janee

haha no it's an old (15years old) abandoned enterprise app running on-prem that hasn't seen updates in more than a decade.

Yes but you need to setup quite a bit of tooling to provide feedback loops.

It's one thing to get an llm to do something unattended for long durations, it's a other to give it the means of verification.

For example I'm busy upgrading a 500k LoC rails 1 codebase to rails 8 and built several DSLs that give it proper authorised sessions in a headless browser with basic html parsing tooling so it can "see" what affect it's fixes have. Then you somehow need to also give it a reliable way to keep track of the past and it's own learnings, which sound simple but I have yet to see any tool or model solve it on this scale...will give sonnet 4.5 a try this weekend, but yeah none of the models I tried are able to produce meaningful results over long periods on this upgrade task without good tooling and strong feedback loops

Btw I have upgraded the app and taking it to alpha testing now so it is possible

it's fairly bespoke, but some examples:

ETL pipelines, we catalogue and link our custom transformers to bodies of text that describes business cases for it with some examples, you can then describe your ETL problem in text and it will scaffold out a pipeline for you.

Fullstack scaffolds that go from models to UI screen, we have like a set of standard components and how they interact and communicate through GraphQL to our monolith (e.g. server side pagination, miller column grouping, sorting, filtering, PDF export, etc. etc.). So if you make a new model it will scaffold the CRUD fully for you all the way to the UI (it get's some stuff wrong but it's still a massive time save for us).

Patterns for various admin controls (we use active admin, so this thing will scaffold AA resources how we want).

Refactor recipes for certain things we've deprecated or improved. We generally don't migrate everything at once to a new pattern, instead we make "recipes" that describe the new pattern and point it to an example, then run it as we get to that module or lib for new work.

There are more, but these are some off the top of my head.

I think a really big aspect of this though is the integration of our scaffolds and recipes in Cursor. We keep these scaffold documents in markdown files that are loaded as cursor notepads which reference to real source code.

So we sort of rely heavily on the source code describing itself, the recipe or pattern or scaffold just provides a bit of extra context on different usage patterns and links the different pieces or example together.

You can think of it as giving an LLM "pro tips" around how things are done in each team and repo which allows for rapid scaffold creation. A lof of this you can do with code generators and good documentation, but we've found this usage of Cursor notepads for scaffolds and architecture is less labour intensive way to keep it up to date and to evolve a big code base in a consistent manner.

---

Edit: something to add, this isn't a crutch, we require our devs to fully understand these patterns. We use it as a tool for consistency, for rapid scaffold creation and of course for speeding up things we haven't gotten around to streamlining (like repetitive bloat)

So we have an LLM code scaffold repo we use in a large (2m loc) production Rails codebase and it works amazingly well.

Rails and especially Ruby lends itself to describing business logic as part of source code closer to natural language than a lot of typed languages imo and that synergizes really well with a lot of different models and neat LLM uses for code creation and maintenance.

I go in because it helps separate work life from home life, which I find benefits both positively in different ways.

I prefer a hybrid work area with three zones

1. Open plan chaos, lots of people talking and going bonkers

2. Smaller office 3~4 people, maybe your team or people you like more than others

3. Solo office, or hot desk in quiet zone. For deep focus. This one has a great view of the mountains in the area, which I find helps me think.

I bounce around these at my office depending on mood and task at hand. That variety is the main thing I like about our office setup

Heard about MPTP a while ago, it was no 3 of 6 on this list. Some crazy stuff out there

https://youtu.be/5G1eaNkzERE?si=ic71KlAtdVE7Mwey

"macro service" hilarious, will most certainly use this in some future conversation at work, thanks.

There is the downside of having to maintain both schemas now.

Unless you automate it devs will have to remember to migrate both when making a change which adds some overhead, not a lot, but it's just something to consider here imo as some migrations (schema and/or data) can become nasty and complex

"what advice would you give to xxx"

Other than a means to gain advice, I've found this question a good gauge for collaboration compatibility.

I often ask it in interviews on both sides to give me insight into what someone currently values.

It's sort of like asking someone to define "better" be that in skill, or happiness or avoidance of pain.

My main interpretation of the post would be a high value placed on pragmatism, gained via a journey of experimentation. Put crudely there is no silver bullet but try a few for a while

I think point 10 is highly underrated in my opinion

No hate on Emacs, just came across this on Friday and it cracked me up...thought I'd share

https://youtu.be/urcL86UpqZc

Have you thought about taking on the role of CTO?

Not sure if it's a possibility or something you even want, but it sounds like you're invested and have thoughts around the role.

Maybe if it comes to quitting..before you do that have a conversation with the CEO about taking on the role?

We've had success using DBT incremental models for this. Deletes aren't supported though, but for our use case that's fine and do a nighly refresh on the whole.

Otherwise the best alternative would be something like https://materialize.com

Made me think of cool retro term, which I haven't checked out in I want to say 10 years...lo and behold someone already applied this to the green version haha

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/121322/32070715-16...

See https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

Yeah it's a bit of a shame they were bought by one of the cloud providers.

Would've been great if something like Cruncy Bridge, PgAnalyze and Citus were merged into one company so that you have managed Postgres over the 3 major providers with the best pg tech out the box.

Having your DB and apps in different providers is a stuff up, the latency and data transfer costs killed us, so Citus was a non start (we don't want to manage it ourselves in EC2).

https://web.archive.org/web/20021222091814/http://www.pbs.or...

Sad to see. We really loved gitlab, but the pricing was so horrendous for what we were using and couldn't be scaled to non-tech employees (e.g. wiki or just reading MRs), so moved to github and haven't looked back.

Interestingly gitlab pricing influenced us to rethink our own pricing and we spent a month building out granular permission controls to allow sales to craft licenses bespoke to a client needs and charge less.

After a year our revenue has 2x and there's a nice upsell flow towards enterprise.

Ah yeah, I was try to reply to op

I don't think this is really comparable to 2008. Grossly simplified 2008 for me is more about bad debt, while this is around bad risk management...svb bought too many long term bonds which was a bad bet given current rates and an industry "correction" as you put it.

They just didn't manage the risk of a market "correction" and high interest rates. The tech sector was/is due a correction, but this isn't 2008

Haha indeed! I've started with a very basic Ruby api client that can read and create dashboards.

My plan is to poc a tool that allows you to edit metabase config as files and secondly something that can replicate cloud instances to other environments like local docker image or staging instance

Ah I was looking for exactly this the other day. I'm try to build a git based interface to our BI tool so that we can get config for our reports in source control instead of configuration in a db.

Was looking for something to read json files which will house the config via SQL, i.e. a human readable db as an alternative to what the BI tool is using for it's config persistence.

Will give DuckDB a go, thanks for posting!

so...AI kills us (waves hands in the air). Ah yes clear as mud.

What exactly is the concern here? I scanned through the article but there so much...for lack of a better word cruft, in there yet so little about what the underlying issue is.

Is it that AGI will take over all jobs? Or are we talking Von Neumann probes or what? Because I just see a bunch of fear mongering words.

Personally I think this is the greatest thing since slice bread and is going to increase efficiencies across several data intensive industries. The future is bright!

Living in a 3rd world country the experience is the polar opposite. Everything the government touches fails here and quite dramatically.

You mention business efficiency being built on the back of a responsible government, but I've often heard here where I live (South Africa), if you want to know where to deploy capital look for companies doing something the gov should be doing...because it's easy to compete (port management, electricity, rail, air lines, mines, refuse management)

Yeah I've also wondered the same, i.e. I view it as a closed system and excess liquidity usually results in inflation until demand matches supply of money

It'll be before this, but seen once it can self evolve to a point where it fights not to be destroyed

Article doesn't explain what's wrong with folded ear cats so looked online

The inherited cartilage defect causes other, more problematic deformities throughout the body, resulting in a condition called Osteochondrodysplasia. This is an incurable disease that causes painful, swollen joints for the Scottish Folds from as young as 7 weeks old and for the duration of their often short lives.

Didn't even know folded ear cats were a thing, strange.

I think the fact you mention billable hours is telling. What about caring about problems and their solutions?

Because that's the core driver for me. I often feel other programmers fall into this trap of technology usage for the sake of technology usage and less about solving real problems.

I think having a distaste for process is justified when working in environments where there's no buy in from the team...but don't assume that applies to "many of us"

Reads like an onion headline

Personally I find it helps with immersion for content of that era.

E.g. the non-digital aesthetics of Tarintino films contribute a lot to their style in my opinion.

Plastering fake film grain ontop of something is not really my ideal, but going full film is also probably not something people can really afford in terms of time and budget...unless you're someone like Tarintino who's already at the top

If anything it's rather the start of programming in my opinion, or rather the start of a new era.

We build endless higher level abstractions ontop of each other in programming, this is just another one.

I'm not bullish on AI actually understanding something in the near future and it'll rather continue to be something more akin to mimickery, albeit amazingly expressive and accurate.

I think this is rather going to become an amazing tool to help reduce repeating already solved problems. But humans would still be needed to plumb it together and adjust it to meet some final need.

If the AI can do the whole thing then whatever you're trying to create probably already exists and there's unlikely to be a need for it in my opinion.