Thus practice may be very bad for your health. Not that these "executives" care, but you should.

Yes. And that is how AWS got their 13 hour (?) outage. That outage was probably more expensive than what they can save in cost over a year or several by using LLMs as surrogate coders.

Why stop there? Make it part of the start-up message and if there is none, add one!

Well, the routinely clueless economics graduates certainly think so. My take is that in a few years actually competent coders will be in high demand to fix the mess and out out a lot of fires. When that happens and if you are inclined to participate, make them pay through the nose.

Sounds like very risky behavior. But some people are simply not smart...

Will probably not take long.

I have no idea what graduates you look at, but this is not the case here (Europe).

Pretty much this. LLMs can be convenient, but they are not magic and that they make competent coders slower is pretty well established by now.

The problem with that is that external pressure to get better is raising, both from reliability requirements and from security requirements. In this case, stagnation means getting worse and worse.

Well, that is certainly what they are planning. Just one problem: The evidence is mounting that LLMs cannot replace competent engineers.

No surprise this idiocy is happening in other areas too. There is a special kind of mental disability you need to have (or acquire) to be an economics graduate: A total inability to see more than a few months into the future and a total inability to do any kind of risk management. It worked? Everything must be more than fine and surely we can do it cheaper, right?

That is why people with critical institutional and technological skills are not treated even remotely at their value, let alone critical for organizational survival. Tech history is full of big names that are not around anymore or only in massively reduced forms. And in most cases, it is because some "managers" did not manage to think.

It could. But it could also be completely genuine. There really are people that badly defective and apparently not only a few.

I do not think Microsoft is capable of that. Solid engineering? Depending on and trusting in what others have found to work well? Admitting they have a severe problem? I do not think they can do any of those.

What we really need are proper support systems for children in place, but in the real world they often don't exist. Some parents also seem to think they should have full control over their children and know everything they are doing at all times, which makes things like seeking support for being LGBTQ bother difficult for the child and something that the parents demand is not made available.

Maybe we could set up better moderated communities for this kind of thing, but that brings its own problems. As an example, with the current attacks on trans healthcare in the UK, a lot of trans kids are being forced to go the "DIY" route for treatment. It's not illegal as such, but it is something of a grey area. Any kind of official moderation is likely to make such forums useless to a lot of people.

Are you sure you were paying attention when you read it, because that's not what happens in the book. For example, Rocky needs essentially an environmental suit to survive in an atmosphere suitable for humans, due to his planet having much higher pressure and temperature. Communication is established over some time based on engineering principles, which are universal properties of the universe and a classic sci-fi trope for communicating with very different alien species.

I thought it was a pretty good book overall. Lots of interesting ideas and detail. Strong characters, at least for the protagonist and Rocky.