Of course they do. We gave the DHS (and any other government agency) far too much power and they flex it.

We have so many agencies that can regulate businesses to death without any congressional intervention that it would be beyond idiotic to stand against them.

Not to mention that it's been proven again and again that the American populations attention span is far too short to do anything meaningful about the aforementioned powers / abuses.

Maybe it's age, or the attention I've paid to the erosion of liberties post 9/11. but is this headline a surprise to anyone?

They also usually cooperate with government around the world. The "must abide by their laws thing"

we're talking about the threat of regulation not "must abide by their laws" thing.

It's common in the EU that if you don't do what they say they threaten to put regulations that compel you, but it's still different. it's a threat not a reality. That's the issue my dude.

I love that you're lamenting a CIA website closure as a step toward dystopia... 10/10

It could be as simple as budget changes.

I think the lament is the rise of the "facts are the enemy" stance is a step towards dystopia.

I recently learned that if we converted all the land we use to grow corn for ethanol (not food) into solar farms the US would produce 84% more energy than it currently produces (from all sources) [1]. Of course that's a huge undertaking, but we're not even talking about it because pesky things like facts are swept aside in lieu of punchy counters like: panels are expensive (they're not), we don't have the land (we do), what about the batteries (solved problem with today's--let along tomorrow's tech), the corn best doesn't get enough sun (it does), etc.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

Real reason to remove the facts and archive of the records is so that they're not cited in deportation litigation and government lawyers don't have to argue against the facts the government holds true

source or evidence of this?

It's broadly reported that lawyers often depend on it in asylum cases as "a trusted, objective source for country conditions."

If you want an official government source to outright say "it was inconveniencing our mass deportation efforts," I don't know what to tell you.

This is what I want to be true, but as someone’s at the middle of their career I’m terrified.

It's an interesting time for sure and I'm not clairvoyant but I really don't think "we won't need developers because business people will just vibe code their own apps" is coming any time soon (or possibly ever)

You’re forgetting the companies that already had developers.

Whose job had been maintaining a single internal system but had never had the bandwidth to expand their focus.

Companies like that are the ones spending millions a year for large one size fits all SaaS products.

Tbh I think you’re fundamentally misunderstanding the issue (or I am).

It’s not about some single dude disrupting the saas market. It’s about largish companies who already have internal dev teams, slowly weening their company off these ginormous one size fits all saas products and building local, tailored solutions.

It’s death by a thousand cuts from the erosion of their highest paying customers.

I feel the market forces kinda point the other way, though, since the customization of the SaaS is also cheapening, but faster and more targeted than these internal teams. Over time I believe that’ll lead to more, not less, SaaS consolidation.

Let’s put the cost of code production at 0: regulatory compliance with payment processing laws or industry oversight is a recurring job that’s common for the whole industry when it changes. SaaS companies have hundreds of customers to attend, these become first class business functions. New demands won’t be in training data for LLMs, so someone needs to be doing this. SaaS has the funds and customer base to have dedicated experts at these functions, but it’s dead capital and nigh-impossible hiring in a tiny talent pool for the rest of the market… the delta to get Salesforce or SharePoint not to be total ass and fully customized is orders of magnitude smaller than detailing those foundations, and as people who sharecrop on platforms like those know, the devil is always in the details. Those internal teams just aren’t positioned to juggle both sides of that coin, they can’t be experts, mistakes can be existential, and the liability picture is so very ugly… coding is the least of it.

Into this, MBAs are not static. It’s not gonna take more than a few “vibe coding ate our CRM data” high profile snafus, or industry think pieces to map out why customization is faster/better/smarter, to get clear business dogma around this. A witty turn of phrase about focusing on your actual business.

I think ‘no one ever got fired for hiring IBM’ x 5 is on the horizon, and the evil marketers at Salesforce, MS, and the rest are gonna work hard to grow their piece of the pie. They have LLMs too, only with better models and unlimited tokens. And our executives will be checking directly with their LLMs about how to invest (the consultants, journalists, fanboys, and social media bots too…).

My current boss is an ex CTO of IBM, and tbh he's proof that more people should have been fired for buying an IBM.

Unrelated to the convo you make some very valid points. I just absolutely detest that saying xD

It’s remarkably easy to tell others not to do what you did.

I really want to know other's opinion on this, but the critique that Ai pushes spaghetti / barely maintainable code doesn't carry a lot of weight because that's all I've ever seen in production anywhere.

If I can spin up in a week what used to take me 6 months and it kind of works. That's absolutely insane. I really wish we could all step back and acknowledge that. Instead, I only hear people talking about how bad the code is.

Honest question, so what? If I can monetize a bad product in a miniscule fraction of the time it used to take. Then optimize it while funded, what's the issue? I get this may upset purists but for product companies it's always been about the MVP.

Make it work

Make it pretty

Make it work well

While you're correct. I truly believe the velocity offered outweighs this consideration for 90% of the application teams and startups. I've personally never worked in a clean codebase, and I've been convinced long ago that they're mythical. I don't see an issue with an LLM spitting out bad / barely maintainable code because that's basically every codebase I've ever seen in production.

I ask a LLM to do it :'(

The piece I think people are missing is for years the biggest bottle neck for development has been time. These services have just ripped apart the time barrier, and the industry is still trying to wrap their head around that.

To me the next obvious barrier will be size (context) barrier, and I can easily see a place for a human in that process. Sure, anyone can prompt an agent build a codebase, but as those code bases grow / evolve It's hard for me to believe a non-specialized person will be able to manage those projects.

edit: I had another thought after posting this. To all the smaller company devs just building and maintaining internal tools. Users always want more features. The difference is now you'll be able to deliver them.

The biggest disruption I'm seeing is in estimation. It's a skill developed with experience, and it just went poof

The biggest bottleneck to development has always been what is the right thing to work on, and how should that be accomplished via code.