and using AI to create fake driver's licenses to get accomplices hired as delivery drivers.

And in-person voting is fraud proof? Ha ha.

We can't blame all this on the Clowntator, but he has had the FBI take a lot of focus off of real crimes to chase alleged illegal immigrants with "crimes" such a parking tickets, alleged voter fraud, and political opponents. Plus, a lot of experienced people left the FBI who didn't want to be part of the Gasstapo.

Thus, a cause, no, contributor yes.

but my violin for this is too small for even a tardigrade to hold.

Plus many countries are pushing to get off MS because Donald made them realize that US voters are f$cking idiots who put assholes in power. I doubt Donald's the first asshole. Remember Palin, and the string of war-mongers?* USA is an unreliable trade partner.

* Sounds like a 50's rock-group: "Palin and the Warmongers, with their new hit, 'Fox Jesus Told Us To Just Take It!'"

trades that AI will never replace...

Never say "never". Future forecasts of the past got most things wrong, at least in terms of timing. I never thought I'd see AI comparable to the TOS Trek's monotone computers in my lifetime. I would have bet against it at about 20 to 1 odds. (It's the computer that goes, "Working...")

Perhaps one can make a reasonable guess for about one decade away, but beyond that is just too foggy. Perpetual trade school may be the future, as bots nibble away at different careers.

When I left in 2022, you unofficially had a limited amount of time to make it to the senior band. The "up or out" philosophy very much applied to junior engineers; if you didn't have the potential to make senior engineer (because you hadn't made it yet after x years), you were managed out.

I find this very stupid. Some people are good, reliable, and experienced "worker bees" who either don't want to be in management or are not qualified for it. I see no logical reason to get rid of such people, do you?

(I'm not sure if "Sr. Engineer" means quasi-management at MS, but the mentality is common in big companies regardless.)

the long tail of LLM-exclusive idiot moments persist, and the moment you wholly surrender the codebase to only ever touching it via the LLMs, they'll ruin your day more and more often as time goes on.

How shops use and react to it might indeed be a big factor. With new tech, many developers are like puppies who energetically piss all over everything to force the latest buzzwords into stuff. Many make messes that the next group has to clean up, and they end up making a catalog of anti-patterns to avoid reinventing the entropy discovered by the puppies. We saw it with overly aggressive use of GOF OOP patterns and microservices.

Going to be interesting to see how big the surprises are. The problems are often not the technology, but the humans using it.

I admit it, I never enjoyed coding in the first place.

I like defining and delivering my vision of the how to tool should work for the customer, like designing a custom car for them. But the frustrating part is having to re-re-re-invent GUI idioms that have been around since the mid 90's. I don't want to have to make side mirrors from scratch, I want to select them from a catalog and paint & trim them to fit the custom car's vision and style.

Another analogy is as an oil-painter; I want to buy my paints in tubes, NOT mix my own paint like they did in the 1400's. But because GUI kits/libaries are fokked up, largely because DOM is wrong tool for GUI job, they have to be micro-managed. Web UI needs a bigly rethink. COBOL lasted so long because it's not intended for UI's. Biz and CRUD idioms don't change much, yet we have to reinvent how we integrate them into UI engines over an over for some stupid reason. Let's hire Vulcans to clean them up, not the Ferengi's we have now.

My usage of "prompt" is maybe not the right word. Typically there is the direct prompt that the user enters, and then a "hidden prompt" or similar that the bot UI sends to the model cruncher when a user enters new prompts. Thus the cloud service gets the user's prompt as-is, and the "hidden prompt". Maybe that's what you are calling the "compacted context"? I couldn't find a consistent word for such on the InterWebs. For one, there are different kinds of "background info" an AI IDE/UI might send.

Anyhow, how far back in size and time does this "side prompt/context" go? I imagine there's an upper limit, at least unless one pays for premium. I wonder if the important context "falls of the edge" of the context buffer due to size trimming/quota, if one has to start re-explaining the wheel to the bot?

Are those conversations and results kept in an extending prompt? How far back can your bot typically recall? Does the company charge for extra prompt (history) size?

> Explain to the AI what it got wrong and have it fix it. You could fix it yourself but that will just confuse the AI.

Please elaborate. Confuse for what purpose or context?

If you need to cancel your model subscription for some reason, does all the bot's knowledge of your shop's practices and patterns go away?

If that's a problem, then in-house or fully open-source models may be safer even if not as good initially.

"Back in my day bots draw 8 fingers per hand, you spoiled whipper-snappers have it down to 6!"

Now MAGAs will have to troll the old-fashioned way: type Fox talking points into social media.

Are you talking as a language per programming productivity, or per security?

Don flips faster than his hair in the wind.