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Does this support new programming abstractions, or just another remix of existing ones?

Probably one that annoys me the most also, but then again I’m also annoyed by humans using “strawman” all over the place.

Not looking forward to the inevitable “wanna”, “gonna” and “lemme” appearing as AI output based on their popular use.

They do, it’s just that these days they are your users or customers.

Curious what industry your in and what your facing AI wise?

This makes me fear for the ability to easily dismiss or silence a particular human viewpoint just by insinuating it is “AI-generated”.

Quality software meets its requirements. Both functional and non-functional. Of course our industry still cannot quantify non-functional requirements, or discover a way to predictably implement functional requirements.

So all that remains for our so called “engineering” discipline, is an answer that says something that doesn't break a lot.

OpenAI has a $8B PR budget

No. It is the primarily the cost of providing their free service.

Sure it wasn't Sanitation Team Lead?

pretty fluent in consultant

Thanks, gave me a chuckle. One to remember.

All I see is disgusting popups - “k-ll j——“, “r-pe n——“ Very upsetting, no thanks to you.

Who wants that on their web site? In some jurisdictions you’re going to be in trouble for facilitating hate and calls for violence (or worse). This is why what you have implemented will not work in its current form. I suggest you move to a system that characters can trigger only standard phrases and emoticons.

They may be getting 3 times the work done, but what work? Quality effective code that meets requirements? Or something else?

Nice, I don’t think your foolish. Now you just need to ignore the jokes that say that Actuaries make Accountants look exciting!

A couple of decades ago I was leading a project migrating one of the main applications widely used by actuaries.

Those were the days - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48641095

Frankly I’m sad to hear it. There are just too many programmers - simple.

30 years ago or so, I was a contractor working on back-to-back 3 to 12 month C++ projects. I would typically get a call one day from a recruiter followed by a phone call (or maybe a quick meet or coffee) with someone technical on the project, and arrive and be in the codebase the next. That day I would get 2 calls about my availability.

There was no sh*t-show of continuous deployment, code reviews (even for trusted internal projects), and scrum-like ceremonies. There was instead version control, periodic tested releases, a weekly update meeting, a Friday team lunch at the pub, and trust.

Too many programmers (sorry err Engineers) - too few jobs, and the enshitification of an industry.

What concerns me the most is that improvements in software design are at an end. The “big ball of mud”, which really is a problem of modularity and dependencies, will never improve through innovation because the way it is done now is all there will ever be.

Email them because most people these days never receive a personal email from another real human being, instead of newsletters, solicitations, marketing, announcements, notifications and spam.

The solution would seem obvious - decide what you want, then hire the first applicant that qualifies.

Of course, the real issue is that a prospective employer doesn’t know what they want. Our “engineering” industry runs on vibes, heroic effort, fashion and hype-cycles. Someone very smart, enthusiastic, quick learning, flexible and affable is the only real job description.

Combine this with the “supply” side entirely overwhelming demand, having to compete with AI, and experience having no value, and for most software developers the future is bleak until a new more equitable equilibrium is found.

Nevertheless in the meantime, at least one can have solace in collecting the authors “failure stamps”.

Accenture is in trouble with their main consulting business due to AI

Is this something being seen across all outsourcers like Accenture, Wipro, Infosys etc?

My fear is that durable workflows are increasingly being seen as required for everything, because we need to solve the distributed transaction problem in a micro-services world.

It questions the initial wisdom of creating lots of little independent distributed apps, without regards to interaction between them. Let’s build ever more necessary plumbing and schemes just to enable their interaction.

I am arguing that durable workflows should be a last resort for boundaries you must cross, not a default pattern for every business process.

Just looked at it for the first time. My first impression - grey, gray and more grey. Please help brighten our day by adding some color to the page?

To me “clanker” is a derogatory word that just sounds ugly. I recoil when I hear them use it. Perhaps it my anglo background, and it sounds different/better to German speakers.

The assumption here is that the profitable price (variable costs) is only the api price. I question that.

Subscriptions can be equally profitable depending on the total actual tokens used across users. Few subscriptions use 100% of their potential, but these memes that subscriptions are unsustainable always seem to assume it to be so.

Anyone taking part in a meeting these days should state out loud …

“Notice: Any comments made by <name> or on behalf of <organization> that are interpreted by AI in this meeting, may not be accurate.”

I do this in every meeting.

This seems to assume that all there is, is systems software, tools and frameworks. Why ignore the elephant in the room - business / enterprise / line-of-business software? The case for Rust, Go, Gleam and Zig vastly changes for these versus Java or C#.

Salary stays the same. A bunch of others are fired. You’re expected to produce their level of output as well as your own. After all, you’re 10x more productive now?

I find Flow really interesting, thanks for pointing it out.

Deterministic workflows using AI to help perform those steps not requiring human input has been an area of interest for me for some time. Particularly interesting how you are using the AI to determine what a step has achieved and the action of the next step.

Combine it with workflow elements that does handle human steps together with a notification/routing/task system would make for a helpful system for so many.

Is it possible that the line of thinking really is that "agentic AI" will up for the capability shortfall?

It seems to be the stated expectation, but I find it incredulous that management really would believe that?

Vanity titles never make much sense, and now even more people can call themselves “engineers”. I was always at a loss why many weren’t calling themselves “web engineers”. Hey Mom, I used Claude Code today at work so I’m an Agentic Engineer!

TOD - Transfer on Death?

I like the idea of face-to-face discussions. My only fear is that many of the new generation will say they really prefer that we text or slack instead.

And in practice, they usually only manage people …

I usually differentiate between real managers who exist to make decisions, versus those who manage people. The latter are “overseers” not managers.