I always thought that coding questions during interviews were stupid anyways even before AI: it's information that one can simply look up with a simple internet search or programming book.

If you could learn to code with one simple internet search and having one book on your shelf, then you'd be right. Also, ha it occurred to you that you've been asking the wrong questions?

The only reason to ask programming questions is to figure out if the person was "fibbing" on their resume about their skills.

Kinda. That's the point of an audition. A substantial number of programmers can't write a simple program in a language of their choice or read existing code they're not already familiar with. I know there are companies that hoover up loads of mediocre people and they just kind of grind doing tiny amounts. And I'm pretty sure some people can only code by randomly permuting code in an existing codebase and seeing what happens.

Plus it shows absolutely nothing about their interpersonal skills, which are as important to be a valued member of a development team.

Gosh it's almost lie you can ask two interview questions or even 3! You don't need to ask a single question than answer every topic.

actually they rise because lowest 20% welding jobs are done by ignorant people just sputtering snot with chinese MIG kit.

Hey that sounds like my welding!

It's amazing how few programmers are willing to use a profiler, even if you show them how and why.

Yep. I think it's flat out arrogance often. I KNOW why things are slow.

But even Trillion dollar companies like Meta essentially freeload off the likes of Php where a contribution in the low millions or tens of millions works help bend development to their liking,

Even less: clearly most of these companies don't particularly want to influence the directions (they could hire the devs if they really wanted to). They're jut content to use them. If they chucked, say, 10 grand a year at a handful of projects, the problem would be solved.

But I guess companies are now meeting their doing good quota

It's not even doing good, it ought to be pure, bloody minded self interest. The cost of things like the PHP exploit, heartbleed and so on are absolutely immense. Investing a small amount in the future i jut good business. Trouble it it needs everyone to do it to make it so cheap they don't notice.

I suppose the main thing I'd have said very differently is the terminology, in that I wouldn't regard the kind of incompetent senior as a senior in the first place

The best phrase I heard (I think here) was "10 years experience or 1 year experience repeated 10 times".

But then I'm pretty old school about this: to me, a junior developer needs quite close supervision to produce useful results, a regular/mid developer can perform routine tasks with minimal supervision but might need more help with larger or more complex tasks, while a senior is someone you can give more or less any task on your project to and they'll figure it out, and senior is also the level of someone who would be capable of supervising and training a junior.

Ostensibly yes. The juniors I'm thinking of certainly do need close supervision, though I don't think Claude replaces them because the good one use claude.

What I've noticed is there are a lot of jut plain crap mid level and senior people (for some value of senior). They can do more or less what you say, except they're still crap. The results will be overengineered piles of crap where they've decided to use the latest "technologies" which are really due to curiosity not some actual need. And the whole thing comes with an attitude problem too.

We've had a wave of people, particularly since the tech boom during COVID, who have obviously been over-promoted due to the employee's market and title inflation.

This is true, but my big corporate job spanned COVID, and I can assure you that the problem existed before COVID. Some of the refugees (haha they were in for a shock) from other big corporate shitshows had much the same to say.

Even that somewhat inflated sum is pocket change for just one of the many major corporations which rely on PHP.

I challenge you (well obviously this is impossible but you get the rhetorical point) to find one corporation in the entire world valued at over a billion that doesn't, say, use openssh. The OpenBSD foundation struggles to raise CAD 400,000 a year.

Sure they are legally allowed to be freeloaders. The point of the license is anyone can use it. It's really stupid however to contribute absolutely nothing when it's critical infrastructure you rely on day to day and you could easily afford a sponsorship. But it's the tragedy of the commons.

For a junior developer, I'd say frontier models passed their standard some time ago.

No, I disagree, and now that I'm thinking about it more, quite strongly. I think frontier models passed the mediocre programmers of all seniority levels some time ago. I've worked with so many arrogant pillocks who are convinced they are the shit and will not listen to someone with domain expertise and then get pissy when they turn out to be wrong. Or worse, get political and push through an objectively broken thing.

Good juniors can drive AI really well and do good stuff. I had a summer intern the summer just gone. 2 month placement in the middle of an engineering degree. Basically gave him a problem I didn't have time to work on: you know "here's the current solution, here's what I know, this is the problem, go nuts" kind of deal. Obviously there were regular feedback sessions, but he did all the work, and used AI heavily but not religiously. And that's now part of the product. He was obviously very very junior, but I've had seniors who were less capable and flexible.

The frontier models are hit-and-miss when it comes to writing good test suites,

I've also found the mediocre are very much monkey-see-monkey do kind of programmers who write tests because those are Bet Practices and they are the Best. But they also as I say convinced they are the shit and don't appear to actually believe their code need testing really. CI is there to put the halt on all the fools they are surrounded with, not them of course, but they know they need to model Best Practices for the unwashed.

End result, a lot of programmers are shockingly bad at writing tests and basically test useless things that are easy to test and unlikely to break but don't do what's actually hard but important. This appears to be what Claude has been trained on: basically the average, on average and it tends to write long batteries of more or less meaningless tests.

Naturally good juniors aren't very good at tests initially. They're juniors, but I find it's the attitude that matter. It's not hard to convince them they might be wrong and that there's a need for testing. Or "prove to me Claude hasn't messed it up", kind of thing. I'd much rather work with an enthusiastic junior who wants to prove me, Claude or themselves wrong than a senior programmer who I have to beg to consider the notion that their code might not be perfect.

TL;DR I broadly agree, but I think Claude makes the competent/incompetent split starker, not the junior/senior split.

Currently, based on objective data comparing similar fully completed development tasks like for like, I still outperform agentic workflows using frontier models by about 25-50% on average, and I don't have to pay anyone extra fees to do that, and subjectively I also find it more engaging to work that way. So I don't really buy the hype about AIs making us all orders of magnitude more productive unless you're happy to YOLO everything forever and take the much-discussed risks that comes with.

Yes, though as you say quite a lot of stuff can be YOLO'd.

It's amazingly good at some stuff and not at others.

It can bash out a CRUD app with a web based UI in basically no time, and really well. Think some boring internal tool like inventory management or something. Would cost a fortune to buy and also suck massively. It would from a project perspective count as long and complex, but from a pure software point of view, it's not complicated stuff. It's well documented. It's also a horrible tech stack.

It's also very good at indexing an unseen codebase and figuring out entry points for things. I've known people, or rather a person, that good, but I ain't.

But I've also seen it make a complete shitshow of threading in a small, contained task. It's also so-so if that at optimization. I set it on making thing go faster. I had the dataset, and specified tests. It found the hotspot and made it faster, which is frankly more than a lot of programmers can do. Most of them will smugly tell you everyone knows e.g. std::unordered_map is slow (and you're implicitly a moron for using it), change everything to their own implementation on a Friday night then bugger off. So yeah better than that, but I let it churn for ages with its agents and it didn't get much further. So I put some easy wins in by hand.

It is quite often wrong and i definitely worse in areas requiring domain expertise. But then again that's the case with your average programmer. It's also a bit weirdly pissy at time, but much less so that many programmers, so that's a net win. It won't flounce off if you tell it to delete a bunch of code it just wrote.

So...

Yeah I use it and quite a lot.

This isn't wrong. One of my devs is on a bit of a side quest to see how far he an get with Qwen locally (5070Ti) compared to Claude. He was basically trying to answer the GP's question. Resort so far: it's not as good as the latest frontier model feels like 4.6 instead which is pretty solid. Main thing is it's got a pretty small context, but that's due to the 16GB size of the GPU not the model per-se.

Pork barrel? Nah it'll be the green chile barrel, and I'd be OK with that.

Maybe the could fund replacement emergency spare tires for all. After all you're not really meant to put 100k miles on one.

and countries are still maneuvering to gain the best position, and that includes the US.

Are they? The US isn't, it's bending to the whims of an angry, stupid, corrupt and senile old man bent on getting as rich as possible. Needlessly burning allies doesn't put the US in a good position.

meaning Russia and China's nuclear arsenal is effectively useless

Russia's nuclear arsenal is already very close to being effectively useless. Not a chance they've been doing good stockpile stewardship while the entire rest of the armed forces (and its tyres) rots into the ground.

And why would Trump/America care?

When America lost 3000 people on 9/11 and called for aid, Europe stood up.

The question was not why should America care, but why would America care.

There's a good chance they simply won't. America has not had a great record of being a reliable ally over the years.

Also profiting off of crime and fraud is morally questionable.

Unless all profits go to real charity, people that watch this support fraud.

That's like saying people that watch true crime shows about murder support murder.

The problem is UK energy policy. It is to build large amounts of intermittent power generation in places where there is no demand.

Not really, or rather only in as much as this is because we have other problems. The problem is a massive lack of investment in infrastructure (i.e. the grid), and absolutely zero long term planning. Sure there might be plans, but they'll change every 5 minutes anyway, just to ensure that no companies invest properly either.

The result is that the UK has to build a hugely expensive new transmission network from the wind farms off the north coast of Scotland to the Midlands and South.

It's called "investment". The reason the UK is such a shitshow in so many ways is we have the least investment of the G7. We are not going to get better by continuing to not invest in important infrastructure because it's too expensive.

the only solution is of course gas fired generation, but that is politically incorrect.

"politically correct" lol.

No, the problem is with like everything else we underinvest. We have a crappy, ageing grid which can't move electricity around the way we need. We keep trolling industries by making grand plans and cancelling them so no one can productively invest. The solution sure as shit isn't just using gas: that's why we've in the hole we're in now. Because gas is critical electricity prices are tied to the price of gas.

Having more gas isn't going to make the electricity prices less tied to gas.

The program also involves large amounts of solar. However, the UK is the second worst country in the world for solar power generation (the worst is Ireland).

Well apart from that not being 100% correct... so? Solar in a lot of places is just stupidly good. It's only a bad idea if it doesn't have sufficient ROI compared to other options.

doing what we've done for the last 30 years (that is, not investing in, well, anything and tying the price of electricity to gas) is not going to change where we are relative to the last 30 years.