anecdotical:

I'm a Ham and I wanted to CAT control multiple radios and a couple serial port devices. I currently do this with multiple USB serial ports which is a pain because if you ever move them you'll get a different enumeration and have to reconfigure everything.

I asked an LLM to create a project for a multiport card with hardcoded serial numbers and configurable settings (speed, parity, polarity etc - even inter-byte delays).

It did everything as I requested. The only issue I had is that when I bootstraped the project i selected a different microcontroller target. But the result is now a serial port that 1) works exactly as intended, 2) has serial numbers which allows me to move it around ports without reconfiguring (Linux by-id path), 3) whatever quirks i can either fix or add as workarounds for badly behaving devices. 4) Is not a chinese clone that will refuse to work on windows because the official drivers detect it as counterfeit.

The experience was honestly just fantastic. I do NOT want to write code for a multiport serial card. It's completely boring drudge. There is nothing fun in it. There is just hundreds of #define and compiler guards for everything. This thing had a working solution in 10 minutes, of something that would probably take me an entire weekend to do myself - a weekend of, you know, not actually using my radios because I was too busy writing code. I was able to do what I really wanted (focus on the high level requirements and then actually use the product) instead of digging deep into a datasheet developing a skill I'll never use in my work (I don't do embedded code for work).

its during those sprints when I'm pumping out thousands of lines per day that I write the code that turns out to be the highest quality, requiring the fewest number of bugfixes later

yeah, all of us write (or copy/paste) great boilerplate code. that's not really something to be proud of.

we all make mistakes when writing business functions which are never 25k LOC in a week.

except no. because when you ask it to generate test cases it comes up with cases you didn't think of. and it then run the tests and fixes the errors.

my experience with both 20 years as a software developer in multiple teams, and LLM user, is that they are very similar in results to what a human produces without enough context.

every time I got a "ticket" to add a feature, the ticket wasn't 100% clear, it only provided happy path solutions, and LOL if it ever provided any test cases. The "extras" I added myself by just thinking "maybe it should have this. The LLM behaves 100% the same. except in the case of humans we call them "peer reviews" which usually just means "the control freak lead engineer who wrote the bad ticket is now extending the scope because what you developed exposed the 1000 ways that he didn't think of"

the finance bros "ai can't replace my bloomberg terminal" has some serious techbro "ai can't replace coders" vibes

Maybe I'm out-of-date or a control freak, but I don't want my codebases to contain custom code that I need to rely on but that I didn't write myself.

Apparently you're just a person who never worked in a team. Working in a team requires accepting other people's code. Code that you may not have written the same way but it works, and it's efficient. It's just not "your way".

If you're working in a team, I hope you're not making your coworker's lives miserable by dissecting every PR with 80+ comments and dragging it for days on end, because what you really want is that they will rewrite it the way you solved it in your head.

It's a tool. You need to know how to use it. But before all, you need to know what you want it to do.

I don't "vibe code". I explicitly tell an LLM what's the output I want. This works great. It's also helped me take care of long-standing low-priority tickets.

For example, I had it rewrite a backend function that reads from DB/returns JSON. But I had it do it "streaming" from the database instead of buffering-and-stringifying the database response. This has been long in my to-do list. I knew how to implement it (as I had done it in the past). I just didn't want to do it because it was a "nice to have" but not a must for our use case. And it's honestly boring to write.

The LLM did it for me in a few minutes.

I also tried "Vibe coding an app" to see how that would work. It didn't. It shows awesome progress at the beginning and then it starts failing. It deletes entire files, rewrites unnecessary parts, keeps looping and burning through tokens so, I honestly don't know what the "vibe coders" are really doing. It just didn't give me any results when I tried it.

don't worry, you will live at the company town and get paid in company scrip

also: FUCK SLASHDOT ADS.

in a world of "age verification laws" and governments pushing for "cashless", and precedents like Canada freezing protesters bank accounts, yes.

governments are turning ultra fascist everywhere. doesn't matter if they say they're left wing progressive. they're after your internet anonymity and want you to keep your money in banks, mostly to avoid tax evasion.

(cue in europeans saying they're not fascist and i'm a dumb american etc and canadians justifying the bank account freezing because it was aligned with the party's interest)

and pay for it

actually, Javascript IS a stable language. they have maintained compatibility with every quirk in the language.

It's the "ecosystem" built around it that has a completely different philosophy

Because an alarmingly high number of developers believe that, if code isn't being changed, it's dead. And dead code is "VuLNeRaBle".

Have you ever tried anything in Python or JS? Breaking changes are the norm. And if the app broke, it's YOUR FAULT for not reading the changelog, not their fault for changing the API for no good reason (so many changes in JS for "consistency", like, someone developed something and spelled it "colour" and 3 versions later some dev is incredibly irritated that the rest of the spelling of the app is in american english, so they "fix" it for consistency. Yes, they broke thousands of apps out there that had been running for years, but, isn't it nice how the code is now all consistent?

And don't let me get started on shit like React Router, which, last time i checked was in V6 and every version was a full rewrite, completely incompatible with the previous version - because of conceptually different behavior. Imagine doing this SIX TIMES in less than a decade.

toxic loser.

believing AI is not here to stay is just delusional. and universities better start adjusting accordingly.

I'm tired of hearing that this is just "a bubble that's going to burst anytime soon". You know what was also a bubble, that also burst? The fucking internet.

And now we can't even imagine our lives without the internet.

they are telling us that AI is going to replace us all, the future is 'agentic' and there's no stopping progress

also corporate: we want you back in the office 100%.

they are psychopaths.

I still use my dad's Hi-Fi and record player. I bought kilos and kilos of vinyl records in my trips to japan.

For "smart anything", I stick with "Home Assistant" and "ESPHome". The latter is an open source platform to build your own smart devices. You can DIY light switches, remote buttons, remote sensors, even build a security camera for $10 (ESP32CAM). Runs great on Raspberry Pi.

For "good behaving" smart things you can buy, you need to look for the "Matter" standard. Devices are required to always have an open, local API so even if the manufacturer disappears, your smart hardware is still smart even though it can't phone home anymore.

I still stick to ESPHome