I get the sense that this is true for many enshittified services. See anything Microsoft. The FOSS movement seems to be gaining some traction again.
My guess is it's driven by very poor user experience coupled with worse product.
Technical leople who care about privacy/surveillance at least a little bit need take one look at the current state of tech and US govt to see how fucking fast dystopia is becoming reality. See discord/openai writeup that came out, ads literally everywhere, flock and ring cameras wide open and passively performing recon, routers doing the same... it's like snow crash out here
Makes perfect sense that those who know would say fuck this, im out. Convenience isn't worth it anymore
None of this is true today. Maybe it becomes true, but I don't know what planet this guy is on where he doesn't have to worry about version control and gets perfect code from the agent everytime so no need to check and not a single person types code
I agree that sdlc is changing, but dead? Come on
The poles at the ai hype scale are taking on religious qualities with these grand proclamations and imagined reality
Title clickbait for sure, but the process has radically changed in the past 6 months due to this new generation of models.
"Perfect code from the agent everytime" isn't really what the expectation is. Bugs are always going to be shipped into production, no matter who or what is writing the code. Where SDLC is really getting compressed is in the iteration phase.
For example:
- "This is a known good state; write tests to enforce this state" is something that takes minutes now instead of days. That is incredibly powerful for understanding and maintaining a system.
- Bugfixing is a matter now of an agent watching error logs, diagnosing traces, and immediately issuing PRs with suggested fixes, something that again would have taken hours at least and is now down to minutes (and can be a 24x7 operation, which for most businesses is a revelation).
- Engineers have the freedom to land enhancements that in the Before Times would have sat in the backlog for months and years on end because of the time commitment. That has knock-on effects of quality, features, and just overall improvements for users.
It is a very, very, very different world that we're operating in, and what used to be huge steps of the SDLC now take less time than checking your email in the mornings with your first cup of coffee.
> This is a known good state; write tests to enforce this state" is something that takes minutes now instead of days.
Pointing the AI agentic SLoC cannon at that sounds like a way to speedrun a set of tests that completely ossify the codebase.
Careless slapping down of tests feels great and looks good in the CI at first but a good test that only tests what it needs to do and leaves flexibility for maneuver is at least as hard to write as the code to start with.
- "This is a known good state; write tests to enforce this state" is something that takes minutes now instead of days. That is incredibly powerful for understanding and maintaining a system.
Not if you don't describe the tests before. AI will generate absolutely useless tests, and since it seems even the latest version have difficulties to generate working test doubles (which i'm _still_ surprised about, but i took 4 hour generating a dogshit test double i could have written in half the time. To me this should be a something AI should be absolutely great at, and it's not), if your test are AI-only, understanding of the underlying system will be hard.
On bugfixing I agree with your message, but disagree on the scope: bugfixing changed for some categories of bugs (most of them tbh), but some will still have you dig deep into the database or the transaction history/monitoring.
On enhancement i agree 100%, i think this is the biggest benefit of AI. Even new hires can land a few enhancement a week without any domain knowledge. Our backlog is almost empth, and only the largest enhancement are up (basically performance improvement)
Sorry i wanted to nitpick, I do that very often when i think i mostly agree with someone except on very specific points.
I disclosed a vulnerability much like this one. .gov website. Incrementing IDs. No password to crack, just a url parameter with a Boolean value. Pretty much
I switched back in 2022 to Ubuntu 20. I barely knew JavaScript at the time. I had zero problems doing so. Maybe my use case is narrow enough--I just use it for dev work and web browsing--but it was the least daunting process ever. Everything worked out of the box basically. Learning bash and unix changed my life. I don't understand how one could complain about Linux unless they've never even tried it
That said, I threw NetBSD on a P4 tower and it took me half a day just to get a GUI and an internet connection. Was kind of fun,though.
Yeah I've seen this too. Bangs out five hundred line unit test file, but half of them are as you describe.
Just writing one line in CLAUDE.md or similar saying "don't test library code; assume it is covered" works.
Half the battle with this stuff is realizing that these agents are VERY literal. The other half is paring down your spec/token usage without sacrificing clarity.
On a pro plan. Use opus 4.5 with thinking enabled. I find that two sessions eats through my entire five-hour "session limit", so no need for parallelization because I've consumed my tokens before I can even blink.
I see the power and am considering Max but 5x cost is difficult to swallow. Just doing this for a lark, not professionally.
I like using Zed with Anthropic API Key. Burned through a few hundred dollars in a weekend but got the Rails app to work about 10x faster than trying to hire someone.
It's not gonna get cheaper either, all AI companies are still losing tons of money overall, and so prices will need to keep increasing (or they will all follow OpenAI's lead to add ads).
A lot of commercial software (think TurboTax) doesn't support Linux. Those that do require somewhat convoluted installation. Closest analog that Linux has to this is idk, snap on deb?
Agree that web browsing is easy enough, but people want to install programs on their machines. Doing so on Linux still exceeds the average consumer's capabilities or willingness.
I've been using it daily for a few years, and just last night I had to Google around about AppImage, which I had never heard of.
My guess is it's driven by very poor user experience coupled with worse product.
Technical leople who care about privacy/surveillance at least a little bit need take one look at the current state of tech and US govt to see how fucking fast dystopia is becoming reality. See discord/openai writeup that came out, ads literally everywhere, flock and ring cameras wide open and passively performing recon, routers doing the same... it's like snow crash out here
Makes perfect sense that those who know would say fuck this, im out. Convenience isn't worth it anymore
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