Every technology you touch hurts the environment

All life causes pain and suffering to other life.

Therefore, the logical end-stage conclusion is to trigger a false vacuum decay event that erases all of existence throughout the universe and so relieves all suffering.

no confidential client information is to be sent to any cloud AI service

If the code has been crafted correctly, none should be.

Client info should be 100% data, and remain 100% in production. If you have any dev-side data to test and debug with, it should be 100% procedurally-generated pseudo-data that only imitates client data in terms of gross patterns, and not specific points of data.

Like customer names. Those names should be broadly representative of what is found in the regions the software operates in, in order to demonstrate acceptable data input validation and effective storage compatibility with those names. For example, you don’t want to be storing European names in a DB field that is not UTF-8 compliant, or validating those names by restricting characters to US-ASCII. But any one generated name that just so happens to match an IRL name should be a statistical occurance, and any extended data attached to that entry should (generally) not match any other IRL data for any IRL occurance of that name…

Why should I pay a subscription fee? The AI is not touching my code, not generating any of it. I use the free versions to ask questions or give it snippets as examples, and go from there.

Sure, I’m beginning to bump into Claude’s free ceiling, but there are so many other options out there that I just partition my questions to the most appropriate model for that question.

There may come a time when I actually sign up for a paid tier, but it hasn’t happened yet. Until then, I will continue to exploit the parasites that fund this largesse.

And honestly, I won’t be upset if it all crashes and burns – it’s only a tool for me, not a crutch like with so many other devs as of late. Almost all of them will have regressed all the way back to junior-level skills if they had to hand-code all over again. It’s actually kind of sad to see such skills erosion and dumbing down that’s happening IRL.

Decades ago we had engineers and devs rise up through the ranks to become a part of steering committees.

Now they’re all MBA/BPM/PMBOK people with either zero or superficial tech/dev knowledge.

You cannot “tightly scope” that which you cannot understand.

Bottom-up should be the direction.

But- but- but- that’s communism.

Workers taking control of the means of production is heresy in capitalism.

The one thing that rubbed me the wrong way is that it treats the underlying host as “disposable”, in that it intentionally does not support in-place OS upgrades. As in, if you want to jump from an older LTS to the most recent, you need to explicitly spin up a blank, new LTS host, run the installation script from scratch, and then restore the data from an overnight backup.

I can understand an immutable container/binary with external data storage and config settings, but flipping the script and locking down the underlying OS? Yeah, that seems excessively unnecessary.

IMO, using AI to advise or guide you is the way to go, as it’s not actually touching the code.

But AI doing the work is a disaster that will lead to epic amounts of technical debt because it is impossible for AI to utilize judgement or taste.

I have been using AI more and more lately to just advise, to find, to make me aware of other options. I still do 100% of the work. So while AI hasn’t made me faster, it has made me more flexible by kicking me out of ruts and making me aware of alternative paths to reaching an objective.

I will not let AI touch my code until/unless it acquires judgement and taste. But until then, it’s turning out to be one hell of a gopher and rubber ducky.

then you end up on a VPS with a bad spam/RBL reputation because they have other customers being spammy dickheads, and their entire IP allocation is listed.

Sure, if you don’t do your own research and legwork, first.

In fact, there are a shitton more bad corners you can paint yourself into if you are too fucking lazy to do some trivially basic research ahead of time, from hosts to software chosen to how you configure things.

Hell, a lot of these bad corners also involve turnkey solutions hosted by others. So simply having someone else do all the work can hose you just as badly. Sure, Azure/O365 or AWS Workmail or Google Workspace solutions are usually not that kind of corner, but unless you are willing to pay out the nose for minimal needs, you’re usually going to go for something a lot smaller and possibly more sketchy.

Even in this day and age, when furniture is being mass-produced, there is still a niche for those who create furniture by hand, without the use of assembly lines and CNC.

The same goes for software development.

The downside is that you need to become the creative, the “ideas man” that can come up with that bespoke solution that AI can never truly provide. And you likely have to do it on your own, or if you are lucky, in a small company whose entire identity relies on bespoke solutions and high-quality, high-cost work.

The vast majority of software developers will never be able to make that jump, just like how hundreds of thousands of furniture-makers in the early 20th century, across North America, were also unable to make that jump. Those turning out bespoke furniture today represent an almost-unmeasurable rounding error compared to the same numbers of craftsman a century ago.

But they still exist. They can still make a living. And so can software developers with the right skills and attitudes.

Manufacturers stole repairability and the headphone jack from us under the guise of waterproofing and now you make fun of people who use the feature?!?

Because said waterproofing was for accidental, rare incidents of exposure, such that you have enough time to yank it somewhere safe before water penetrated.

Waterproofing was never meant for intentional, repeated, or extended exposure to extreme environments. That’s what waterproof cases are for. You know, the kind that allow your phone to go intentionally into water.

Who… da fuq… does this??

• Your code will be significantly more insecure. Expect anything exposed to world+dog to be hacked far quicker than your own work.
• You will code even slower than if you just did the work yourself.
• You will fail to grow as a coder, and will even see your existing skills erode.