nthj

We didn’t fire all our developers when we invented compilers either, and for much the same reason we didn’t stop hiring laborers when we first built ships and established overseas trade routes: business will always expand to meet its reach

Many enterprises are currently exploring to see if they can invite developers to leverage AI tools—like they leveraged the compiler—to be more productive. To operate on a higher plane of agency, collaborating on what we should be building and not just technical execution. Those actively hostile or just checked out with the idea of relearning skills are being laid off. (Some unprofitable business sections are being swept up opportunistically too.) The idea that all developers would be fired if AI tools can write good code doesn’t meet the lessons of history

We’ve had the sycophant problem for as long as people have held power over other people, and the answer has always been “put 3-5 workers in a room and make them compete for the illusion of favor.”

I have been doing this with coding agents across LLM providers for a while now, with very successful results. Grok seems particularly happy to tell Anthropic where it’s cutting corners, but I get great insights from O3 and Gemini too.

A big difference between crypto and AI is around how crypto could paint a better future once we rebuilt most of our transactional infrastructure and persuaded a quorum to move onto it, and how I personally am benefiting from AI day by day to build myself tools and infrastructure for my life, work, businesses and finances only requires me to accept this change. Everyone else in the world could reject AI-augmented engineering, and I will still be tremendously better off.

SVB has a ton of bonds that mature (will be cashable) after ten years, but nobody wants to pay for them today because they can make more money placing their cash in a savings account. For a silly analogy, imagine if you had a bunch of cash locked up in a CD, but also had a surprise medical bill. Our parents could very easily look at your books and say “huh, I can advance you 80% of your CD because there is really no chance the CD won’t pay me back once it matures.” Is this a bailout? I don’t think so. It’s different than paying off our drunk uncle’s gambling debts for the 7th time.

And also we probably don’t want to say “haha silly SVB customers, they can wait ten years to get their money back” because none of us want to live in a world where most Americans, most of whom don’t understand all these complexities, start runs on ALL the banks because they think this is the start of a collapse. It becomes self-fulfilling at that point.

Rails can easily serve up pages in <100ms. If you do have an endpoint that is CPU-bound to where you can’t meet your SLA goals, you can serve up just that endpoint in Rust or Golang. But that’s rare.

Usually what happens at scale is that the SQL database starts slowing down as more data is loaded in. Partitioning, indexes and painful refactorings aren’t prioritized. Engineering will champion “a faster language”—that incidentally allows them a new data model where they add in proper indexes at the start. They aren’t really incentivized to realize they could see the same gains by just improving their existing data inside the Rails monolith.

Source: experience improving performance (including latency) with multi-billion-dollar Rails monoliths

Git and/or feature flags exist for this reason. Adding a network layer isn't the fundamental insight here, but it can cause additional consequences.

> we need to store enough energy to power the whole country for at least 2 weeks before we can get rid of fossil fuels.

Maybe this is self-obvious, but "get rid of" seems to be carrying a lot of weight in that statement. I personally am not offended or concerned by keeping natural gas generators around for decades, even, as insurance for catastrophic disasters, if in practice they're unused 99% of the time because storage infrastructure has reached 24 hour capacity. We reach diminishing returns on increased storage.

I don't know your culture or your boss, but I have worked with people who could not code their way out of a paper bag, and round-robbined there way through DMs to "pair" to complete their assigned work. These people were highly paid and highly damaging to productivity and morale. I suspect I'm not alone, and I'll freely admit I have a large amount of bias in how I perceive your arguments due to that.

I will also say that your mentioned group chats should probably be a team channel, and the responsibility then becomes the Team Manager if the team members don't step up on their own. "#team-channel: @BobTeamManager are you able to help here?" would get a specific team member assigned.

I have at least a thousand hours into Factorio.

Factorio has provided a sandbox for me to visualize and acquire skills on managing bottlenecks in data flows; skills that I have and am applying as the point software engineer to resolve critical bottlenecks in multiple e-commerce systems. I won't speculate as to the commercial value of resolving those data bottlenecks here, but whatever dollar number you're imagining is, I suspect, probably missing multiple zeroes.

There's an episode near the end of The West Wing where it's C. J. Cregg's first day as Chief of Staff. Of course, this same day, a national security emergency has arisen involving weapons-grade plutonium. The whole day goes by, with C. J. increasingly frustrated as the Secretaries of Defense, State, and Energy all pass the buck on the crisis.

The President is able to nudge C. J. to put together a tiger team. With a few words, he has resolved the crisis.

Until I saw this, I never understood corporate structures. Why are reporting lines structured so customers can languish until the CEO barks an order to address? But during a normal day-to-day, the top executive needs stability. Anyone incentivized and empowered to single-handedly address problems is also-by definition-someone who wields immense political power. So departments are set up. The implicit standing order is "maintain stability." And whenever process actually needs to change, the top executive routes around the communication chains he has established.

Part of the problem is we use unintentionally vague terms like "performance." What does that mean? Bandwidth? Reliability? Scalability? Something we can fix later right? That's what all executives and—frankly—most engineers hear.

I only ever talk about "latency." Latency is time—you can't get latency back once you've spent it.

“I have an idea for an app”

That’s a great scene. For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, I might recommend skipping the clip and watching the full film! If you’re on HN, odds are you would enjoy it, and it has an impressive cast.

The 100x impact isn’t usually with proofs of concept, it’s with surgery. 1,000 lawyers would likely never identify and execute the life-saving graft, all while avoiding side effects that eventually kill the patient.

A surgical ten lines of code across 5 services can absolutely create billions of dollars out of thin air. The combination of technical, political and domain expertise required for such changes is relatively rare.

(I mean political in the purest, non-controversial sense, i.e. the communication skills to answer objections and acquire group consensus on the required change.)

I think in many contexts, “I think” means “this is complex, but I am prepared to articulate my position using logic,” and “This feels” means “my subconscious, experience, or instincts are telling me this is wrong, but I can’t yet articulate why in a logical, cohesive argument.” I will often use the latter to justify delaying decision-making or action while I formalize my argument.

Different blockchains could still agree how to exchange messages and transactions relevant to that exchange. I must have consensus with my employer on how I will be paid, but my employer has no business in my agreement with my landlord. Yet we all 3 have our own “blockchains” (accounting books)

Slack has saved messages. I use this as an inbox/todo list. Any message that takes longer than two minutes to reply to, I move to my actual todo list and un-save the message.

I’ve found people often overlook that while code can be very quickly deleted, gigabytes or terabytes of production data is a huge pain to ETL later. Investing in the data model upfront has huge payoffs for your code and avoiding ETLs later on.

AWS lets me provision servers all over the world at any point, which is required by customers both for compliance and for latency SLAs. Even billion dollar companies are going to find that a huge lift to build out themselves, and they have opportunity cost while they try to do it.

I have a 2021 Honda. Yes, CarPlay is basically the iOS philosophy of “full screen touch interface with Siri that becomes wholly focused on whichever app you’re using.” Maps, Spotify, and Messages are the 3 I mainly use, but I could download more from the App store or even make my own.

> Companies like to control those things

I mean, this is probably true, but in enterprise software, companies are paid by their customers to control those things and enforce various compliance standards like SOC-II. The difference between a piece of workflow SaaS charging $1K/month and $25K/month is fulfilling those compliance standards, so there are clear economic incentives in play.

A lot of companies. https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html#

I’ve seen a few researchers raise the idea that moving this scanning to the client is effectively a political prerequisite for enabling iCloud E2E, so I suspect that may be coming.

Just to add, I have a 2021 Honda, and disabling this functionality is a 1-button-press toggle on the dash to the left of the steering wheel. Not mandatory.

Anyone inclined to argue against this could maybe sink 1,000 hours into Factorio. The game is simple enough to require 1-person-engineer, but complex enough that the player must both solve low-level problems AND be The Eye of Mordor. If you don’t relentlessly pursue both, you get stuck in the tarpit and progress stalls.

I think observed only along the axis of the increase in remote work as a percentage of available software jobs this may true, but may not properly account for the continual geometric increase in demand for highly skilled software developers happening alongside the other shifts.

Or in other words, I suspect demand for developers is going up faster than remote is addressing supply.

Also I see trains as network design. You have to commit to the train size upfront (network block size) and you can hit throughput limits

My day job is getting alignment and approvals on fixing things. Factorio is deciding to fix something and then doing it.

Yeah, the 10x debate always seems to be just a disagreement of terms. Are we talking about junior engineers shoving lines of code through the JIRA backlog with no negotiation over what the most effective things to be working on are? Probably not 10x variance, and if there is, maybe they're cutting corners on process.

Are there people who say "I propose we subtly adjust the product in this way which saves us 7 person-months of development effort and 2 months in time to market while delivering 90% of the original proposal's value?" Yeah, there are, and I don't understand why we pretend that can't be a thing.

I believe the confusion is over the term "buy." In San Francisco/US terminology, a 25 y/o is likely to rent or lease an apartment. Buying would more likely be of a condo (or a house, as you mentioned.)