I contend just the opposite. I'd be terrified to watch someone that doesn't know how to code use claude code for the very reasons you mentioned. It's going to do amazing stuff most of the time and really stupid stuff periodically. To pick up on that stupid stuff, knowing how to code and conscientiously reviewing changes with that background knowledge is the only way to get those impressive results.

Ah, if only that were true. Sadly, there are people that simply refuse to acknowledge the superior experience of using the Apple ecosystem across phones, watches, laptops, desktops, etc., etc. My wife and kids being among those stubborn hold outs with arms crossed and brows furrowed yammering on and on about elitist this or snobby that...whatever. ;)

Yes, yes, I'm JOKING! Please no flames. I mean...the situation I described is real enough, but c'mon, can't we all just get along and inter-operate!? LOL

It saddens me to hear this. Last time I needed to do this was just a few months ago. It's relatively common to be honest.

I was hiking along the ridge of the white mountains. Overnight some fellow hikers had taken some amazing shots of the milky way. Sure we could have exchanged e-mail addresses or numbers and then waited until we all got back down a few days later where we once again had cell coverage and then hoped they remember and/or bother to send to you so you could share that experience with others.

Or, as luck would have it, they happened to be using an iPhone as was I and we just airdropped right there.

It's really not a far fetched idea. I'm sure I'm in that situation at least 2 or 3 times each year and I'm sure in the absence of said functionality, there are photos and memories I would have long since forgotten.

End of the world? Certainly not. Clearly first world problems here. But you can't suggest it's a complete non-issue either. And although you didn't explicitly say it was a non-issue, it's easy to infer that sentiment from your statement. If that wasn't your intent, then fair enough I suppose. But even if that's the case, I suspect there are plenty of other people who, like me, took it that way and I figured I'd offer a counterpoint.

You're feeding the trolls...don't feed the trolls. ROFL!

Genuinely great conversation here. Thanks for that! Been a while...thus why I don't usually post. ;)

I just wrote up a slightly different take on the exact same situation you described. As a fellow "advanced" gray beard with decades of experience and broad knowledge of all the various "cool architectures du jour" that have popped up and gone away in that time, I feel that I am (as you are) fully qualified in writing code that others consider to be of "superior" quality.

The hands of such a person, these tools can build our knowledge. But only because we have all these learned system architectures upon which we can base our read and understanding of whatever new thing we're looking at.

Yeah, in a way we're "novices" in that field, but dude...we're novices with a vast knowledge library to build upon. Even without these tools, we can dive into an area we're entirely unfamiliar with and come up to full competency FAR faster than most true "novices".

The novices of concern here and being referred to by the author you replied to are those that aren't yet able to, as you wrote, "review the tests the LLM had written and direct it to improve them" in the same way you and I can. *Those* are the novices I am / we are concerned about never advancing beyond "novice" level.

Now...what we do not know is the long term playout of this. There was a time, I'm sure because I was there as I suspect you were as well, where higher level compilers were considered suspect. I've had to review the assembly they spit out to find floating point bugs I *knew* weren't in my code. But now? In 2026? I haven't reviewed compiler output in at least 2 decades, maybe almost 3...certainly not to the extent I was 4 decades ago when C compilers for the 65816 were first coming out, for example...

Is that where we are now in this genAI spool up? Perhaps. Perhaps the newbies now that seem like novices because they don't know the details of the underlying libraries and APIs like the back of their hand are just the new users of the new "compilers" and at some point in the future they're all going to look back and say "remember when we used to have to write actual code and memorize APIs and read through piles of documentation....OMG things were so painful back then".

That's what I'm hoping is happening now. I suspect it's more of that than what some are claiming that "software is doomed" and "we're going to lose all experienced coders". Nah...I suspect we're just changing the type of coder that's going to be considered "experienced" and the domain we're going to consider them experienced in.

You're right, but....

I mean, yes, you're right in that a novice using AI will very likely never advance much beyond being a novice. Which sucks and I don't have any answers for that yet. It's a HUGE looming issue and even my younger son is caught up in this mess trying to find a job when companies have absolutely put the brakes on hiring "novices" out of school (not even sure I'd call him a novice as he's quite competent but apparently "right out of school" immediately removes you from consideration at most places as far as I can tell).

But here's the tricky part...the part that's making this whole problem worse by acting as a feedback loop of sorts. When these tools are used by experienced system architects, coders, technical writers, etc., (all of which I, perhaps egotistically, consider myself as) they can be made to do incredible things very quickly and very completely in a way that a human isn't going to be able to slog through in days much less the minutes it takes these tools to crank it out.

And interns? I've been offered "another intern" just about every year for the last 10 years. But in the last 2 years, I've turned them down. I just do not need them anymore. But more than that, I enjoy getting that work done myself now because it's an opportunity to experiment with all these new tools.

And that's the spiraling feedback loop of destruction, unfortunately. It's not just that we don't "need" junior coders. That's true, but if the process of coming up to speed on all this new tech wasn't so interesting to all the gray beards like me, we'd be more than happy to being on junior coders and spool them up on this instead. But that's not the case... I haven't seen interesting new tech that actually got me truly excited about software and hardware in *decades*. Literally...*decades* of mediocre or (for sure) declining quality and the flattening of designs and architectures had left me 100% ready to walk away and just go start farming or something.

But then THIS shows up!? Are you kidding me! And you want me to let all the newbies play around with it and leave me behind? I mean, yeah, we probably *should* let that happen but I can't. Coding is just too much fun again and that's what got us all into this decades ago.

"prety" I can ignore. "rane" I cannot. ;)

Joking aside, my assumption is that Trump's position on Greenland is exactly that same statement as you made. We do pretty much have free reign but so does everyone else and that's the sticking point...I think. I usually try to find some hidden agenda because every slimy political move is slimy, but this one, at least to my naive self, seems pretty straightforward. "We" have an interest in limiting how closely we let "enemies" get to our borders with established bases and working condition and access to resources.

Police "discretion" already does that. Everywhere. All the time. At every level.

TFS doesn't even mention Java in its "anyone familiar with" list, but Java streams have been around since 2014 and are much a more disciplined and formal implementation of a very similar concept of chaining operations together like this. I'd call this Python pipe operator nothing more than syntactic sugar. Seriously, honest question...does it actually do anything functional other than change the *syntax* of how you chain calls together?

Feels a little bit like moving away from legacy environments and starting fresh with [ insert more modern, secure, pattern-focused paradigm/language ] is a somehow more accurate summary to me.

Phew....I was starting to wonder if I was the one that had misread it cause everyone seemed to be taking it seriously.

Also...1343!? Holy shit!

I can't be bothered, so hopefully one or more of y'all will take it upon yourselves.

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at because the weakest link across every OS is the meatbag running the keyboard. This article talks specifically about the delivery mechanism for this involving a dumbass user copy a base64 encoded curl command or some similarly stupid crap and running it. If you give me root because you believe this "security check" is necessary and blindly click OK, then I'm not sure which OS is going to be able to help you out there.

Came here to say the same; graybeard and all...except 35 years as a professional developer (software, hardware, firmware, whatever); e3 user initially with IBM in early 90s, then vi from about 92 to present.

Used to use Apple exclusively in the 80s until they absolutely lost their #$!@% minds. That period without Jobs (pretty much all of the 90s) was insufferable trash.

Eventually they sorted it all out but it took me a solid 15 years after their release of OS X to finally be willing to give them another try; and honestly it was all the Windows 10 horseshit that drove me to it.

Bought my first MacBook Pro (Intel) in, I think, 2016...never...looked..back. Ever. Not once.

Fancy with all kinds of pretty little bells and whistles? No. Intuitive, powerful Window management? No, for sure.

But it f'king worked. I have NEVER had a single crash of any sort on any MacBooks I've owned or running any version of macOS I've tried. I'm sure it happens, but holy hell what a difference the entire experience was from Window's upgrade/BSOD/reboot hell and Linux's atrocious desktop/support/management consistency hell.

And then Apple goes all in on ARM!? I'm here to stay I guess. At least for a while; almost certainly until I retire and beyond a bit...I could get by on what they currently have for that time period. So even if torched every good idea they ever had tomorrow, I guess I'm finishing up this career with Apple...where it all started for me.

I've found that, counter to what the talking heads would have you believe, the only people that can effectively use AI for coding tasks are the same people that can code effectively to begin with.