Mofpofjis

A commit that was "co-authored-by" 6+ people and has three thousand lines of code: this is a total wreck of a development workflow. This feature should have been implemented with a series of about 20 patches. Awful.

quick, the address of a burn clinic

next level: use AI agents in their dating apps on both sides to decide if they want to hook up

> I make a wall with bricks, even if it will be covered with coating i will do my best to have regular joints and pacing.

Absolutely. This is at the core of it.

> Why would anyone rather read and fix someone else code rather than writing the code themselves?

Because their own review standards are low (so they find reviewing "easy"), and/or because they can't appreciate the emotional & mental fulfillment that coding provides.

Strongly agreed. And, your wording is excellent.

For me, the electric bike analogy works differently: it enables people to ride, regularly, who would not be able to do that with traditional bikes. That's totally fine. But electric bikes don't threaten to take away our normal bikes.

There are things that "modulate" this. Violating copyright is never right, of course, some questions are however scale, and purpose. Taking others' creative output, unlicensed, for large-scale commercial gain, is about the worst.

Agreed. Smartphones are portable, mobile computers that suck at every single aspect of being, and working as, a computer, except for mobility. They are not powerful, they are not general purpose, they are not ergonimic, they do not respect user freedom or privacy. Use such a mobile device only when you can't avoid it (i.e., when you are on the road -- when mobility is the single most important priority), and at no other time.

> I got into programming because I like programming, not because I like asking others to write code on my behalf and review what they come up with

oh finally someone else who didn't enter programming because, as 7-10 year old child, they were into SOLVING PRACTICAL PROBLEMS FOR PEOPLE.

> But the last fucking thing I want to do is delegate all the code writing to someone or something else

Thank God there is at least one other person that understands that the ratio between creative and reactive work is crucial for wellbeing at the job.

For crying out loud.

> but if I ever get to the point that I feel like I spend my entire day in virtual meetings with AI agents, then I'm changing careers

so am I.

> but at least I guess I got a couple of good decades out of it

Thanks for this perspective. Yes, at least we've got our memories, and the code locations and commits we recall from memory, from a distance of 10 or more years.

>. If this is what the job turns into, I'll have to find something else to do with my remaining years

Me too.

OMG I didn't notice. Way to burn down a huge amount of respect stemming from past cryptography work in just one blog post.

> I am finding the most destructive aspect of LLM assistance to be the loss of flow state.

Finally someone else mentions Flow!

Wrong.

I do pay my general contractor for the unseen quality that goes into the structure of my home. Programs should be built the same way.

"regular" code review is indeed a total theater, a travesty, a farce.

Real, meticulous code review takes absolutely forever.

then you are a terribly sloppy reviewer

well said!

This is actually a good reason for exiting the industry before one's job goes away. Steering AI to barf up the right-looking pool of vomit is not the Flow-generating experience that many people have started to program for.

> Understanding code takes more effort than writing it

yes!

> somehow

not difficult to explain. Coding is a creative activity where you work top-down; you decompose the abstract/high-level into the detailed/low-level. You dictate the "events" happening to the code, you are in control. Reviewing is reactive; the code you review dictates what happens in your brain (you are under control, not in control), and you need to work bottom-up: you try to re-compose the whole from the fragments. Even for human coders, a detailed commit message is a pre-requisite before their code can undergo review. The reviewer is in the worse position, so he needs to be supported as much as possible.

> why the hell did I do this? struggling to remember

- git blame

- always write good commit messages

This is it. Reading AI slop does not form synapses in your brain like writing the code yourself does.

> A heartfelt provocation

okay then (profanity begets profanity)

> Reading other people’s code is part of the job. If you can’t metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates: skills issue!

Do you /intend/ to spend /most/ of your work life reading AI puke? If so: sanity issue! You are advocating for replacing creative action that gives you Flow with reaction that gives you hemorrhoids, as the /bulk of the work/. Fuck right off.

> How are you handling the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline?

By correcting the deadline setting methodology for the next round of development.

> Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs

then rely on Cursor.ai to raise your next-gen seniors who are going to be supposed to review AI puke in the future

> but the craft [...] Do it on your own time

Go choke on a bag of dicks. You are the problem. This is why quality no longer exists in the world, only lowest common denominator consumerist shit. This is why cars, home appliances, and tools have been getting both worse and more user-hostile. Because nobody values the quality of their own creative output anymore. Quality should not be an exception (which makes it very expensive), but the standard. Quality should be a near-commodity, and therefore at least occasionally affordable for anyone.

> I buy a fucking table

A ridiculously low quality, but hey, cheap!, table, that will fail you at the most inopportune moment. IKEA does have its place, but it's probably not in your office where you receive clients. Do you want them to see the table top fly off?

> They almost certainly have a bigger bag of algorithmic tricks than you do: radix tries, topological sorts, graph reductions, and LDPC codes

and you'll have to review that bag of algorithmic tricks embedded in AI puke, with potential hallucinations introducing obscure, critical mathematical bugs. Good luck verifying all that as a senior, based on proofs and first principles. A human coder will either use a well-reviewed library, or cite a textbook, and implement the textbook very closely, so you can follow it, and have some trust in the intent at least.

> No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property

how disingenuous. you are showing contempt for copyright. You are totally missing the point of copyleft. Copyleft doesn't advocate for anarchy, it advocates for user freedom via the software copyright framework. When AI barfs GPL'd code snippets into a proprietary code base, that harms user freedom.

> and watched it in seconds spot LVM metadata corruption issues

you are drifting; this is not code generation. Fuzzy pattern matching has always been fair game.

Evidence to the contrary (anecdotal, admittedly):

- https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books/is... -- "The most recent freely available draft of C17/C18 used to be c17_updated_proposed_fdis.pdf, but it's no longer available directly and you need to use Wayback Machine to download it."

- I used to work for a multinational software company whose bread-and-butter was C. The company had indeed purchased a catalog of standards, but that catalog didn't include ISO C. When I formally proposed just that, they rejected it (and kind of made me feel uncomfortable about my proposal, to boot).

I agree with you about the seriousness and heft of POSIX (and I definitely know your name from comp.lang.c[.moderated], so I respect your opinion); however, there is no arbitrary gate-keeping around POSIX. If anyone is willing to put in the time and effort, they're welcome to join. This couldn't be more different from other standards orgs where you can only join as a (voting, or observing) representative of an employer that pays an exorbitant yearly membership fee.

> Now try to contribute to OpenGroup.

Funnily enough, I had ended up contributing to POSIX without trying to. I just participated in mailing list discussions and in the public bug tracker (reporting issues, commenting on tickets etc), for which I only needed to register a no-strings-attached account -- the absolute minimum for participating in any bug tracker. Unexpectedly, I got named in the "Participants" section of the standard. My head is still spinning.

Here are some links for you:

- SUSv2: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908775/idx/index.ht...

- SUSv3, 2004 Edition: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/nfindex.html

- SUSv4, 2024 Edition: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/

You can find links to earlier editions of SUSv3 and SUSv4 here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#Exte...

Austin CSRG landing page: https://www.opengroup.org/austin/

Join the group: https://www.opengroup.org/austin/lists.html

Bug tracker: https://austingroupbugs.net/view_all_bug_page.php

I don't know where the SUSv1 PDFs are, I have local copies; but in 2025, they're at best of historical interest.

> they could find a home at ECMA where Javascript lives or they could go build their own SDO for purpose

One option is https://www.oasis-open.org/

> "Maybe you haven’t really trusted anyone with your wins yet"

At the end of one of her interviews on youtbue, Kelly McGonigal explains that -- paraphrased -- being praised to the face creates an intimate context around the praiser and the praisee, in which it's the praiser that sets the tone and initiates the dynamics. In a way, they find themselves in a position where they evaluate you. This is why taking praise gracefully is not trivial; people being praised usually show bodily signs of stress. It takes a real effort for the praisee not to dismiss or belittle their own achievement, just to get out of those dynamics as soon as possible.

At the end of said interview, the host praised Ms. McGonigal to her face. In response, she drew his attention to the fact that while he was talking, speaking those words of appreciation, she swallowed. The act of her swallowing was a kind of stress-relief (IIRC). (I'm sure we can all relate to choking up slightly when praised to the face.) She highlighted the dynamics of being praised to the face live, mid-interview, through her own reaction.

You may be avoiding sharing your wins with others because you instinctively might want to avoid the situation where others qualify you. In that situation, you experience being the subject of an evaluation, and that -- i.e., being talked about -- might feel like a subordinate position to be in, even if the judging is 100% positive. My remedy is to just yield, lean back, give in, permit the other person to be in control, allow them to have all power in that context, and just bask in the glorious warmth they're sending your way. It can be an experience that you remember for decades after, and you're going to start to crave it. (Peer recognition can be a huge motivator, i.e., doing things for recognition. Whether that's good or bad, is a separate topic :))

> The public money is inevitably passed through [...] public sector bureaucrats

I'd phrase it a bit differently -- local (country) regulations, taxes and fees stifle startups in the crib.

> I think it's cultural.

Oh yes. Being a failed entrepreneur is a stigma. Being a very successful entrepreneur is a stigma too. Only being a struggling or moderately successful entrepreneur is acceptable.

The complaints about ISO Prolog, and about ISO standards generally not being available publicly / at no cost, resonate a lot with me. If you compare eg. the POSIX and the ISO C development workflows, and their respective end results, there's a world of difference.

"ISO" (International Standards Organization), where you have "national member bodies", should absolutely be a thing of the past for programming languages (or for anything related to computing). My country's national body's own homepage has a huge tirade, aiming to "dispel myths", such as the "myth" that "standards should be available free of charge". Meanwhile, lots of std orgs have published computing standards with various degrees of openness already.

ISO is a relic when it comes to computing. (So are other standards bodies that choose to remain proprietary; like those behind PCI, SCSI, ... Computing is ubiquitous and these bodies should be forced open by law, for the public interest.)