I think I would just as soon drop the natural label entirely because it's meant to sound healthier without actually being any healthier. It seems like the only two states that matter are did you add coloring to the product, or not. Same thing with flavorings too.

I mean a dev tool that's seemingly failing to resonate with developers as to why they would pay for this is a pretty good way to tell if it's going to fall in the 1%.

The Dropbox take was wrong because they didn't understand the market for the product. This time the people commenting are the target audience. You even get the secondary way this product will lose even if turns out to be a good idea, existing git forges won't want to lose users and so will standardize and support attaching metadata to commits.

Well they don't call it being a wage slave for nothing. You aren't getting a raise because you're still selling the same 40-60 hours of your time. If the business is getting productivity wins they'll buy less time via layoffs.

(USSR National Anthem plays) But if you owned the means of production and kept the fruits of your labor, say as a founder or as a sole proprietor side hustle, then it's possible those productivity gains do translate into real time gains on your part.

>But if you owned the means of production and kept the fruits of your labor, say as a founder or as a sole proprietor side hustle, then it's possible those productivity gains do translate into real time gains on your part.

Not even then: since it will commodify your field, and make any rando able to replicate it.

What about coops? Or partnerships?

The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism.

--Theodore Roosevelt

If you want a pure software solution get yourself an old atomic clock and https://github.com/jj1bdx/WWV play some tunes to set the time.

The repo you linked to is a WWV simulator, WWV broadcasts the time via _audio_ (double-sideband amplitude modulation) at various fixed HF frequencies. SOME clocks might be able to automatically receive and decode this signal, but not many. There is also a web version here: https://wwv.mcodes.org

Radio controlled ("atomic") clocks get their signal from WWVB, a long-wave station in Colorado. Its signal is just a carrier and data is encoded via pulse-width modulation and phase modulation. People have built local, low-powered WWVB transmitters to sync their watches and so forth in areas where WWVB is hard or impossible to receive. It's not a good idea to build one of these unless you REALLy know what you're doing because radio signals can travel farther than you expect, and the FCC takes a rather dim view of intentionally broadcasting your own signal (to any distance) without a license to do so.

There's a digital code as part of the WWV transmissions (!) but you're right that the typical "atomic" clock doesn't sychcronize to the HF stations.

There are weak wwvb simulators out there as phone apps and such that depend on using EMI to sync your clock. Like the old AM radio bus noise music hack. https://github.com/kangtastic/timestation?tab=readme-ov-file...

The LLMs are fantastic at writing terraform when you tell it what to do which is a huge timesaver, but good heavens is it terrible at actually knowing what pieces need to be wired up for anything but the simplest cases. Job security for now I guess?

I was able to one shot CDK, Terraform and CloudFormation on my last three projects respectively (different clients - different IAC). But I was really detailed about everything I needed and I fed ChatGPT the diagram.

I guess I could be more detailed in the prompt/md files about every time it changes lambda code, check the permissions in the corresponding IAC and check to see if a new VPC endpoint is needed.

It's not even a strongly worded letter, lol. Senators and congress people should have to wear shock collars, and on majority polling get hourly "feedback" from their constituency, and for senators, weekly national feedback.

The convention of states project seems like it might be the only way out - there's a shot at implementing term limits, clearing up some of the money in politics issues, no risk of a runaway convention, etc, and we can bypass the people deliberately fouling up the system.

And installing a .deb package is equivalent to executing arbitrary code as root so I'm not sure what this actually buys you in security terms.

I would love for folks to start packaging their software for major distros if for no other reason than to see just how annoying the tooling is to use.

If Claude Code or Cursor is actually that good then we're all unemployed anyway. Using the tools won't save any of our jobs.

I say this as someone who does use the tools, they're fine. I have yet to ever have an "it's perfect, no notes" result. If the bar is code that technically works along the happy path then fine, but that's the floor of what I'm willing to put forth or accept in a PR.

> If Claude Code or Cursor is actually that good then we're all unemployed anyway. Using the tools won't save any of our jobs.

There is absolutely reason for concern, but it's not inevitable.

For the foreseeable future, I don't think we can simply Ralph Wiggum-loop real business problems. A lot of human oversight and tuning is required.

Also, I haven't seen anything to suggest that AI is good at strategic business decisionmaking.

I do think it dramatically changes the job of a software developer, though. We will be more like developers of software assembly lines and strategists.

Every company I have ever worked for has had a deep backlog of tasks and ideas we realistically were never going to get to. These tools put a lot of those tasks in play.

> I have yet to ever have an "it's perfect, no notes" result.

It frequently gets close for me, but usually some follow-up is needed. The ones that are closest to pure one-shot are bug fixes where replication can be captured in a regression test.

> Every company I have ever worked for has had a deep backlog of tasks and ideas we realistically were never going to get to. These tools put a lot of those tasks in play.

Some of that backlog was never meant to be implemented. “Put it in the backlog” is a common way to deflect conflict over technical design and the backlog often becomes a graveyard of ideas. If I unleashed a brainless agent on our backlog the system would become a Frankenstein of incompatible design choices.

An important part of management is to figure out what actually brings value instead of just letting teams build whatever they want.

That's different form my experience. I've worked many places where there are loads of valuable ideas in the backlog or bugs that are real, but don't have enough impact to prioritize. But the business has limited resources, and there are higher value things on the roadmap.

I'm experiencing the early stages of a reality where much more of this stuff is possible to build. I say early stages, because there's still plenty of friction between what we have now and a true productivity multiplier. But most of that friction is solvable without speculative improvements, like the models themselves getting better.

If I worked someplace where there was nothing of value on the backlog, then I would be worried about my job.

You need to groom your backlog.

This would easily meet the bar for a harassment complaint.

If they fly low enough that I could hit them with a shotgun, they're on my property. This isn't true of planes and helicopters.

These things aren't planes or helicopters and poised to be much more invasive and annoying, why people act like they are just like a passenger airplanes flying a literal mile overhead is baffling. But to that end if Amazon started making deliveries by landing a fucking helicopter in my yard on the regular I would also want them banned.

Relevant xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/1523/