> Hot take: if your job can be partially or wholly eliminated by AI, that’s a GOOD THING. If your job has patterns that predictable or labor that routine, AI automation is a GOOD THING.
The article never says why this is good. It just states it then moves on.
> As a whole, I’m sure it’ll give birth to entirely new systems we haven’t even conceived of yet and, one can hope, free up that time and energy towards more meaningful or creative pursuits.
The people's who job it takes probably don't give af about the patterns of their job, or creative pursuits they can do while unemployed. They are probably just trying to pay their bills and feed their kids.
> one of the worst misconceptions in product design is that a microwave needs to have a button for every thing you could possibly cook
"Worst" is a stretch. Not to mention these often actually do more than just power and time. For example detecting humidity and/or varying power over time.
> You can just have a time (and power) button. People will figure out how to cook stuff.
You could, but people don't always want to figure it out, especially when they are hungry.
This would have been a better article if the takeaway wasn't basically "people are smart, make them learn the underlying structure".
I think good design is recognizing when and how to either expose the structure or paper over it, all while making it pleasant to interact with for all users at either end of the spectrum of willingness to learn it.
For a bike, it pays off to learn. For other things maybe not so much. Combining these two very different cases and then making a blanket statement that "Good designs expose systematic structure" doesn't land well.
Yes, it's absolutely great to have a "low floor" -- common use cases should be easy to do, without needing to learn a ton up front. But, hiding the structure is not the only way to achieve that!
For example: a microwave could have presets like "we recommend cooking a potato with this power for this time. If it's undercooked, try higher power, but avoid max power because XYZ."
The simple use cases should guide the user while building up a coherent mental model. If there are fancier sensors being used, those could be explained and exposed to the user directly.
Otherwise you end up with no path to further learning. If I have no idea how potato mode works, then I don't know when it applies or doesn't apply, I don't know how to adjust when it doesn't work well, and I don't know how it relates to the other modes at all.
I think the microwave ones are useful even if they are just presets for time and power.
With a new bike, you can get a feel very quickly for what "5th gear" works well for and experiment with it and get immediate feedback and try other options pretty much no downside.
With a microwave, I don't necessarily want that level fine grain control. I probably just want to eat and not ruin my food and I certainly don't want to spend time running experiments. Having a preset at least gets you in the ballpark.
I've tried to watch Louis many times.. can't do it. He is just so whiny and annoying, it is really off putting to what might be otherwise interesting topics.
200k/yr revenue?
Like others have said - basically they can't afford to do the things you want to do. All the things you want to do take time to make run smoothly and divert dev attention for a while, and it seems there is no time for that. It all may help in the long-run and actually help generate more revenue, but that won't matter if they go under in the meantime.
If you don't like that yolo culture, move on... you are not likely to change it.
^ this. If a junior dev is legitimately interested in software development and how things work, they will use these tools for more than just completing their tasks and a paycheck and will eventually stand out above their peers who don't.
If the author is suggesting that more junior devs today than in the past are only interested getting tasks done and the paycheck, then this really has nothing to do with AI.
I can't really speak to the impact on junior devs since I haven't worked with any since the start of AI dev tools so this comment is kind of off topic.
Totally agree that should be treated as learning tool just as much "give me something that works" tool. If Junior devs are not taking advantage of that side of it instinctively out of their own curiosity and interest, well, maybe they were never going to be good developers in the first place even without AI.
What I can say is that for me as a as senior dev with 22 years experience who has been using using these tools daily for about a year now, it has been a huge win with no downsides.
I am so much more efficient at unblocking myself and others with all the minor "how do I do X in Y" and "what is causing this error" type questions. I know exactly what I want to do, how to ask it, but only partially what the answer should be... and AI takes away the tedious part of bridging that knowledge gap for me.
Maybe even more significantly, I have learned new things at a much faster rate. When AI suggests solutions I am often exposed to different ways to do things I already knew, features I didn't know existed, etc. I feel good that I found a solution to my problem, but often I feel even better having learned something along the way that wasn't even the original goal and it didn't really take any extra dedicated effort.
The best part is that is has made side projects a lot more fun and I stick with them a lot longer because I get something working sooner and spend less time fighting problems. I also find myself taking on new types of projects that are outside my comfort and experience zone.
I never really understood why not simply use milliseconds since the epoch and keep track of a time zone separately if needed... This allows fairly easy conversion to most native systems i have worked with, easy sorting and diff operations as well as final display control. Also don't have a need to be thinking about daylight savings then, or do other conversions for say timesheets.
It depends on what you need to do. If you just need to say when something happened (e.g. some log event) then milliseconds since the epoch is fine. If want a user to schedule a reoccurring meeting at 8am on the first Thursday of every month, you can also keep a set of timestamps as milliseconds since the epoch, but you are going to need to do some work to figure out the right numbers correctly.
> If want a user to schedule a reoccurring meeting at 8am on the first Thursday of every month, you can also keep a set of timestamps as milliseconds since the epoch
No, you can't really, especially if the recurring meetings go on more than a few years into the future. If the time zone rules themselves change (e.g. if the user's country abolishes or introduces DST), then the timestamps you stored will become wrong in light of the change.
The article never says why this is good. It just states it then moves on.
> As a whole, I’m sure it’ll give birth to entirely new systems we haven’t even conceived of yet and, one can hope, free up that time and energy towards more meaningful or creative pursuits.
The people's who job it takes probably don't give af about the patterns of their job, or creative pursuits they can do while unemployed. They are probably just trying to pay their bills and feed their kids.