More interesting that LinkedIn use fingerprinting everywhere and connect your personal data to every device you are using and connect to other services connected to their network.
... i'm pretty sure every website does this lol. Aggressive fingerprinting is so easy to implement and so high ROI from a security/marketing perspective.
Honestly, I couldn't care less about the rights to my code in today's world. What you're describing probably really bothered me a couple of years ago. But today, I'm not even sure what programming language my next project will be in. Everything has changed so much and is changing so rapidly that perhaps in a couple of years, corporations will be worried about their huge and important products.
What if, in a couple of years, you can create your own Photoshop with video editing capabilities? Maybe that will be possible too.
For background, what I mean by my code that I saved by keeping my rights to reuse it, is basically two full front-ends, one a platform for SPAs with all the screens/dropdown/module/component architecture you can imagine (think of React, except a lot cleaner and easier to read) [originally written in AS3 and then completely ported to Typescript around 2018], and another that's a complete page-based CMS for businesses, only better than Wordpress because it has hierarchical permissions over every writable field on pages distributed over franchised businesses. Those, plus custom back-ends [originally in PHP] with auths and modern security to back them; database schema to support those; a full set of hand-written UI components and SCSS; a complete form rendering and validation language in my own DSL that works on both platforms; a NodeJS version of all of this; and lots of other stuff... Since I've written these all for various clients over 25 years and cobbled them together into my own platforms, it makes it very easy for me to spin up a new app or service or site. One that actually works and doesn't have any unknown security holes or garbage code.
Okay, so I did an experiment with Claude a few weeks ago. I asked it to write one fundamental piece of my SPA framework from scratch, without looking at it. The piece that manages memory, creates and disposes of current screens and their sub-components. I spent about 10 hours coaching Claude until it was able to write something quite similar to the 500 lines of code that I had written that sit at the heart of that system. Questions were like, "hey, don't you think maybe you should create a cleanup function for that component before destroying it?" You know, basic stuff like that.
Its code was crap.
Every time I corrected it, it said, "oh, you're right! That's so smart!" But at the end I had to debug the whole thing myself. And this was without even trying to tie anything to a back-end service or API.
So what if, in a few years, this is unnecessary and anyone who wants Photoshop with video capabilities can just will it into existence by asking an LLM to write it? Maybe that'll happen. I'll still have my proprietary frameworks and, unlike that thing you vibe-coded, they're battle-tested and I know everything they do. That's why the advice I'm giving to the OP is solid.
Every piece of code you write yourself is something you fully understand and it gives you the power to do more on top of it the next time. Saying that it doesn't matter because LLMs will take over, and no one will need to code, is just some kind of resignation, or laziness, or solipsism, or wanting to watch the world burn, or whatever. But whatever it is, it's not useful work and it won't profit the person who is writing code now and wants to keep their rights and not get screwed.
When people are sandboxing new vibe-coded copies of Photoshop - and asking an LLM why the colors are all messed up, which it can't see or understand - someone will still be asking for us to come make things and fix things.
At work, I meet many people with similar experiences. But the number of people who are able to use new tools is gradually increasing. I myself spent many hours learning how to make my AI work and make workable code. Moreover, I treated it as something important and new. So much so that I began to view my own old code differently. Not as something with sentimental value. But at the same time, it can easily become obsolete in the face of new realities.
I don't mean to devalue your feelings about your code. But I myself I went through devaluing my own work. Perhaps people who did carpentry in the old days treated their tools with care, creating beautiful engravings for the hard-polished handles. But now you can saw a board with a power tool, and we have lost the culture of these craftsmen.
AI is changing the attitude toward code. It may sound painful, but the value of old work has diminished. On the other hand, the main goal of developers has not changed. We're still solving problems, not writing code for the sake of code.
Imagine you are in a marriage and your spouse say: "I can sleep with other people, doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission".
I don't understand context, but my honest reaction will be: "WTF, you just said? What type of relationship you think we have if we discuss such things?"
I definitely understand why people worry. This is just crazy to weight trust in money. If this is on the table and discussed internally, then what we are talking about?
Yeah, I've once said in a relationship "Look, sure, she maybe pretty, but I want to be with you, so no, I am not going to reach out to her, don't worry". Apparently, it was a poor way to word this idea.
Yes, people tend to try to dig out additional information from the particular wording (talk about a hidden channel) based on how they would phrase the same message themselves. That's why communication is hard.
This whole thread is various people saying "[This] is trash, [that] is awesome", with the next person claiming the opposite. I suspect most people with strong negative opinions here know enough to have felt the pain, and not enough to be able to properly reason about the system.
I've worked with Github Actions, Gitlab-CI and CircleCI in the last 10 years, and they've all been such an improvement over Jenkins, or god forbid, CVS with manual deployments, that I'm generally just counting my blessings.
For me the pain only came when not adhering to KISS. All the mentioned VCS are pretty much feature complete and only really differ on meta-topics (cost, license, lock-in) or niche topics (Actions marketplace, matrix builds, SSH on Runners). I've not yet run into an issue that would have actually blocked me, because there's always sh to fall back to in case of a bug or missing feature.
Having some limited experience with lazy imports, yes, but this eliminates a lot of gross boilerplate. It also has the effect of "blessing" the practice of lazy imports which can have a cultural impact; it also prevents a situation wherein multiple subtly incompatible approaches to lazy imports become individually popular.
So basically you just rewrote boilerplate code with complexity of "hello world" and deploy scripts. Without any dependencies, data migrations, real user data and downtime SLA. And after that you had time to write quite long article.
Writing a comment that categorizes comments as a literary genre and then immediately argues that comments are useless is some meta level deconstruction. Kudos.
