ManuelKiessling

Well, I really wish that anyone, no matter their income level or job description, is immune against murder; or are we just throwing out civilization now?

I also like how they ask the model to work on it for 8 hours; guess asking for more is against labor laws…

If you cannot be bothered with learning our language, and think that being rich somehow makes our country owe you its citizenship — then yeah, maybe Germany isn’t for you.

The article is from 2019.

This is half question, half thought experiment: What exactly is it that makes us think „great, I can delegate coding to the agent, and focus on architecture myself“, instead of „great, I can delegate coding to the agent, and I can delegate architecture to the agent, and I can focus on <third thing> myself“?

And how many levels up can you construct this sentence before things go south?

What I‘m implying with this question is, of course: What makes us so confident that these things are not also better architects than us?

After all there is a huge corpus on how to architect applications correctly, and that’s in the training data just as much as Python best practices and C++ style recommendations.

It has always been my understanding that if talking about homo sapiens sapiens: then if you could „snatch“ a newborn from 200k years ago and raise it just like any other human baby today, there is nothing in terms of biology etc. that would stop said baby from becoming an engineer, astronaut, formula one race driver, lawyer, programmer, or CEO (or any other modern profession for that matter).

Never read up if that pet theory of mine has any merit, though.

I fully agree with the „AI demands more engineering discipline“ premise.

And I‘ve quickly realized that it’s also much easier to follow that premise.

Not only because agents obviously help with writing documentation, test cases, DX tools, and so on.

But also because it feels so much more rewarding to know that someone — even if it’s just a soulless agent — actually cares to read and use and follow these.

I have always been the guy on the team who would write the tools and documentation, and it’s always been a bit frustrating to know that only half the team would care to read and use and follow them, at best.

Well it can go in both directions I guess. How to design a system well for the long term is definitely in the training data, and I‘m regularly very content with the suggestions that SOTA coding agents make when asked for it.

If I had one unqualified guess free — and boy am I unqualified here — I’d wager it’s those „zero sugar“ stuffs.

No way you can just replace (also very very not good for you) sugar with something else and end up with all the upsides and no downsides.

Crazy. On mobile it’s relatively easy to grab the playhead and scrub back and forth quickly over the full length of the video — this shows how the face movements are totally repetitive and constrained to a very limited space and variety.

I think the main difference, and the angle that makes your approach much more feasible, is that what users of your solution build fully lives „outside“ the core application that they build against, right?

While my approach is that users would modify the core application itself (even if initially in a sandboxed copy), which would be a lot more powerful, but also a lot more complex, with many more hard questions that would need to be answered, like how to deal with data and security and so on.

What if software shipped with a software engineer?

https://manuel.kiessling.net/2025/11/04/what-if-software-shi...

Just bought this one from a Japanese eBay dealer with many very good reviews, so fingers crossed no scam:

https://www.ebay.de/itm/147282358614

Yes, you will pay more than the original price. But once every 30 years or so I don’t give a fuck, I want this because the video showed a man working on it who cared.

You probably have other stuff on your mind right now, thus I can understand if you are not in the mood for answering, but I‘m too curious to not ask:

According to the Reuters article, AI use has increased 6x over only three months. How did that feel from the inside? I’m especially curious because Cloudflare is not a toy company, and this is not about some influencer trying to sell me their latest „this changes everything“ bullshit.

So, shifting a company significantly towards agentic AI, and I assume this isn’t simply about „install Claude Code on every desk“: would you say it actually works? Or would you say it’s still more of a bet, and still needs to prove itself as a sustainable long-term strategy?

This is only a tangential question, but anyway: I‘ve read several years ago that since around Photoshop version 4, 99% of the work is about keeping the application UI usable with all these new features, and not about „hard“ technical challenges within the features themselves. Is that true?

Reading only the parts of the post that are not about AI does not instill the sense that Mr Armstrong is the kind of person who would hesitate to say that people are let go because the company wants/needs to save money.

You‘ve got mail.

Yeah but imagine yourself lying on the floor with your vision being your only sense, plus an info floating in your mind: „fyi, you are no longer upright“.

That’s all, you feel nothing else. Now your job is to move all parts of your body in just the right way.

What was eye-opening, or rather, sobering for me was when I read an interview with an engineer who explained how incredible difficult it is for a robot to orient itself when it is lying on the floor and wants to stand up.

Yes, it can do the required motions just fine, that’s not the point. But think about yourself when you are lying on the floor: it’s really easy to determine if this is safe, if you are lying underneath something and so on. You just feel that.

A robot cannot do that; all they can do is look around as good as possible and visually determine their situation.

Would you mind sharing what you can and want about how the sausage is made? I would love to hear concrete cases where actual leverage is measurable. I‘m asking in good faith, not to attack your standpoint.

I‘ve built https://github.com/dx-tooling/productbuilding-orchestration for more or less the same use case as Broccoli, but in my case a) the „frontend“ is Slack, not a ticket system (but the agent people talk to in Slack manages the ticket system under the hood), and b) everytime there is a new commit on a PR, a preview system is bootstrapped or updated, and the codebase that is to be previewed explains how it wants to be deployed for preview.

This works really well.

(I‘m saying this as someone who uses AI for coding a lot and mostly love it) Yeah, but is that really the same? Compilers work deterministically — if it works once, it will work always. LLMs are a different story for now.

I think you are on to something here. But it would mean that sentiment could change on a whim: a serious blackout somewhere in Europe that makes continent-wide headlines, and EV demand might crash.

Global copper reserves are about 980 million tonnes, with 1.5 billion tonnes of identified resources and 2024 mine production of about 23 million tonnes.

A conventional car uses about 23 kg of copper and a battery-electric car about 83 kg, a difference of roughly 60 kg per vehicle.

With more than 17 million EVs sold in 2024, that implies about 1.4 million tonnes of copper embodied in those vehicles, or about 1.0 million tonnes more copper than comparable conventional cars would have used; applying the same assumptions to the current global passenger-car fleet implies roughly 120 million tonnes total or 87 million tonnes incremental copper for an all-BEV fleet.

Separately, the IEA says that under today’s policy settings and announced projects, copper faces an implied 30% mined-supply shortfall in 2035, while expanded recycling could reduce new mine needs for copper by about 35% by 2050.

USGS copper reserves / resources / mine production https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-copper.pdf

USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025 landing page https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/mcs2025

IEA Global EV Outlook 2025 – trends in electric car markets https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/trends-in...

IEA Global EV Outlook 2025 – full report page https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025

IEA Global EV Outlook 2025 – PDF https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/7ea38b60-3033-42a6-...

IEA Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 – overview for copper shortfall / recycling https://www.iea.org/reports/global-critical-minerals-outlook...

IEA Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 – executive summary https://www.iea.org/reports/global-critical-minerals-outlook...

IEA Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 – PDF https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/ef5e9b70-3374-4caa-...

International Copper Association – copper intensity in electrification of transport https://internationalcopper.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/2...

I say this as someone who owns two EV cars, zero ICE cars, and loves everything about owning and driving EVs: it baffles me how quickly and noticeably consumers shift their preferences; I think I read something along the lines of „for the average German commuter, the petrol price spike means 6 euros plus per week in spending“ — and that is enough for so many people to go „okay screw it I’m switching to new technology for my planned purchase“?

I mean, great that it happens, but yeah, I‘m baffled.

These days, all dev tooling of my projects lives behind mise tasks, and the runtime for my projects is Docker.

This means that getting a project in shape for development on a new system looks like this:

- clone project

- `mise run setup`

I have zero dev tools on my host, projects are 100% self-contained.

Pure bliss.

See https://github.com/dx-tooling/sitebuilder-webapp for an example.

Nearly same story here. AMD and MSI will forever hold a special place in my heart.

Better yet, post about it on LinkedIn and explain what it taught you about marriage proposals!

My current assumption is that the interfaces and workflows that stakeholders and product owners use today to manage software engineering resources are the future interfaces and workflows towards agentic engineering systems.

Well, I‘m still using my brain from morning to evening, but I‘m certainly using it differently.

This will without a doubt become a problem if the whole AI thing somehow collapses or becomes very expensive!

But it’s probably the correct adaptation if not.