The 10th amendment to the Constitution reads "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
I agree with this. Computing as a field is the way it is because there is a low barrier to entry. My dad gave me a Tandy 1000 and some programming books, and now I have a very lucrative career. I never took any classes. I never had to beg anyone for permission. I could just get started making things with the minimal investment of a cheap personal computer. (And eventually, an Internet connection. Working with other people is fun!)
In a world where everyone is a Claude controller (something I honestly enjoy!), that goes away. I use hundreds of dollars of tokens a month. Suddenly, the kid in her basement with an unloved computer can't get in on the ground floor. You have to be rich to even get started. That worries me deeply. It's a big change for our field, and I don't think it's a good one.
Did your dad give you a Tandy 1000 or a Cray X-MP/48? Do you really think you need the most top-of-the-line model to learn anything, or will a locally run gemma4 (or whatever it turns into) still get you going just the same as when you were a child?
That's true, local models are good. The Tandy 1000 was really only good for a little bit QBASIC. Still fun!
The other is that computing in general feels more accessible? While some models are free, you still can't easily make your own model. But I see the argument where you can't really just build your own computer anymore (no one person knows how to make a modern CPU, and you can't do it at home). You are always beholden to society, nothing truly starts in your basement at home. And it didn't in the nostalgia era that I remember either.
They can't prevent the innovation, competition and engineering, but their lobbying makes sure that the Chinese competition doesn't enter the market, and if it does, with severe obstacles on the way.
Their biggest customer is the US federal government, taken in aggregate across agencies, IBM is one of the largest federal IT contractors, and deep public-sector and financial-services contracts in the US make it IBM's single largest national market. No individual commercial company comes close to the government's aggregate spend.
Now, equivalent product, another company, they want to sell to the government twice cheaper, can they ? nope, it will be IBM winning.
Furthermore, according to the lobbyists, China = evil but they forget that a lot of software contains Chinese code.
I agree with you. I used to work for an ISP that sold kind-of overpriced 1Gbps connections and always wondered why customers bought it. Probably helping things was that we took them out to "events", floor seats at basketball, etc. The company just has a fixed expense, but the people making the decision get free stuff that makes them feel important, and it was kind of a way of transferring the company's money (by not buying the $29/month Internet connection) to themselves. I never felt good about it, but if you say that out loud, everyone will look at you like you're crazy.
AWS did this for us at the time but the 3 people in the company that used AWS services never got to go to these things. So I doubly don't get it.
Vendor bribe swag is basically ubiquitous in the industrial world. When I worked in oil and gas it was quite common for a vendor to do a 'lunch and learn' where they bought the whole office very good lunch and we listened to them pitch whatever product line they wanted us to specify for design customers. I work in a more socially responsible but less lucrative industry now and alas no vendors buying me lunch
I agree with this experience. LLMs are great and save me a lot of time, but they need frequent nudges to avoid going down a completely wrong path. I just don't feel like the management dream of "every engineer has 3 agents working for them full time" is quite a reality yet. I'm not saying it won't get there, or that I feel secure being a software engineer until I'm of retirement age, but I also think it's important to understand the limitation of the tools. You do need to know your codebase. You do need to iterate on small chunks of it at a time. You do need to carefully understand every line of code you're putting into production. LLMs are amazing at generating a lot of proposals, but you need to carefully consider each one.
Most surprising to me about the article was the desire for OP's company to use AI for design docs. I feel like AI-generated design docs are some of the worst -- basically treating English as a programming language. They aren't enjoyable to read, and they often miss the forest for the trees. A human written sketch explaining why we're here and what we're working towards is still meaningful and important. If you want code-level details of every decision and algorithm, we have code for that.
I have mixed feelings on whether these documents are useful LLM inputs. I did a project where I carefully paired with Claude Code on producing a specification that another model would actually implement. I'm not sure it saved me any time, and it was very un-fun. (I kind of blame Opus 4.7 xhigh for this. It ain't speedy.) I feel like I can nitpick code to get exactly what I want, but defining exactly what I want an auto-mode LLM to go and do, in English, is much more difficult. I don't think the PLAN.md I generated would have been useful for a human trying to understand the system (too verbose), and Claude Code still made its usual mistakes that I have reminded it a billion times not to make (t.Context() in tests, not context.Background()!), so I'm just not sure it was worth it. I would say I probably wouldn't do it again in the near future. A rough sketch to get humans on board and to get the high level details worked out, written by hand, and then pairing with the LLM on actually typing in the code seems the most productive to me. But I do try to go outside my comfort zone once in a while to test the edges of these tools. They are very impressive and are worth a lot of the hype. (I know I will never write a YAML file again. I hate it more than anything, and Claude is amazing at it. But I worry I wouldn't feel the same way if I hadn't already had 8 years of k8s experience.)
There is something appealing about "it's just a file" (it really isn't; it has locks and a WAL), but I agree with you.
I think people are afraid to read the documentation for postgres. You can start it up in milliseconds. Fast enough and light enough to run one copy for every test case in your test suite, or whatever you're using it for. (mkdir /tmp/whatever; initdb -D /tmp/whatever --no-instructions -A reject -c listen_addresses= --auth-local=trust --no-sync -c fsync=off -c unix_socket_directories=/tmp/whatever -U postgres --no-locale; postgres -D /tmp/whatever) Now you have a test database that behaves exactly like production because it's exactly like production. (OK, turning fsync off makes it a lot faster than production, so be careful.)
> I think people are afraid to read the documentation for postgres.
Postgres may introduce a single-file embedded filesystem because what the hell, but the irony is all these guys won't even notice it. The same people that say Postgres backups are too hard.
I think they were intending to evoke the image of RAID rather than literally referring to a redundant array of inexpensive disks. You host your code on Github, Gitlab, and at home, then you survive a Github outage. It's a redundant array. Not sure it's inexpensive, though.
I don't think you can ever trust one service with critical data. Some Claude instance deletes your prod database, you have to restore from an offsite backup because it also deleted your local backups. Even at small startups we did pg_dump to AWS from GCP because ... who knows what is going to happen to GCP, and we want to continue to be in business if that happens.
I don't feel safe with any one single point of failure. "Your credit card bounced", "you thought it was dev", "you got hacked", etc. are all the same problem to me and no cloud provider solves those merely by setting up an account.
Kind of a random aside, but I never realized how obnoxious LEDs were until I got a studio apartment and started sleeping in the same room as my homelab / workstation / networking hardware. Electrical tape saved me, but wow. You sure can produce a lot of light with a milliwatt of electricity :)
(And yes, my workstation has a clear case and LED RAM. Yes, I'm an idiot. Whenever Windows applies an update late at night, I wake up if it turns back on. I don't know what I was thinking when I built that thing, but never again.)
I like to put a little red wax over LEDs (at least, ones that I don’t touch). That way you can still see them, but they are dimmer, and the red tint makes the light less annoying at night.
I always thought it would be low-grade hilarious to record a fairly long video of the unboxing and assembly of a ridiculously elaborate in-case LED setup, only to reveal with a straight face and at the absolute last minute that the case in question is entirely opaque.
Even worse are phone chargers, intended to be used next to your bed, that light up like a Christmas tree when running. Black electrical tape is great for the worst of it, but you still need a few things available to tell you the operational status, if only they'd dim them a bit.
One of the best investments I ever made was in ordering a set of dimming LED stickers from Lightdims.com
I went throught my whole house adding them to powerbars, routers, toothbrushes, smoke detectors, etc. I even found the exact of location to put one over the motion detector on my Ecobee thermostats so they wouldn't light up everytime you walked by. I swear my house is about 1000% calmer than it would be without them.
Very nice, thanks! I was thinking of gluing baking paper over the most annoying LEDs as diffusers but these are much less of a kludge.
For anyone else seeing this, they ship to most countries for 99 cents so it's not the usual $29.95 for Fedex shipping on a packet of stickers. I'd seen similar ones on Aliexpress in the past but they're just light-blocking dots, not dimming ones.
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