Ethan

How is that useful? Because if your answer is “I boycott devs that have type errors”, I got bad news for you. Unless you’re working on mission critical systems, like pace makers, airplanes, spacecraft, financial systems, etc, sinking the necessary engineering time to 100% prevent those kinds of errors is a bad business decision.

An error message should either be instructions for the user, or something they copy-paste into a bug report (or equivalent). That’s it.

How would telling the user there’s a type error be helpful at all? If the user isn’t a programmer that would be utterly useless to them. If they are a programmer it’s probably still useless because the probably don’t have the source on hand.

I did not because the only part I actually cared about was the bullshit clickbait title.

Upstream infrastructure was compromised. Implying it’s a fault with Notepad++ fault is disingenuous. What OSS maintainer is going to think, “I need to pick a hosting provider that’s not going to get hacked by the Chinese government”? Unless your favorite editor is being hosted on infrastructure hardened against state level hackers, it’s not any better.

… with a debugger

I, on the other hand, would not consider someone a serious, competent professional if they were unable to do their job without an IDE. Sure, every serious developer I’ve known uses an IDE or similar for day to day work, but that’s a matter of convenience. In my book “competence” includes being able to do your job without needing your hand held by the IDE.

Feel free to not use a debugger for your software. But I don’t hate myself so I’m going to stick to using one whenever possible.

Because I don’t hate myself

We need better distributed connectivity. It wouldn’t be that hard to build a project management system (issues, etc) on top of Git, but DVCS only gets you so far without a way to connect directly to the other contributors.

They’re different signals. The default handling is the same - terminate - but they’re triggered by different things and (if the process handles them) handled by separate handlers.

I tried for a good 20-30 minutes to get it to generate something that worked. It just gave me a sequence of garbage. Each one looked plausible but as soon as I really read the code it was clear there were issues. Different issues each time. I wasted more time trying to get it to produce correct code than it took to write it myself, once I gave up on the AI.

For me the most productive way to use AI is to ask it to suggest a strategy and to implement that myself. If the code is simple enough for the AI to get it right, I can often write it myself with less effort. If it’s something that requires multiple reprompts to get right, I can almost always do it faster myself.

Or something more complicated than it can handle. Ask it to implement an ASN.1 floating point parser. It looks good but the closer you look at the code the more trash it is.

A good teacher will do that. And even the best teacher can’t force you to learn if you don’t want to. LLMs can be a powerful tool for learning if you’re sufficiently motivated.

AI is an extremely useful tool. I’m on the other end of the career track, but it seems to be that it’s almost like having a personal tutor. And as with any other teacher, if you use it as an aid to figure things out yourself I imagine it would help immensely, but at the same time if you use it as a crutch to do your work for you, you skills will be as weak as someone who cheats off their friends in school. I attribute a large part of my skills to spending lots of time reading other people’s code and understanding why they wrote it the way they did (usually because some library didn’t do what I wanted so I figured out how to beat it into submission out of pure stubbornness). If you use the AI as an aid and spend the time to really understand the code it’s producing (and the flaws in that code), I think you’ll build up your skills well.

My rant about code monkeys was inspired by people I’ve interviewed and worked with who had to be told exactly how to solve a problem since they apparently had zero problem solving skill themselves. The “programming is just writing code” attitude drives me up the fucking wall and “LLMs are going to make programmers obsolete” is just the latest iteration of that bullshit.

Knowing how to write code has only ever been half (or less) of the job. A real programmer solves problems with code, especially problems that aren’t like any they’ve seen before. Someone who can write code but can’t solve problems or can only ‘solve’ problems they’ve seen before is just a code monkey. AI can regurgitate code it’s seen before (that is, code it was trained on) and it can do some problem solving but it falls on its face quickly if you ask it to do anything complex (at least for my metric of what is complex).

Seniors should know their shit. If a junior doesn’t need help they’re either not doing their job or not a junior.

I think you haven’t met “problem solvers” as creative as the ones I’ve met. My first job out of college I built an inventory system for a small engineering firm. One of the engineers tried to solve his problem instead of asking for help. Once he gave up and called us, it took us an entire day just to figure out how he had managed to screw things up as badly as he did.

That’s preferable to people who don’t ask for help until everything is hopelessly fucked because they kept trying to solve their problem different git commands, none of which they understood.

Flash was awful. I was contracted to un-fuck a custom video player and that experience convinced me that Flash was a dumpster fire that needed to die. Fortunately it did.

Almost any language is ok but some ecosystems make me want to turn into a murder hobo (looking at you, JavaScript).

Keep your Rust to yourself. I don’t care what language someone else uses for their projects but Rust is an unreadable mess that I don’t want anywhere near my projects.