The other day we were discussing a new core architecture for a Microservice we were meant to split out of a "larger" Microservice so that separate teams could maintain each part.
Instead of just discussing it entirely without any basis, I instead made a quick prototype via explicit prompts telling the LLM exactly what to create, where etc.
Finally, I asked it to go through the implementation and create a wiki page, concatting the code and outlining in 1-4 sentences above each "file" excerpt what the goal for the file is.
In the end, I went through it to double-check if it held up from my intentions - which it did and thus didn't change anything
Now we could all discuss the pros and cons of that architecture while going through it, and the intro sentence gave enough context to each code excerpt to improve understanding/reduce mental load as necessary context was added to each segment.
I would not have been able to allot that time to do all this without an LLM - especially the summarization to 1-3 sentences, so I'll have to disagree when you state this generally.
Though I definitely agree that a blog article like this isn't worth reading if the author couldn't even be arsed to write it themselves.
Call me conservative, but between writing an article against TDD where the main argument was "I don't like the people who do TDD", his opinion on typescript, and the article he wrote on London not being great because it has only 30% whites, I find DHH not really worth listening to. I know, I know, ad hominem, but there's only so much I can read in my life and I have to filter it down somehow. I find that filtering out people who've written a lot of stupid stuff in the past works well for me.
DHH’s argument was about rapid demographic change and loss of a majority culture, grounded (rightly or wrongly) in concerns about social cohesion. An argument you can disagree with, but not reduce to racial preference without distortion.
Fair point, as can be seen from this quote here (emphasis mine):
> London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late ’90s and early 2000s. _Chiefly because it’s no longer full of native Brits_. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.
Here it clear that the thing you refer to as majority culture, DHH refers to as "native Brit". So what majority culture is he talking about that dropped from about 60 to about 30% in that time? Helpfully, DHH links to a wikipedia page on the ethnic makeup of London to clarify his point. The group that dropped from 60 to 30 is that of native white Brits. So the majority culture he's explicitly referring to is that of native white Brits. Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.
You’re doing it again. You’re taking a descriptive proxy he used and treating it as dispositive evidence of motive, instead of engaging the underlying claim about what happens when a historically dominant, locally rooted culture ceases to be a majority.
The amount of effort spent and blood spilled to make anything that even remotely smells like socialism fail is one of the greater tragedies of the 20th century.
"Yes AI" means you're in favor of using AI for absolutely everything, including making court decisions, medical decisions, etc.
"No AI" means you're against using AI for anything, and oh by the way that includes all technology previously identified as AI, including various search, pathfinding, scheduling, and planning techniques; rule-based systems; logic programming; knowledge representaion; clustering; computer vision; and robotic control. If you're in the "No AI" camp, you need to immediately reformat your hard disk and then microwave your computer, or risk being branded a traitor.
Conflict of interest that the author fails to mention: he's a QA manager at Amazon, and has a vested interest in QA being seen as a necessary role. It may well be, but this is definitely a conflict of interest.
Aside from that, this article is incredibly heavy on theory and very light on empirical fact. Its bibliography consists of a very narrow selection of blogs (4 of the articles he quotes are one and the same blog somehow), which talk about a very narrow subset of the industry. This article not referencing the serious and well-established research that has been done on the effectivity of dev-owned tests by for example the DORA folks, almost seems dishonest.
The clickbait title, when compared to the content of the article, is outright dishonest. The author theorizes about some warts dev-owned testing may have at some specific companies, but this is a very far cry from it failing in practice, especially when you compare them to the warts of offloading quality to a different team.
It's probably a bit harsh, but I feel like, as an industry, we should have a higher standard of empiricism when it comes to evaluating our ways of working.
Here's some more context, which you seem to need: the reason they've laid off 75% of their devs is because their revenue is down 80%, despite tailwind being more popular than ever. This seems to be caused by a drop in visits to their documentation, which is really the only way people find out about their commercial offerings. This drop in visits to the docs is, in turn, most likely caused by the increased use of LLMs.
using tailwind docs is awful. I'd MUCH rather use an LLM than try to grok their documentation. That it was their only way to promote commercial offerings is not my problem, there are many other ways to approach this than encouraging a worse experience for devs.
I can't speak for executive orders for a mayor, but I can say that executive orders of the president are anything but symbolic. Their scope was expanded significantly under Bush and Cheney, and they are binding for federal agencies. For example, they used executive order 13440 to circumvent a supreme court ruling that stated the Geneva convention applied to the people they illegally kidnapped and held at CIA black sites. This EO functioned by essentially weakening the definition of torture, so they could go on and torture the folks they captured.
So, while the next president can just undo executive orders made by any previous one, making them a bit ephemeral, they do have direct and real consequences going as far as torture.
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