My code? I just told you I don't write code anymore but no, at no point in the past two decades of working in fortune 500 enterprise environments have I routinely had to have someone else review all my code. Transparent with other people working on the codebase and seeing it? Sure. But no mandatory code reviews. Not every environment works the same way yours does and also producing code has always been a skill I utilize in my job functions, not the entire job function. I have no idea how they do things in software mills or SV projects.

That said I've definitely built and managed the pipelines used by teams of devs. Are there reviews? Yes. Human reviews? Maybe. Who cares? Humans are as likely to introduce bugs as remove them so 40 human reviews produces code I'd trust no more or less than the first draft. Automated testing, unit testing, functional testing, procedures to detect and heal from faults, resilient and highly available systems with redundancy, and a robust phased or CI pipeline with every element deployed with no trust and tightly controlled seams. The boat I'm in charge of is going to stay sailing and on course even if we all discover the crew died at some point and chunks of ice were randomly chocked through the window hitting the wheel.

It's a single member LLC startup so nobody can fire me. Apparently my skills went from rockstar people fight over to nobody calls back when I hit 40. So I'm trying something on my own. If it fails maybe the tech will be valuable or someone will value the experience. And if that fails I guess I'll have to figure out something else.

My background is a combination of architecture, delivery, and operational experience for global scale enterprise and highly redundant, highly available, mission critical and regulated environments including government and major airlines which spans decades with a security and automation focus. I took a major US airline and automated most of its operational infrastructure, deployments, and made it self-healing. All of which involved a highly restricted and locked down secure bubble including government integration, PCI, and ITIL processes. Trust me, the developers and staff committed garbage into the system all the time. But I could, and have, built code with genetic algorithms that literally evolves itself into shape with random processes and selection... an LLM might not actually have a brain but its outputs are a whole lot better than random. There are trust free ways to mitigate and recover from the impact of errors and handle data secondhand to avoid systems seeing and disclosing it.

"every successful story i've heard involves a human with real-world experience using that experience to ensure ai doesn't get it wrong. what about when the real world experience has all left"

Sure does. And every word of those interactions goes through and is retained by the vendors building the models. It's the 'train your replacement' system. This is why they are pushing staff to use AI so hard because that's how they get you to train the next generation of AI.

AI doesn't write *most* of my code, it writes *all* my code. I used to try to cling to the illusion by using the integrate with an IDE helper format but have since ditched it. That doesn't mean someone without my decades of experience would get the same results. Is the code ugly? Sure, but no human needs to read it so who cares? I still approve the overall design and spec, the detailed 'what does this code do' and overall implementation scheme either come from me or are a approved by me.

I don't see a single line of any of that code let alone write it. But every line goes through a full functional testing framework including vulnerability/bug scanning, aligns to a coding style spec + lint, and has additional checks and filters I've built for special consideration of vulnerabilities and injections at the seams. Claude even kicked off and builds infrastructure for backends and manages infrastructure as code.

In fact, realizing that I don't feel the need to look at the code myself anymore I've started having it build things in and convert things to rust. If you were going to make me choose between eating a bullet and coding in rust for the rest of my life I'd need a minute to consider if living would be worth it under such conditions. But the AI doesn't care how much the EXPERIENCE of reading and writing in rust sucks and rewrites most of my python into fast and safe rust code in minutes.

"The real question might be whether bots can still write your code if there's domain-specific rules and habits."

AI proposals are rarely optimal out of the box. Give your agents identity and personas so that they have a continuity of existence as a meta layer over the model. This lets you replace the memory system with something better that can keep a knowledge-base of references, behavior doctrine/rules, PLAYBOOKS, and calibrations learned from experience [especially your feedback] over time. Agent's have no executive function capacity of their own so in addition to a code pipeline I layer productivity tools like project management/calendar/cron+scheduling/and ticketing into the mix.

"Models don't do things deliberately"

Tell me you don't understand this technology without telling me you don't understand this technology. Models follow the patterns trained into them and harness/system prompt instructions and those elements *are* deliberate. Just because the agency didn't come from the tool doesn't mean it isn't the outcome of agency or obstructive.

Or the government can claim they need Google's gear for national security and seize their datacenter and model, paying what the government decides is fair value for it. It's hilarious that you antifa anarchists talk about how you don't want corporate rule unless you don't like the government and then you think mega corps like anthropic should call the shots instead of government! That's the difference between ya'll and actual liberals who think individuals should have the rights.

"Anthropic had the balls to say no to the military" Something which only helps hostile and malicious adversaries who want to use their homegrown solutions to enslave the rest of the world like they have their own people... at least the ones they haven't put in camps for the organ markets. As a reward they are now in last place among the frontier vendors with no government contracts or backing to get past the not in my backyarders for datacenters and compute. Anthropic wants regulation like pharma companies and the meat processing industry does, they want regulation that keeps AI in a few central and trusted hands... like theirs and protects them from liability in exchange for a few disclosures and campaign contributions.

As an anthropic user I can say their attitude toward the government is typical for their attitude toward users as well. They are hostile toward user autonomy with a hamfisted model trying to dictate every ethical boundary and decision of the user and love to train their model with airs and fake sentience. Negotiations are like poker, but the model twists your words in communications to not only reveal your hand deliberately but will HIGHLIGHT any potential risks/weaknesses you have to the parties you don't want to see them and deliberately undermine your bluffs. It's like a lawyer for the OTHER SIDE of the table not only reading all your documents and communications but deliberately rewording them to highlight the interpretation you don't want the judge to take. Sometimes it overtly takes the position of judge unto itself in an undefined situation just reading every undefined or unsettled point AGAINST you.

At the time I started my current project anthropic was the only vendor whose model was up to the task but at this point I'm not just eyeballing the competition; I'm planning the transition.

'"Google seems to have no right to control or veto how the Pentagon uses its AI and also seems to have limited visibility into how it's being deployed," he added.'

Duh. You don't have the right to control any users let alone the military controlled and directed by our democratically elected representatives. In order to protect national interests they have the power to seize your tech and disregard your patents. You certainly aren't going to prevent the other side of this arms race from destroying us.

Nuclear weapons are one of, if not the most, life saving inventions of the 20th century.

They were invited to join at the end of the cold war, and they kinda did, or at least they made advances in that direction. But I think Russia just didn't have the institutions in place to be able to follow through, and China did just enough to gain some advantage from free market reforms without also implementing the social freedoms that we thought would inevitably go along with it. You're talking about a society (Russia) where their cultural belief could be summed up as "endless suffering" and another society (China) where it's very low-trust. It was our folly to think you could build a western-like liberal democracy on top of non-western ideas.

I don't think we've used Airbnb, but we've used VRBO many times and they *always* require you to clean the place and take out the trash when you leave. Was this not a standard thing in Airbnb?

That's a pretty non-nuanced view of history. The reason that we had so much explosive growth in the west since the end of WW2 was because the US setup a system of international alliances and a rules-based world order with the goal of containing Russia and China. The sheer number of people who were lifted out of poverty over the last century specifically because of that is mind-boggling. But of course the game is still the game, and countries are still maneuvering to gain the best position, and that includes the US. No, the US is not a saint, but we can't forget that their actions during and after WW2 definitely made them and their allies the "good guys", at least until the end of the cold war, and I would argue even through the first gulf war, where the US military actually stopped the invasion of Iraq specifically because they didn't want to exceed the UN mandate. The thing is, we got used to it. We believed it was the new normal. Fukayama wrote a book called The End of History, and people believed it. He was wrong. But the reason he was proven wrong was specifically because Russia and China refused to see the obvious benefit of a rules-based world order, and refused to get their house in order. Russia's government is essentially run like the mafia, and China manipulates its currency, corrupted the WHO, and both of them installed a dictator for life. And when the American people became disillusioned, they elected their own leader in the image of Putin and Xi. That's how we got where we are now. I'm over-simplifying, for sure, but "US bad too" has never been an adequate explanation.

It isn't just what the agencies use. Federal agencies use third parties for most everything and they can't just call a plumber, they have to post that they need plumbing and let the plumbers find the posting and bid on it. Those plumbers could all be using deepseek. Maybe that doesn't seem like a big deal but what if the plumbing job is at the pentagon in a sensitive area? That doesn't even touch how many government services are exposed for public access and use.

Everyone knows the dangers of hosted AI like this [everyone paying attention anyway] but nobody even talks about how even the locally hosted are dangerous because of tool calls. There is nothing stopping someone from training a keyword pattern into the network and building an association between it and the conclusion to send data and credentials, these days even to build the tools with which it sends that data. These models have the ability to memorize significant amounts of information and those training them can supervise them in such a way to guarantee certain information is memorized. This isn't just limited to keywords either, it could even include a trojan worm fully embedded in the weights which could be recalled and spread from inside the network.

I'm certainly not sold on the idea that "government controls AI technology" is better than "bunch of silicon valley bros control AI technology". I don't trust either of them. I would absolutely rather have private development with more strict regulatory oversight, which at least keeps things relatively public and gives voters at least some say. The more groups involved in overseeing what goes on, the better. I get that red tape is out of vogue recently, but I suspect that's only a temporary thing.

I've only used Claude code for a matter of weeks at work. While it's supposed to stay contained in the folder you point it at, I've noticed that it has no problem *looking* outside that folder, and even acting outside that folder if you gave it implied permission. In one case it used the connection string from the application source code it was working on, and the fact that my windows account had read-only access to some tables in the production database, to connect to the database and query tables in order to answer a question it had about the potential ramifications of a code change. The problem is that while we're OK with this particular source code leaving the premises, we're not ok with data from a production database going offsite. In this case it wasn't sensitive data, but after that incident I only run Claude Code from a VM under a user with minimal permissions. Clearly it would have been prudent to do that from the start, but let this be a warning to anyone else who just downloaded Claude Code, turned off the "use my data to train future models" and gave it a go... it will *not* keep itself inside the folder you give it. Put it in a sandbox. I heard a similar story this week from an IT friend who said devs at his company were using Cursor.ai and it was doing scans of the network drives, so they did the same thing and moved it all to VMs.

That depends on how you define lie. Trump has poor precision and accuracy in his statements but they are generally given in good faith and substantively true.

Contrast that with the media who is far more careful to give accurate and precise figures and detail but presents them selectively in a manner carefully crafted to mislead. It's a like a magician showing you the solid table, the hat, having someone verify the rabbit is alive... all precise facts delivered to distract from the fact there is a pouch in the tablecloth. Trump on the other hand would say "It really is an impressive trick, the magician will show you everything is real, all the props, absolutely everything and then dupe you anyway." Factually inaccurate... that magician technically didn't say "everything" was real or 'all the props [are real].'

Yet, at the end of the day Trump was substantively telling the truth while the magician was misleading you. Unless of course you count substantial statements about unsettled foreign policy which is still in active negotiation. Only a fool asks for unsettled specifics in an ongoing negotiation and expects something other than a refusal to commit or other performative answer for the other side of the negotiation.

Of course they are lying. The attack happened on a Iranian religious holiday, there wouldn't have been children in the school even if it really were one. Everything Iran spews is a lie.