Almost every single post on the ClaudeAI subreddit is like this. I use Opus 4.5 in my day to day work life and it has quickly become my main axe for agentic stuff but its output is not a world-shattering divergence from Anthropic's previous, also great iterations. The religious zealotry I see with these things is something else.
I suspect that recurring visitors of that subreddit may not be the greatest IT professionals, but a mixture of juniors (even those with 20 years of experience but still junior) and vibe coders.
Otherwise, with all due respect, there's very little of value to learn in that subreddit.
100%. I would also say that this broadly applies to pretty much all of the AI subreddits, and much of AI Twitter as well. Very little nuanced or thoughtful discussions to be found. Looks more like a bunch of people arguing about their favorite sports teams.
This exactly. The /r/codex subreddit is equally full of juniors and vibe-coders. In fact, it's surprisingly a ghost-town, given how useful Codex CLI is.
Yes, as far as I can tell infinite scroll + 2010s era social media recommendation algorithms alone have already decimated the wider human collective's ability to think for themselves, and has subsequently eroded sane discourse and democratic norms in societies all across the globe.
Then you should probably add kotlin and java together as well. They share the same purpose, use the same VM, usually live in the same project, have native compatibility, are used with the same frameworks, etc.
Especially considering Kotlin is used as a drop in replacement for Java in a lot of projects. Especially when using the type of frameworks often associated with Java (Spring, Quarkus, etc.).
Personally, I think statistics like this are biased towards the median of the past few decades and do not necessarily tell much about the future; other than that things apparently move very slowly and people are mostly conservative and stuck in their ways.
Cobol is still in that list. Right above Elixir, which apparently is a bit of a niche language. Kotlin has only been around for about 15 years, and the 1.0 release was actually only nine years ago. Java was released 30 years ago and it's been dominant in enterprise development for 25 years now. So, no surprise that Java is nearer to the top.
Python is surprising but it's been around for quite long and gained a lot of popularity outside the traditional computer science crowd. I know biochemists, physicists, etc. that all use python. And it's a great language for beginners obviously. It's not so much that people switched to python but that it is driving the growth of the overall programmer community. Most new programmers use python these days and that explains why it is the #1.
Javascript has had a virtual monopoly on basically anything that runs in a browser, which is of course the most popular way to distribute code these days. Especially since plugins were deprecated and things like applets, flash, etc. disappeared around fifteen years ago. Anything that ran on the web was either written in Javascript; or transpiled/compiled to it. WASM is starting to change that but it's early days.
What the past 25 years tell us is that things definitely change. But very slowly. C++ still outranks Javascript. That's because it's mostly browsers where it is used. It's a lot less popular for other things.
I like Kotlin, so I'm biased. But it's obviously not the most popular thing by a long shot. But popular doesn't mean good. I actually like python for small unimportant things. But I reach for Kotlin if I need to do it properly. I used to reach for Java. But Kotlin simply became the better tool for the job; at least for me. I even prefer it over typescript and I do occasionally use it for web frontend development. The transpiler is pretty good. And there's a WASM compiler too and Compose for WASM just entered beta. Kotlin seems future proof and it seems to be growing into wider adoption. There are a few million programmers around by Jetbrains counts. It's not nothing.
C++ is still very popular where you need raw perfomance but not so raw as C. Especially with the fact that python is used as a more user friendly interface.
But TS is not valid JS and nobody uses TS because they can write JS in a file with a different extension. You also get 0 benefit from running `tsc` on a JS file. You could argue that C is valid C++ so there's no reason to discern them either.
You can also easily have Objective-C, C, and C++ in the same Swift project and have them interop. That’s a feature of Swift. But adding their numbers together wouldn’t make sense.
I like where Scala 3 is headed (finally). Martin seems to realize that the simpler "direct" programming model is better and that will make the language more attractive to regular people who aren't FP purists. Though it does feel like it might be too little too late.
Doesn't really bring benefit. With Java you are more quickly useful in C++ and can write server apps without fuss. Very little benefit in using a different language when Java literally does the same and is used everywhere else.
I also find them very developer-centric — testers get forced into upfront design work that doesn’t fit how they naturally test, and many struggle with it. I’ve had better results by expressing behavior directly and keeping UI concerns thin, instead of using a wrapper around page structure.
I'm sorry, but if your testers are not comfortable getting involved in the early design stages of your software in a 21st century world, then there's at least a 90% chance that their primary role at your company is perpetuating organizational dysfunction.
Most of my career has been defined by cleaning up the gargantuan messes the culture of "throw tickets over the wall to QA" created, and it has been very, very ugly. It defies common sense how culture around tools and processes for dev and ops roles continues to evolve over time, but for some reason testers are still trying to test software off in a silo, like it's released once or twice a year on CD-ROM.
Not me. More than half of my 20s were mostly defined by working service industry jobs, hanging around with party kids, staying awake until the sun came up, and basically getting by doing the bare minimum for everything. It was probably the lowest point of my life cognitively. It wasn't really until sometime around my mid-30s that I started feeling pretty sharp and performing well on cognitive tests. I didn't grow up in an environment where there were any cultural expectations of achievement in anything. I had to find all of that on my own through a lot of trial and error. That being said, who knows where I would be today if a nice chunk of my 20s had been less dumb? I ruminate about it fairly often.
Yup. I think programmers are giving themselves too much credit here. I love programming, but let's not kid ourselves, at most organizations at least 75% of the code needed to make something a working product is BS. I'd rather prompt an LLM agent to take care of that while I review it so that I can spend my limited energy on the more interesting bits. I find the exercise of prompting an LLM to generate boring code to my exact specifications far more intellectually stimulating than doing any of that stuff by hand, and the time that I have invested in this area has paid dividends in making the code cleaner, more consistent, and more coherent.
Sounds like you really like code reviews. You must be a unicorn.
I find most programmers don't like code reviews. They do it because it's required by their job and most will just click the approve button. Or I guess in a more dysfunctional org, argue about formatting or something, which should just be done automatically so that nobody has to even think about it.
What they like doing is the coding and problem solving.
And now you want to make programming into code review?
Yes, can confirm that as a senior developer who has needed to spend huge amounts of time reviewing junior code from off-shore contractors with very detailed and explicit instructions, dabbling in agentic LLM coding tools like Claude Code has felt like like a gift from heaven.
I also have concerns about said junior developers wielding such tools, because yes, without being able to supply the right kind of context and being able to understand the difference between a good solution and a bad solution, they will produce tons of awful, but technically working code.
Totally agree with the off-shore component of this. I'm already going to have to break a task down into clear detail and resolve any anticipated blocker myself upfront to avoid multi-timezone multi-day back and forth.
Now that I'm practiced at that, the off-shored part is no longer valuable
Many companies that see themselves as non-technical at the core prefer building solutions with an army of intermediate developers that are hot swappable. Having highly skilled developers is a risk for them.
Unlikely. Microsoft had layoffs everywhere except India. There they keep hiring more. As song as the can keep upskilling themselves while still being much cheaper than US workers they won't fear unemployment.
Just yesterday I saw on X a video of a Miami hotel where the check-in procedure was via a video call to a receptionist in India.
Six months from now, that singular worker if they are still employed, will manage a high number of receptionist avatars. And then they themselves will be replaced. It will still lead to a massive collapse in the labor market and with all of that excess labor, existing jobs while being overworked will still see flat to decreasing wages.
Most people underestimate how strongly capital wants to displace labor, even if the outcomes are demonstrably worse. Esp in a captured scenario like hotel reception, you have already booked, you aren't going anywhere else.
Blowing away the junior -> senior pipeline would, on average, hit every country the same.
Though it raises an interesting point: if a country like India or China did make the investment in hiring, paying, and mentoring junior people but e.g. the US didn't, then you could see a massive shift in the global center of gravity around software expertise in 10 years (plus or minus).
Someone is going to be the best at planning for and investing in the future on this, and someone is going to maximally wishful thinking / short-term thinking this, and seductive-but-not-really-there vibe coding is probably going to be a major pivot point there.
This is such an important point. Not sure about India, which is still very market forces driven, but china can just force its employers to do whatever is of strategic importance. That’s long gone in the US. Market forces here will only ever optimize for short term game, shooting ourselves in the chest.
I've got myself in a PILE of trouble when trying to use LLMs with languages/technologies I am unfamiliar with (React, don't judge me).
But with something that I am familiar with (say Go, or Python) LLMs have improved my velocity massively, with the caveat that I have had to explicitly tell the LLM when it is producing something that I know that I don't want (me arguing with an LLM was an experience too!)
Ah mate I can’t relate more to the offshore component. I had a very sad experience where I recently had to let go of an offshore team due to them providing devs that essentially ‘junior with copilot’ but labelled as a ‘senior’.
Time and time again I would find telltale signs of dumping LLM output into PRs n then claiming it as their own. Not a problem, but the code didn’t do what the detailed ticket asked and introduced other bugs as a result.
It ultimately became a choice of ‘go through the hassle of making a detailed brief for it to just be put in copilot verbatim and then go through the hassle of reviewing it and explaining the issues back to the offshore dev’ or ‘brief Claude directly’
I hate to say it but from a business perspective the latter won outright. It tears me up as it goes against my morality.
I know what you mean it just feels a bit inhumane to me. Sort of like defining a value for a living being and then determining that they fell beneath said value.
This is definitely a useful exercise worth going through for the educational value before eventually surrendering and just using the big models owned by "unprofitable companies."
I am plenty able to keep up with experiments others are doing and their results, but as for me my time is best spent building things that have never existed before, that models have no prior art to implement.
How can you tell what you are building have never existed before? Especially without interacting with an LLM about it? You should assume it stores your chat though, so be careful about revealing it to ChatGPT and friends.
I build confidence this is true by using search engines that link to potentially related projects when I query them. The same data LLM trained on in the first place, except more up to date.
Good simple nootropic, but I like the cup of coffee even better with a 200mg capsule of a high quality L-Theanine to give a zen-like calm to the stimulation of the caffeine. Underrated as heck IMHO.
I am still yet to see any decent studies into whether or not L-Theanine actually does anything at all. Studies never seem to find anything statistically significant, yet so many people swear by it. I'm inclined to say it is placebo.
Any brands that you would consider high quality? I'm currently using Nutricost, but only because it was the cheapest, and I didn't know they were allowed to fiddle with quality on these things.
Yes. I would be curious to hear what formed your impression that it is now considered an offensive bad thing. I have some ideas of course, but none are reflective of the reality of the worldviews of most city or even suburb-dwelling US people. If anything, the cultural melting pot thing has never been stronger.
> Yes. I would be curious to hear what formed your impression that it is now considered an offensive bad thing.
I don't know, TBH. I think friends from US told me to be careful, that it's now politically incorrect to mention it, especially to express support for it/imply that it's a good thing? I don't live there so I wouldn't know for sure, especially given that when I interact with US colleagues I generally try to steer away from more potentially "touchy" subjects. I did notice myself that it's best to avoid some subjects in the US corporate world, since you never know what may be offensive. Or well, I don't, perhaps it's a me-problem.
(it's probably also that I don't understand all the local implications and sensibilities. Like, for me "melting pot" means the ability to take immigrants from all over the world, and turn them into "americans" with roughly the same culture & set of values. That, for me is unequivocally a _good_ thing, I think it's generally recognized that conflict at values-level is the most difficult one to resolve/ it's basically unresolvable. You can't have a nation working together if large parts of it have different set of values, that's just a recipe for internal divisions and long-term problems. Or anyway, that's my general line of thinking, that's why I personally have always felt that the "melting pot" was one of the best things US did, and did better than e.g. France or other nations. But I do recognize that there might be other problems associated with that, in the minds of US citizens; and being subjected to the "melting pot" can't be easy/pleasant for everyone, it's in the end about modifying/tweaking your identity so that's gotta be a hard process)
Thanks for the reply. I think I mostly follow your elaboration.
Topics like DEI have definitely become a much more touchy subject in the last 2 years or so, and that they are not discussed as much in "official" channels as they previously were, but that the practices are mostly still there and are generally still considered a positive thing to most people.
It might just be semantics, but I do think your definition of melting pot is slightly off, in that in the US, there is no real consensus of what "the same culture & set of values' actually means. The US is still a very young country. The only "native" culture here was colonized and mostly erased by white settlers. The population of people here can largely be defined by different waves of historical immigration from other parts of the world. Culture and values here are more of two-way street, where they tend to be mixed and matched in the "melting pot" type environments that have popped up all over the country. Now with that being said, most recently we have found ourselves in a situation where an extremely vocal (and quite incoherent IMHO) minority of people against rising waves of multiculturalism have come into power and started controlling the narrative, but I would say that they are not representative of most US citizens, and that the only reason why this has happened is because 90 million people were too apathetic and mentally lazy to defend against it when given the opportunity. I'm still struggling to understand what that says about the US as a people, but I really don't think that as many of us are as wrapped up in identity politics as it might seem like we are from the outside.
Oh come on. The amerindian/indigenous culture has (almost) _nothing_ to do with US culture, which is very much a thing. In fact, it's so much a thing that US almost had a "cultural victory". Part of the cold war victory was US cultural victory, because people all over the world aspired to the american dream. Hollywood movies are some of the most watched entertainment worldwide. English is the world's lingua franca because of the US, not UK (well, UK, but indirectly via US). All the american problems and internal conflicts will spill over to the world - or at least western world - sooner or later (it's unbelievable how much university environment in say, Germany is influenced by what is happening in the US universities; identity politics recently became a thing in Romania, when it seemed to be completely gone and irrelevant).
Don't kid yourself, USA absolutely has a very strong and well defined (and influential) culture. Not in that each citizen is the same, but that there are clear patterns, societal norms, generally-shared values etc. I'll take just one example: there are a lot of Indians in the US, AFAIK. They _largely_ don't have arranged marriages in US (definitely not 90% of the US citizens of Indian heritage!).
I think in some particularly race concious circles it can be seen as eliding the US's historical and modern problems with bigotry. I don't think it would genuinely provoke anyone but I wouldn't be surprised if someone took it as an opportunity to lecture.
