That existed for decades in the USA just by dialing '411'. It only went away a few years ago in many locations.
21,675 karma · joined November 3, 2013
hikingdave @ gmail.com
The biggest anecdote I'd share is that learning to code as early as 1st grade unexpectedly led to children taking the ability to troubleshoot problems and using it across all their subjects in school. They started to treat struggles in other classes as debugging assignments: "What went wrong? What do I need to fix?" Their entire attitude changed from pass/fail into optimization. It has led to academic improvements across entire school districts, which was not at all expected but was a delightful surprise.
So the question posed seems fairly irrelevant to me. Maybe some of those kids grew up to be coders, maybe they did not. Either way, it helped their education.
Because a half dozen a day sounds plausible as standard maintenance issues, as the author acknowledges. If it were a hack, I'd expect something like 50% of them to have problems. But not knowing how many there are, I don't know how significant these incidents really are.
Captures it how? Does she describe it to the device? If so, this is just another ChatGPT wrapper, with added hardware. If not, and it somehow actually captures what is going on in her head, it is far more interesting.
This is a double edged sword. Yes, LLMs have given me some really interesting solutions that are advanced enough that I need to really work to follow them. But on the other hand, once I do so, I often find an architectural flaw that is driving the complexity. Once I prompt it to fix that flaw, the code gets simpler, easier to read and understand, and easier to maintain.
I'm starting to treat advanced solutions as a code smell - when I see something that pushes my limits, that means the AI missed a simple solution.
OK, I think I'm going to bow out of these discussions. Clearly I'm not as into tech as I though I was.
That isn't universally true, though. If everyone is at the same skill level for a skill common enough to be a commodity, it is true. But if you do something unique or are just way better than other folks, you can succeed via referrals.
Where I get slowed down by AI is when working with others. My current main gig is one of the places where they are pushing everyone to use AI for everything, and tying compensation to how much you use it. So people have stopped talking - they paste AI responses back and forth at each other. It is bizarre, dysfunctional, and dystopian, and I am so looking forward to the end of this contract.
It is far more plausible that we'll see that pattern again - small, department-level vibe coded apps will be around. And things that need to scale bigger will need professionals.
It is the same reason you cannot take a pretty rock from a national park. It seems small, but if a million people did it, you'd wreck the park.
Don't wreck the park.
There are other places to share such things, especially since you linked to a reddit post that already covered this situation. Adding it to HN doesn't really amplify it beyond that.
"...please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
Feel free to tell a story in a comment, like you did, but trying to tell the story in the title makes it clickbait, which aside from being against the guidelines is likely to cause less engagement, not more. (And that isn't even getting into the problematic aspect of cherry picking one person who needs help when there are hundreds of thousands of others who also need help to avoid homelessness every day.)
It wasn't that I had some big title and leadership role. That was just how little the process mattered to leadership. Every engineer on the team had their own little empire to run. I, and everyone else on that team, got good reviews not because of any metrics we hit, but because we could handle being thrown a system and just run with it, so the leadership never had to get into the weeds.
We did have formal change control processes - a tedious weekly meeting where we'd all go over what changes were going in to be sure we didn't step on each other. So it was a mix of utter freedom with one painful touchpoint each week. Not a bad price to pay, honestly.
All that being said, I disagree that Scrum or other Agile processes don't exist in large companies. They do. Some people like them. I personally don't mind Kanban, but detest Scrum. But when you are allowed to control your own process, there is no telling what people will choose to do.
Are you sure you actually disagree with the article?
I'm also curious what other alternatives exist, so would be interested in what others answers come in. Just keep in mind that "not maintained" is not the same as "cannot be used"
Because in the USA, border control is now ICE. They throw people in jail. They deport people. They separate families. They kill people.
Most Americans are quite opposed to those things.
We also have a constitution that includes a Bill of Rights. The rules surrounding searches of personal property were established a long time ago, and people fight to keep them.
I think the ladders would be less about how you use it, and more about when you use it. Do you understand when it absolutely should be used, when it absolutely should not, and when it is a grey area? Do you know how to make decisions in that grey area? Do you know how to identify the places where you need a human in the loop and optimize those processes? Do you know how to minimize those processes at the same time? Can you build department-wide systems that integrate institutional knowledge into everyone's usage? Division-wide? Company-wide? Can you create systems that keep that institutional knowledge updated and feed it back to the rest of the department/division/company?
Basically, approach it like any other job levels - it is not about how you do the job you are in, it is about whether or not the impact of what you do improves those around you, and how far that impact is felt.
Also, vibe coded apps are almost by definition something that an AI can iterate on because it came from an LLM in the first place. Legacy apps tend to exclude LLM-based assistance because the models' training is insufficient on obscure ancient tech stacks.
What does that mean? It is just a pile of words to me, not an outline of what your product would do, or how it is differentiated from any other mail platform.
So gut feeling, no - email is personal communication so "AI-native" would be a hard no from me as that isn't personal. I wouldn't even look at it.
I'm not drowning in calls or anything - but they come in often enough to keep me working.
And if the answer is that a complex solution is needed and you cannot "just X", then saying why the simple answer won't work is a fair answer to such a question.
If you think work was the only interesting thing in life, I don't think you have fully explored everything this world has to offer.
"...please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
When did all the voter suppression become illegal? 1965.