usewik

Having worked in another EU country, I can attest that I paid as much as 56% in taxes, so I believe a guy who says that he works in Germany and pays half in taxes. If you have other data, you are welcome to present it.

Who is making this 'health care argument' you are responding to?

Article 'the' is doing a lot of work. I read it as author understands code but doesn't understand THE code.

Not arguing for not reading test code. A lot can be achieved by instructing agents to balance out the testing pyramid with the right amount of fast end to end tests, property based tests for the right things, parametrized example based tests. Ensuring the local and CI has the right mix of tests running at right time. On projects where I have less time to review AI generated code I channel my anxiety into setting up guardrails and processes for the agents and then force them to bump up against them. In the end I view it as creating frameworks which allow me to outsource some of my attention to the agents, so that I can claw back some of that time to go set up more guardrails for more agents who are working on something else.

The "pacing the frontier" claims that they are slowing down intentionally?

Effective use of frontier models involves "driving the build". They can't really do it themselves, human is still involved to tie break complicated tradeoffs and take on deployment, security, financial and other risks. The innovators are not becoming useless, they are offered a choice to 10x their output and speed and quality of execution. Execution still matters, it just became different.

Good point. The other corollary is: why would you want to, if you can solve your problem by more easily finding and reusing existing building blocks with a bit of glue code.

Humans will evolve. Some will keep trying to think more. Many others won't. I'm not sure this is that different from previous disruptive tech in that regard.

It could be that AI is the tool the world needs to solve problems the world governments have been deadlocked to solve in the past 50 years.

While humorous and technically true, I believe this misses the point of the comment. It became a lot easier to build your own version of systems to satisfy one's own unique mix of requirements while not worrying so much about everyone else's. The SaaSocalypse is mainly caused by this. Open source software benefits from this trend because it became easier to integrate more open building blocks faster.

yep, and all those fired and remaining are busy ai-native proofing their careers and tokenmaxxing everything including copy

how long until someone's agent sets up a tunnel for the world to see one's most sensitive, private and embarrassing information or insecure work-in-progress app? granted, for the brew install some massive permissions are needed, so hopefully for those running their agent's in a sandbox, you should be safe.. should be..

This was a kind of example, and not really the point of my comment.

Though to illustrate further, there are many examples one might find of US acting undemocratically even 40 years ago.

So, politicians will talk, governments will be in power, and the observers will discuss. My invitation was simply to discuss known facts not political rhetoric. And main facts are largely absent and unknown.

Eh, on a long enough timeline we have seen this and been there before. US is the beacon of democracy and the free world until it is not, and then until it again is. Depending on who is speaking and about whom and when.

Most of these attention grabbing statements by politicians are usually about scoring political points at home. The only thing worthy of judgement are hard facts, and excruciating details, which are yet to materialize on this topic.

Eh, I prefer to lean on the less dramatic Peter principle.

Oh, the positive externalities of unsolicited penetration (testing).

GitOps offers more benefits than downsides if configured correctly. It is more secure and scalable and auditable than manual apply from workstations. However it should be using short lived (e.g. workload identity), minimum privilege credentials, not broad admin level grants.

Also IaC is not just about terraform. Much of the action is usually in the kubernetes manifests via ArgoCD, flux, and etc. Good luck to anyone keeping track of all those manual helm installs, and then rebuilding or upgrading a cluster without these tools.

This is the way. And the benefit that still makes it more worth it today, is the fact that you can have truly self-service and peer reviewed infra provisioning and don't depend on a single sys admin or several of them colliding on their machines.

Feelings don't really matter in the legal world. Statements and actions do.

Agreed. Pretty sure you are supposed to ask for permission before pentesting someone. Hopefully they, being a security company, know that.

I do like when books are wrapped, but to the idea of separating them into parts, I would say probably not worth it. Most books I find myself reading lately are pretty dense, and so my focus is on fitting material in my mind and imagination, i.e. into Gardens of the Moon right now, and I am switching between audiobook, small paperback and companion Claude code wrote for me to help me keep track and visualize what's happening. But hey, if it helps you focus on reading, and you own the book, why not? I do think it is better to just go to your library and work through what they have to offer, without buying the books, so that, hopefully leaves slicing off the table.

It depends, probably. If we are talking about high end, off the beaten path places, marketing is important. For the $1.50 slice pizza at the hole in the wall in Times Square? I doubt those places are cleaned and no one is checking the reviews, people just line up because others are, and because the smell and taste is right.

The point of his argument is that if it isn't obvious from code, there is usually an opportunity to make it obvious by rewriting the code. This is often not practical, but it doesn't make it less true in the abstract. E.g., in your example one could make a constant for the 6% multiplier and call it LAST_DAY_OF_MONTH_DISCOUNT and take every possible other similar steps to have that idea of that comment embedded into the running code, not in the comments. This way everyone who reads the code can gain that deep knowledge by just reading it.

I find his particular style far from extrimist. I see the delivery as artistic style, serving to make a point. A kind of thought-bait, inviting one to consider the reason behind a jarring argument and hopefully arrive at a useful, even if milder and more practical conclusion on the no-comments only spectrum.

Agreed. Asking for small PRs or commits can backfire, unless the work is deliberately scoped into smaller pieces from the beginning. This requires a human design review and planning and is one of the reasons I don't outsource that part to an agent.

> If your variable is not named well and you need a comment, name your variable better.

100% agree. While you are at it, consider naming and writing your functions in such a way that doesn't require a wall of comments. Clean Code uncle Bob style.

Location: United States (Eastern)

Remote: Yes, remote only

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Technologies: Python, Rust, TypeScript, Spark/Databricks, BigQuery, GCP, Terraform, agentic coding tooling, LLM evals

Resume/CV: https://www.usewik.com/hire/

Email: hello@usewik.com

Fractional engineering leadership, corp-to-corp, a few days a week. Fifteen-plus years shipping production software, the last eight running teams; currently head of engineering and data for a regulated product.

Lately I've been focused on coaching teams, getting AI-assisted engineering into daily practice, unsticking slow release processes, and building data platforms.