enough you'll see resistance. We're not there yet.

well sure.. obviously. but only very few actually have any control over that and they're not incentivized to choose peace. the best the rest of us can do is vote in elections. it doesn't generally work out very well though.

The cost of fixing this will be everyone's problem. If we suddenly have to ramp up domestic production because diesel is >$10/gal it'll be a no holds barred unmitigated environmental catastrophe. We will be drilling and spilling absolutely everywhere, because the alternative is dead people in the streets.

Emergencies like this are one nightmare scenario accelerant of climate disaster.

If that's what they wanted they'd mandate that process. They want the deniability of having you rubber stamp the PR. That way they can blame you when it goes wrong. There may be high trust teams, but I've never seen one firsthand, but my sample size is only N=5.

A kilt is a convenient garment for this scenario