Did not expect that kind of law change from such an aggressively Conservative government. I guess, there is ample reason to put the NIMBYs into overdrive, though…

Don’t think, Grok was a thing yet back then…

I do feel like AI art has entered the boomer stage of the hype cycle, as in Trump et al use it prominently, so the kids start to think, it’s

.

But I also feel like the blog post conflates two aspects. It’s not just about AI art, it’s also about every goddamn brainfart being turned into AI art.
No one needs to see a t-rex giving a thumbs-up or similar.

That’s what people are tired of, for sure. In the before times, the person would’ve chuckled at the thought and then forgotten about it. It took long enough to create an image of it, that they had time to realize that no one cares.
That barrier is now removed, so you definitely see posts online with just the dumbest brainfart turned into pixels.

“I rewrote Kafka in COBOL”

Oh man, it’s late here and I thought to myself “How would you rewrite a Kafka novel in COBOL?”… 🥴

(In case, anyone actually isn’t aware, they’re talking of Apache Kafka.)

In general, though, yeah, I also find it cumbersome how much noise these toy projects add. Actually usable software involves so much more than just dumping some code into a repo.

Nevermind that even just useful software requires you to not rewrite existing software in a worse way. You need to actually come up with something novel, which requires tons of design decisions.

Letting the LLM auto-complete those is a lot harder, because 1) you need to actually describe design goals rather than just telling it “do it like Kafka”.
And 2) because those design goals will be wrong every so often, and/or the detail decisions that you outsourced to the LLM. And then you still need to painstakingly find out what those detail decisions were, so that you can correct the decision.

Did you maybe accidentally turn on the “drunk” mode at the top?

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I imagine, this is more about software devs than sysadmins. Sure, you’ll hire a couple more sysadmins to help with the massive user growth during the pandemic. But especially combined with loans basically being made free in the same time, it’s suddenly worth hiring a bunch of devs to build the Next Big Thing™.

Once those loans start costing again and the user numbers fall off, you quickly have lots of devs that you can’t find tasks for, that are worth doing.

Yeah, the big thing is that management has no sense how little coding you actually do in a software engineering role. You spend so much more time understanding requirements, understanding how you can resolve roadblocks within your organization and understanding what the hell the code does that was previously written.

In particular, the last part is something that will most definitely take longer for vibecoded programs.
The code is often needlessly complex, because:

• folks throw in additional features with no restraint,
• the AI will gladly generate a second implementation for stuff, you already solved in the codebase, and
• AI-generated code tends to just be noisy, because you need rigorous logical reasoning to find the most minimal solution.

But you also just don’t have human beings that made all the detail decisions and can tell you why they’re important. In vibecoded code, all of these detail decisions are accidental and only ‘proven’ in so far as the given accidental state that the code is in, happens to not explode in reality. If you need to tweak anything about it, you’re completely blind as to what’s actually important and what’s just in there, because the AI figured, it’s the most likely thing to autocomplete there.

I mean, even then, they could increase the price per token, if they want to hand out fewer tokens for the price paid.

They could make this work like a prepaid SIM card, where you charge it with e.g. $10 and then you can use it until the $10 are used up.
Instead, they make it work like in-game currencies in scammy free-to-play games. Except that they didn’t choose a confusing conversion rate, for some reason…

Yeah, I imagine that they did try. But it’s not just the intentionally misleading announcement post, they also have 5(?) different subscription tiers, which get different changes from this. And one of the subscription tiers is actually called “Pro+”, so that does not mean “Pro and more expensive tiers” like I wondered. And they have this ridiculous intermediate currency to make things even more confusing.

Their offering itself is overly complex and confusing…

Man, they couldn’t have communicated this more confusingly, if they tried.

Which is a crime, by the way, when you sell it together with a product you hold a monopoly for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)

So, did they use AI tools to type “LGTM” 400 times or nah?

But yeah, I also find that frustrating. Management just looks at terrible metrics like PRs closed or lines of code produced.
It’s not even novel that you can produce terrible code very quickly. Decades ago, our industry learned that it isn’t worth it, because you suffer for it later. Now the game is altered slightly and management demands that we throw all these learnings out the window.

Well, base prices stay the same. They seem to just be billing more per usage on top of that…

Personally, I found it worth playing around with. I cared less than I thought where I had to move my eyeballs to, once I didn’t have to make the decision anymore.

And automatic tiling can also enable workflows that just don’t make sense with manual tiling, for example master-stack-layout where basically one window takes up half the screen and the other windows share the other half, and then you swap out which one’s the big window as you see fit.

But I also wouldn’t have written all that, if I didn’t have a way that you can easily try it out: You can add automatic tiling into KDE Plasma via Kwinscripts. Personally, I’m using Krohnkite: https://store.kde.org/p/2144146
(Easiest to install by going through the System Settings…)

If there’s no reason to hold the feature code back (i.e. its integration doesn’t break anything), then it’s much easier for development to ship the feature and disable it with a feature flag. Otherwise, you have two versions of the code, which means changes need to be integrated in both versions, which is largely just pointless busywork.