Marginally related, I feel the same way about honesty, especially in a work context.

I’ve always prided myself in being an honest but considerate person.

A recent experience with a colleague who weaponised my honesty in an attempt to manipulate me has left a foul taste in my mouth. Luckily their contract ended and the problem resolved itself.

But I remember distinctly feeling that I will be professional and polite but I do not automatically owe anyone my honesty.

Talk to people.

There are an infinite amount of problems to solve.

Deciding whether they’re worth solving is the hard part.

Are any of these people willing to fund an answer to these problems?

We analyse thousands of lines from a csv using an LLM. The only thing that worked for us was to send each individual line and analyse it one by one.

I’m not sure if that would work in your use case, but you could classify each line into a value using an LLM then hard code the trends you are looking for.

For example if you’re analysing something like support tickets. Use an LLM to classify the sentiment, and you can plot the sentiment on a graph and see if it’s trending up or down.

I think that is probably what I'll end up doing. Since the data is text based data. Combined that with the approach of pre analzying quantitative data. To feed to the LLM

I figured I ask this question because there might've been a technique I'm not aware about

I’m really not sure I follow this argument.

A lot of software has friction to get to the value. This is often because of constraints not choice.

To give a concrete example of this, in my company we had users upload files for analysis. To get the export for the file, it took many steps. Not hard, but a lot to get done.

We switched it to an integration and now it’s 3 clicks. We’ve gone from 10% of users onboarding to 100%.

It doesn’t mean we get people to stay, but the barrier to understanding if our tool provides value to them has completely disappeared.

I’m very curious though, what value did you strip away when trying to make your product easier to use?

This also goes the other way too, you don’t assume the original is incorrect.

I see this a lot with developers who come in and start to criticise before understanding.

There is always a reason for why something is as it is, and it’s unlikely that the people before you were just idiots.

How do you introduce any tool/change to a team of people?

You get buy in, start having conversations see what AI people have explored. Have they tried claude? Do they prefer other tools? If so why? What are the objections. Actually listen. I’d also showcase what you can do. I love to present what codex has found when debugging something, or a prototype I’ve put together.

If you have the budget pay for subscriptions so they can play around.

Also, you say that development velocity is a big problem, but I would dive into why that is. You may be disappointed when velocity remains the same with AI tools.

My time in the military has made me hate acronyms with a fury.

https://acronyms-suck.com

If you focus on the differences that’s all you’ll see.

The opposite applies too, if you try hard enough you’ll find plenty of similarities with an Eskimo. We’re all just people in the end.

I’m curious have you ever been burnt or seen anyone burnt by copyright infringements in code?

Sometimes it’s super obvious because a game company steals code from a previous employer, but I have never seen this play out in entreprise software.

How is that extortion? If you use a library/project with a licence you need to abide by its terms. If you don't want to do that, then either write it yourself or find an alternative. People asking for the source code is not extortion, they're fully within their rights to do so.

I actually found the anecdote I was referring to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44605873 (see comment by user yalok).

""" Just anecdotally, but this aligns with my observations on the trend/growth of successful useful open source projects that go with permissive BSD-like license. ~20 years ago there were way less of those than now. And as a SW developer doing client side/apps as well, using GPL/LGPL is a total pain and basically cost prohibitive, unless I work on my personal small project where I don’t care about having to/risking to open source the rest of the code and getting sued/cloned… Real life example from ~2010 - we ended up including an LGPL library in our mobile app code, and published/upstreamed all the modifications we did to that code (mostly ARM optimizations). Once the app became popular, our competitors came to us demanding the source code of our app - just because iOS didn’t support dynamic libraries (so we had to statically link it), and giving them the object code to relink it wasn’t enough for them (which would satisfy the spirit of LGPL), because they really wanted to see how we hacked around iOS camera input APIs… """

Arguably the competitors didn't have a case as the object code was provided, so I would stand by calling this extortion. Maybe the legal burdens were too high, so the company complied.

I didn’t even realise that was a possibility with iOS. Thanks!

Curious to hear more about this, do you have any examples?

We might release it as a framework of gems.

We created an Abstract controller that handles all of the typical behavior for a resource, auth, filtering, pagination, tenancy, import/export, serialization etc.

Then we expanded rails generators to cover ALL typical behavior. And the markdown file calls the generators.

It was a bit complicated to model polymorphic behavior but we got it working thanks to Ruby/Rails.

But the basic premise that made this work is: Use only restful actions; don’t turn it into RPC. Recognize that most RPC/graphql functions are state changes that could have been a patch request. So instead of /clients/activate its /clients with a status attribute for “activate” or “archive”. Then most nested routes aren’t needed, use accepts nested attributes for and return child ids in the show action. There’s more to it that this but by strictly following conventions and modeling the data for rest, the api ends up Super simple.

Our standard controller only whitelists strong params. All other behavior is automatic.

What do the markdown files look like?

Defines the resources, attributes and relationships. That’s it.

Client first_name last_name organization:references

Organization name tax_number has_many:Clients