Why did they change name ? Usually companies do that after some big scandals...

Same job here. You put into words what I've been thinking. I find getting started on embedded projects with new boards increasingly difficult. I thought I was just getting old, but the documentation is hidden on download sites (and gigantic), applies to heaps of incompatible boards (spot the difference !), mixes payware (very $$$) solutions and open source (which the vendors won't support or even explain), the forums take a week to have a single barely related answer...

Or well warmed at least. We have a server room at work (about 10 racks) and we use ambient air cooling for it (aircon only on the hottest days of summer). In winter we can heat the entire building (250 people) with the air that comes out of the machines.

Let them do all their code with AI. Please. When it all comes crashing to the ground, they will have to hire real developers for real money to come in and try to fix the slop.

A year? I've regularly written that much in a month, and sometimes in a week. And, counter-intuitively, 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. I think it's because that very high productivity level can only happen when you're really in the zone, with the whole system held in your head. And when you have that full context, you make fewer mistakes, because mistakes mostly derive from not understanding the other pieces your code is interacting with.

Of course, that kind of focus is exhausting, and you can't do it long term.

By focusing on the structure, not the details. The LLM and the compiler and the formatter will get the low-level details right. Your job is to make sure the structure is correct and maintainable, and that the test suites cover all the bases, and then to scan the code for anomalies that make your antennas twitch, then dig into those and start asking questions -- not of product managers and developers, usually, but of the LLM!

But, yeah, it is challenging -- and also strangely addictive. I haven't worked more than 8 hours per day for years, but I find myself working 10+ hours per day on a regular basis, and then pulling out the laptop in bed at 11 PM to check on the last thing I told the AI to do, mostly because it's exhilarating to be able to get so much done, at such high quality, so quickly.

Well, it kind of sucks to have an idea to contribute and no way to contribute because you have to be invited by someone before you can offer...

The problem is volume.

Just like AI slop content isn't generally that much worse than human slop that flooded the services, at *least* the human slop required more effort to generate than it takes a person to watch, and that balance meant the slop was obnoxious, but the amount was a bit more limited and easier to ignore.

Now the LLM enables those same people that make insufferable slop to generate orders of magnitude more slop than they could before. Complete with companies really egging them on to make as much slop as they possibly can.

LLM can be useful for generating content, but it is proportionally *way* better at generating content for content creators that don't care about their content.

Which for self-directed people is an easy-ish solution, don't let the LLM far off a leash if you use it at all. Problem is micromanaging executives that are all in and demanding to see some volume of LLM usage the way they think is correct (little prompt, large amounts of code).

As far as I've seen, the AI fanatic's answer is "don't care about the code".

They ask for something and whatever they get, they get. The bugs, the glitchiness, the "not what they were expecting" are just accepted as attempts to amend purely through prompting tend to just trade one set of drawbacks for another rather than unambiguously fix stuff. Trying again is expensive and chances are not high that it'll be that much better, unless you have an incredibly specific and verifiable set of criteria that can drive automatic retry on failure. However making that harness is sometimes harder than making the code itself, and without a working reference implementation even that may be a lost cause.

I've always hated trying to salvage outsource slop, and LLM has a very similar smell with similar reactions where people resign themselves to the crappiness.

Well, in one respect it is 'very useful'. Executive direction that the legacy codebase must be 'documented' fully. Poof, it is 'documented'. Is it correct? Who knows, no one will ever read it, but it fluffs the executives "thought leadership". The compromise between 'port the code' which is a risk no one will take and 'document the code to prepare for a porting effort that will never come'.

Just be careful to keep the LLM vomit clearly distinguished from actually curated documentation, lest some naive person one day believe the documentation is actually based on anything.

So we have LLM vomit directed in ways to make the leadership feel like we are 'properly' leveraging the hype while we wait for the hype train to run out of steam.

Because sometimes the client paying for the work wants it to be on GitHub.

If Microsoft is going to put ads in GitHub the people who upload the code should get a cut of the money. The more bugs you fix, the richer you get!

Problem being that this is requests from people trying to contribute.

Even when they avoided github, they got hit.

I wager at one point, a project that stayed strictly email based will have threads with this sort of slop in it.

Unless you make your repository and all means of contact with you invite-only, it's going to be hard to avoid.

Though they managed to ultimately extend this github brand to github copilot, that will gladly push stuff to forgejo, gitlab, etc...

Even worse, they've extended it to tooling that they pitch to developers who use git for anything under the brand affinity of 'github' (which *way* too many people already assumed git == github).

Lots of people could and did design and/or build personal computers in the 70s. Magazines published designs and sold mail order kits pior to the Apple I. There were also a bunch of pre-built home computers contemporary with the Apple I/II, and several of them were more popular.

Neither Steve was really the singular genius people like to retrospectively paint them as. Together they did good work and were in the right place at the right time with the right motivation.