I’m learning that projects, developed with the help of agents, even when developers claim that they review and steer everything, ultimately are not fully understood or owned by the developers, and very soon turns into a thousand reinvented wheels strapped together by tape.
> very soon turns into a thousand reinvented wheels strapped together by tape.
Also most of the long running enterprise projects I’ve seen - there was one that had been around for like 10 years and like about 75% of the devs I hadn’t even heard of and none of the original ones were in the project at all.
The thing had no less than three auditing mechanisms, three ways of interacting with the database, mixed naming conventions, like two validation mechanisms none of which were what Spring recommended and also configurations versioned for app servers that weren’t even in use.
This was all before AI, it’s not like you need it for projects to turn into slop and AI slop isn’t that much different from human slop (none of them gave a shit about ADRs or proper docs on why things are done a certain way, though Wiki had some fossilized meeting notes with nothing actually useful) except that AI can produce this stuff more quickly.
When encountered, I just relied on writing tests and reworking the older slop with something newer (with better AI models and tooling) and the overall quality improved.
Probably all describe problems stem from the developers using agent coding; including using TypeScript, since these tools are usually more familiar with Js/Js adjacent web development languages.
Perhaps the use of coding agents may have encouraged this behavior, but it is perfectly possible to do the opposite with agents as well — for instance, to use agents to make it easier to set up and maintain a good testing scaffold for TUI stuff, a comprehensive test suite top to bottom, in a way maintainers may not have had the time/energy/interest to do before, or to rewrite in a faster and more resource efficient language that you may find more verbose, be less familiar with, or find annoying to write — and nothing is forcing them to release as often as they are, instead of just having a high commit velocity. I've personally found AIs to be just as good at Go or Rust as TypeScript, perhaps better, as well, so I don't think there was anything forcing them to go with TypeScript. I think they're just somewhat irresponsible devs.
> I think they're just somewhat irresponsible devs.
Before coding agents it took quite a lot more experience before most people could develop and ship a successful product. The average years of experience of both core team and contributors was higher and this reflected in product and architecture choices that really have an impact, especially on non-functional requirements.
They could have had better design and architecture in this project if they had asked the AI for more help with it, but they did not even know what to ask or how to validate the responses.
Of course, lots of devs with more years of experience would do just as badly or worse. What we are seeing here though is a filter removed that means a lot of projects now are the first real product everyone the team has ever developed.
We are now definitely doing a lot of that. My manager has been saying things like, "I don't even know how it works, but I used AI to build [thing], and I just sent it to a PR." He's very strong technically, but the mindset has absolutely shifted to, "move fast and break things, yoloooooo". It's frustrating to say the least.
I don't mean this as a jab, but would you use Windows to develop software? Especially Windows that has AD teeth sunk into it where everything is "managed by your organization." It's just a thousand small cuts for seemingly no good reason.
I'm a c++ developer and I wouldn't use anything other than Windows to develop software, for one reason alone - Visual Studio is a fantastic tool that is better than any IDE I have ever tried it and imho it's the best product Microsoft makes. It just works and works well. And most console toolchains are only on Windows, so outside of iOS development I don't really have a choice.
No, but I also wouldn't let people who do not understand the soul of the OS to rewrite it.
If I were the microslop god for 6 weeks, I would force everyone to go to a boot camp and use Windows 7 for 4 of those weeks so they could see what made it so good.
No invasiveness, an OS that felt like yours. Just enough eye candy to not be distracting but to also feel like a clean modern system. Low system usage at idle. Calm, clean, and ready to roll when you clicked a button.
Windows is NEVER going to be MacOS, but the dev teams seem obsessed with macifying windows while also wedging that AI abomination copilot into every line of code, so windows is getting a tag team of rapid enshittification on top of already having been massively enshittified, and at least some portion of it is due to the people being paid to make it not understanding what it is supposed to be, the niche it held, and the reason for windows existence.
Yes, because you know what all of the 200,000+ employees are doing in every wing and branch of the entire company.
Then again, Microsoft themselves directly dispute your statement:
Across the landscape of more than 750,000 devices in use at Microsoft, we support Windows, Android, iOS, and macOS devices. Windows devices account for approximately 60 percent of the total employee-device population, while iOS, Android, and macOS account for the rest. Of these devices, approximately 45 percent are personally owned employee devices, including phones and tablets. Our employees are empowered to access Microsoft data and tools using managed devices that enable them to be their most productive.
Not to mention that most app designers use OSX for the design tools, which means that there is going to be by default some bleed between the two systems on design choices alone.
> while iOS, Android, and macOS account for the rest. Of these devices, approximately 45 percent are
Pretty much everyone has an android or iOS device in their pocket. A lot of those devices are enrolled into Microsoft MDM in order to access email/teams/etc. These phones are part of the stats. Dev work in general is done on Windows boxes, unless you are in specific teams that have other requirements. Default is Windows, specifically Windows laptop.
Worst case somewhere around 50,000-150,000 tablets.
That leaves ~200,000 unaccounted for devices with only macOS on the table. I think the saturation is higher than you have experienced, although I'll give that it's entirely possible that the areas you worked in were not one of them.
I haven’t been eating meat for 14 years, and I sometimes buy stuff like beyond meat patties or similar, but definitely not as a daily food, but like a fast food to eat with beer, or to take with me when grilling with friends. So I assume same way how other people eat meat burgers (am I correct to assume that people don’t eat McDonald’s or supermarket burgers everyday?).
And it’s not really about the taste, it’s more about form factor of a “protein fried patty” in a sandwich. Could easily be falafel.
Normal daily food is of course actual vegan/vegetarian food that doesn’t need to pretend to be meat.
I use ChatGPT to give me overview of some unfamiliar topics, suggest some architecture patterns, learn about common approach to solve X or refresh on some syntax. Sometimes there’s a repetitive task like applying same edit to a list of like 40 strings (e.g. surrounding them in struct init), and I found it useful to make ChatGPT do this.
Summarising diffs in openapi, highlighting bugs and patterns in logs, documents also works pretty okay.
In my domain (signal processing, high load systems, embedded development, backend in Go) it doesn’t do great for coding tasks, and I’m very opposed to giving it lead to create files, do mass edits, et cetera. I found it to fail even on recent versions of Go, imagining interfaces, not knowing changes in some library interfaces (pre-2024 changes at least). Both ChatGPT and Claude failed to create proper application for me (parsing incoming messages and drawing real time graphics), both getting stucked at some point. Application worked more or less, but with bugs and huge performance issues.
I found it useful to quickly create skeletons for scripts/tools, that I can then fill up with actual logic, or making example of how a library is used.
So there is usability for me, it replaced stackoverflow and sometimes reading actual documentation.
I own a few repositories of our system, and contribution guides I create explicitly forbid use of LLMs and agents to create PRs. I had some experience with developers submitting vibe coded PRs and I do not want to waste my time on them anymore.
Now huge amount of investment pays for training. This investment expects some returns, to be able to both turn profit and continue the training, rates must be much, much higher.
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