aenis

I'd rather not name names - but one of the major, popular ones.

We contracted a lot of usage, and are using it literally like a S3 bucket with a malware scanner attached to it, and ignoring the dozens and dozens of document management capabilities it has - that we don't need. (Because really, we only ever needed a S3 bucket with a virus scanner...). This alone will allow us not to renew that contract, and save, maybe, around 2M per year.

Sure, we will have to have our own API that will require support and what not, but... we already HAD to have our own API that requires support and what not, since we have a bunch of legacy document management platforms running in various countries, and we anyway have to operate an abstraction and a router.

I am sure ours might not be the most typical case, but there will be savings, and since the economy is what it is, my bosses are telling me to go for every saving I can find, and thats one of them.

(I'd not try to re-write an ERP system, for instance, or a CRM. But a lot of smaller things where we pay a substantial premium? Sure - we will try.).

Lots of companies buy saas, and then spend years customizing and effectively building what they thought they bought. And for big companies, it is costly - a few tens of millions for saas licenses, and maybe around 50-100m for system integrators leaching on the enterprise, and doing the integrations and customizations, usually dancing around the data model, api surface limitations of each of the saas tools they want to wire together.

I dont think going back to having own developers, owning the code is going to be a bad financial propositions for such companies. My company is now one month into trying this out and so far, so good. We kicked our outsystems addiction and are just went live with a react rewrite - and are well into rewriting an expensive to run document management system which we were at the same time under-utilizing and abusing. Our product people are loving it since for the first time in ages we dont need to tell them "well that would be real hard, considering we have salesforce crap underneath and it just doesnt do this or that well".

I am in the middle of this - my audit committee just told me we need an exit plan "just in case".

I don't think this is practically possible. The governments are currently focusing on enabling sovereign clouds - there is real work in France and the Netherlands that I am familiar with.

However, almost any company uses a lot of SaaS stuff - also for very core capabilities such as IdP, employee productivity, not to mention the boring stuff - CRMs, ERPs, payment, etc.

Some (all, maybe?) have non-US variants, but as anyone who ever worked through an ERP upgrade or a CRM replacement - theoretically trivial exercises - this will be hell on earth.

And that does not begin to address the questions such as next gen productivity tools such as frontier models for coding. If Anthropic, Google and OpenAI decided to shut down the Europeans, we'd be screwed for a while.

On the positive side, the absolute toxic stuff that tech companies brought to the world - shorts, social media networks - would for a while be inaccessible too, so there is that.

Huh?

I use a mac and a linux box. I'd never cross my mind that I cant leave some unsaved changes overnight. I leave unsaved changes for weeks across the many things I am working on.

Nostalgia overload.

I got a Commodore/PLUS 4 - With almost no games (just Saboteur, Jet Set Willy and Booty), and my father taught me how to program in Basic 3.5 - and before I was 10 i was making trainers with 7501 assembly learned almost by trial and error. I knew back then what I wanted to do in life and followed that path to the fullest extent.

I agree, for the most part.

Despite having worked with or managed hundreds of developers over the years, I don't think there were more than, maybe, 5 that I would not gladly swap for a claude-equivalent. Diligent, able to produce good code when adequately supervised, and devoid of a desire for work life balance :-)

Most software devs are just mediocre, they learn to code late in life, they work 9-5, and often stop learning as quickly as they can.

> If this is true, you weren’t a very good programmer. There’s much more to code quality than refactoring working code.

Yup, my conclusion exactly.

With that said, most code I have seen in private sector is almost objectively horrible (and certainly subjectively). Code manufactured with the current best tools such as Claude compares favourably. Companies rarely have the patience to pay for well manicured, elegant code. If it sort of works it ships.

Could be, but that stack happens to also solve for a lot of problems totally unexperienced people will struggle with (such as, to not look too far, CORS issues). Good reco for a non-tech person to build a frontend. And besides, who cares which stack is used as long as its used. Its not like this will ever be maintained. If anything, if a need for a new feature emerges 5 months down the road the whole thing can be re-done from scratch in one sitting without writing a single line of code.

100% this, too. I am an IT professional - CTO for a large-ish enterprise (25-30bn yearly revenue). I am finding myself waking up at 4am every single day for the last 2 months to vibe code stuff i always wanted to build for myself, my family and friends, and never quite had the time for it. My sleep habits are definitely suffering but my happines is through the roof.

It helped me finish my webRTC client for a esp32 microcontroller. Thats fairly low level. It did it without breaking a sweat - 2hrs, and we had a model which works with my pipecat-based based server.

I loaded the lowest level piece of software I wrote in the last 15 years - a memory spoofing aimbot poc exploiting architectural issues in x86 (things like memory breakpoints set on logical memory - not hw addresses - allowing to read memory without tripping kernel-level detection tools, ability to trigger PFs on pages where the POC was hiding to escape detection, low level gnarly stuff like this). I asked it to clean up the code base and propose why it would not work under current version of windows. It did that pretty well.

Lower level stuff does of course exist, but not a whole lot IMHO. I would not assume claude will struggle with kernel level stuff at all. If anything, this is better documented than the over-abstraced mainstream stuff.

I am no longer sure thats the case. I had it chew through a gnarly problem with my own custom webrtc implementation on a esp32 SOC. It did not rely on any existing documentation as this stuff is quite obscure - it relied on me pointing to specs for webrtc, specs for esp32 SDK, and quite some prompting. But it solved the problems I was dreading to solve manually in a matter of a 2hr session. Thats for a hobby project, we are now starting to experiment using this in the enterprise, on obscure and horrible to work with platforms (such as some industry specific salesforce packages). I think claude can work effectively with existing code, specs on things that would never made it to stackoverflow before.

But its already the present.

For what I am vibing my normal work process is: build a feature until it works, have decent test coverage, then ask Claude to offer a code critique and propose refactoring ideas. I'd review them and decide which to implement. It is token-heavy but produces good, elegant codebases at scales I am working on for my side projects. I do this for every feature that is completed, and have it maintain design docs that document the software architecture choices made so far. It largely ignores them when vibing very interactively on a new feature, but it does help with the regular refactoring.

In my experience, it doubles the token costs per feature but otherwise it works fine.

I have been programming since I was 7 - 40 years ago. Across all tech stacks, from barebones assembly through enterprise architecture for a large enterprise. I thought I was a decent good coder, programmer and architect. Now, I find the code Claude/Opus 4.5 generates for me to be in general of higher quality then anything I ever made myself.

Mainly because it does things I'd be too tired to do, or never bother because why expand energy on refactoring for something that is perfectly working and not to be further developed.

Btw, its a good teaching tool. Load a codebase or build one, and then have it describe the current software architecture, propose changes and explain their impact and so on.

I started doing some research over the holidays and the smart system seems to be designed to prevent reversing - fuses blown both ways, so didn't even manage to read the firmware, and communication with the client software relies on what seems to be decent encryption. And from the design of the hardware bypasses it seems that the firmware does not trust its own peripheries. Good design, no doubt - will try to take it apart when i switch bikes and won't mind bricking my unit.

I am not interested in either, I just want to have control over the hardware I purchased with my own money.

As for thieves, they apparently have ways of bypassing bosch drm via hardware - bosch bikes get stolen all the time. As for speed unlocks, they are trivially possible with hardware bypasses. I doubt open source firmware would do harm.

Fantastic and inspiring write up, big thanks!

Here is to hoping someone will do something similar for DRM'ed BOSCH ebike motors.

Committed to buying. They dont have the money to actually buy it (at least not yet).

I have a Class 1 Makita (green) laser level, wide strong beam, excellent tool for landscaping. I accidentally looked into it from a 10 cm distance. It did not leave permanent damage, but for a few days I had the dot burned on my retina. And yes, I almost immediately closed my eye - within a few hundred ms's.

People are and always were reluctant to share their own code just the same. There is nothing to be gained, the chances of getting positive reviews from fellow engineers are slim to none. We are a critical and somewhat hypocritical bunch on average.

I have long standardised the way I do hotel reviews:

- bullshit wifi connectivity (e.g. captive wifi + OTP)? - normal wifi but with very long password? - is there a place to put toiletries in the shower? - clean? - time to check in and check out?

Where I travel the hotels without bathroom doors have not proliferated yet. I've been in a few, even when I am alone I hate the experience.

That, and computer systems have significantly more states, which makes unpredictable states and state transitions more likely.

(Which of course also means that until all eternity the first thing to do when something misbehaves is to try and reset it).

For sure, for instance Google has ADK Eval framework. You write tests, and you can easily run them against given input. I'd say its a bit unpolished, as is the rest of the rapidly developing ADK framework, but it does exist.

Fabulous.

Now I just need to find a monochrome laser projector and my home office design is complete.

Someone here explained that disabling history saving feature also kills the toxic youtube recommendation page (while leaving shorts under 'subscriptions' -- but only for subscribed-to channels). Applied it yesterday and it made my youtube experience much better.

Yes, but also legislation. Same as with drugs, alcohol or cigarettes - it does not make it impossible for kids to get access, but it makes it impossible for large companies to make selling that to kids a business model.

Oh man, thanks for that!

(Shorts are not completely gone - they are still visible on channels subscribed to - but the toxic homepage thing is empty. Big thanks!)

The people managing youtube and similar services are doing lots of harm to humanity. Not sure if more than those who push drugs or cigarettes, but in the same league for sure. An entire generation of kids is growing up that can't read a book or do anything that requires focus and attention.

I think its only a matter of time where legislation, lawsuits and fines will follow.

- a fraction of the board gets all gung ho on buying something

- board-1 gets marching orders to do due diligence. those people are typically aware of the sentiment in the board. they delegate to their underlings and share what they think the board wants,

- if you say no, you are guaranteed to upset one of your bosses. if you say yes, its typically a positive (your boss is happy),

- most M&As are typically bad ideas. Its typically nobody's fault when the thing is written off by the next management and nobody seems to mind that much. People who waved through the due dilligence are proper executives by then and the cycle continues.

Incentives are mis-aligned, and on top of this there is usually (a) not a lot of time and (b) a veil of secrecy. Missing those fake emails does not surprise me.

I spend hours every 6 months or so sharpening knifes on whetstones. I like the excuse to have some me time, listen to an audiobook or just do some thinking. Akin to meditation.

I also dont like the blades ruined through automatic sharpeners - the knifes are made of good quality steel, were made to order in Jp, and have sentimental value. I also sharpen the cheap knifes this way, tho - I like manual work.

I wonder if they can blame this one on AI :-) I can see that they could have identified extortion targets with some "agent" and someone felt very proud of having automated this important, but often neglected part of their business model.

I am not pointing fingers at low level engineers - I specifically blame their senior tech staff. The lead architect who later became their CTO (and is since retired). Tha guy knew full well.

I dont deny the management was criminally complicit in the cover up, but it starts with bugs, then lies and dishonesty and cowardess of technical staff - and only then it has a chance of becoming what it became because of atrociously unethical management. They all belong in case studies taught to both tech and business majors.