This post is the piece those two were circling around: what happens to the bottom of the chart, and whose job it is to fix it. Spoiler — it’s yours, senior engineer. It’s mine. And most of us are about to get it wrong in a very specific, very tempting way.

BS. Most good seniors I know would love to hire more juniors, feel badly for the mass of recent college grads who are unemployed, and enjoy mentoring new engineers without needing a wall of AI slop to tell them to do so. When you give us control over the hiring budget and let us hire juniors again, you can blame us for the future senior engineer shortage. Until then, blame the people actually at fault (management, executives, the investor class), not us.

I’m far from a slop advocate, so this is more of a devil’s advocate point: plenty of code writing is not enjoyable.

If I’m working on my own project, to my own standards, writing exactly what I want to write I’m usually going to get enjoyment out of it. That’s pretty commonly not the case when writing code for an employer. Maybe the tech stack sucks, the product is inane or worse, you think the feature is a dumb idea but have to do it anyway, you’re bending over backwards to work around tech debt that you’re not allowed by management to fix, or you have to appease incompetent/out of touch architects or tech leads who presume to tell you how to do your job. I personally don’t enjoy writing that code very much. At a certain point it’s almost like nails on a chalkboard if you genuinely enjoy programming for its own sake: you know what good would look like, you know how far away what you’re working on is from good, and you feel sad at all the organizational inertia you’d need to overcome to get to good or, choosing not to do that, at compromising your standards. That bugs me, at least, and at a certain point makes it hard to even start certain work projects.

LLMs can make this at least bearable. Rather than spending hours looking into the change yourself, writing all of the code, fighting the shitty test framework and swearing at the past engineers who made it so bad, you let the robot figure it out and review its work. The result may still suck, but it was going to suck if you wrote it by hand too, for reasons largely out of your control. You can’t be fully hands off, and you still have to deal with the things you don’t like to get a good result, but you put yourself a step away from what bothers you and by doing so make it a little more pleasant. And, when you find work that’s actually fun, interesting, or rewarding, you just cherry pick that for yourself. I’ve grown to appreciate them for this reason. I have a lot less dread for the nails on a chalkboard work than I used to, anyway.

While I don’t disagree with this post in spirit, it feels tone deaf. Many very popular and well used FOSS projects rely on one or two core contributors who are volunteering their time to build something useful, fitting that work in alongside their paying work and the rest of their life. If a maintainer of a project I use has 3 hours in between their kid’s baseball game and dinner one Sunday to spend working on it, I’d much rather them spend that time making the project better than on giving pro forma replies to PRs and issues that aren’t valuable to the project to adhere to some sense of decorum (and, as a former maintainer, even a polite “no” to a bad idea or a disguised request for free technical consulting is time consuming).

As a tangent,

Not acknowledging contributions and the work that goes into them, whether through a quick response or a kind word, undermines our entire community. Every time that happens, it’s a “fuck you” towards a contributor. That seems fashionable if we look at the wider society—things are falling apart around us as we burn the planet and let nations get away with exploitation and murder—, but that doesn’t make it acceptable.

is kind of a wild connection to draw given the reality of many (most, I’d argue) FOSS projects. A busy single maintainer prioritizing their limited time by ignoring low effort contributions is in no way like burning the planet.

(maybe the author is implicitly thinking of very large, well resourced projects with sustaining funding and a lot of maintainers, where I think a higher standard might be fair. That’s not really clear from the post, though, and I don’t think it’s accurate to regard those as “the community”, in the same way that we don’t regard Google, Amazon, etc as the entire software industry)

I have a hard time telling AI authored LinkedIn thought leadership apart from formulaic LinkedIn thought leadership sometimes, but this feels AI written, which makes it fairly amusing considering the point it’s making.

(Does vibe coding feel incredible? Also, “Nobody’s asking what happens in Month 18 when the original dev has left and nobody understands the codebase” implies that the vibe coder original dev understood the codebase at any point, which isn’t an argument I’d feel comfortable making for any of the ones I’ve worked with)

App Tracking Transparency on iOS devices is an interesting test case for this argument. When an app wants to track you, you’re asked in plain language whether you want to be tracked. You can say no. You don’t have to be a savvy user to say no, and the consent is explicit rather than being buried in a EULA that you don’t read. If you say no, the app will likely still work fine. Specific numbers vary, but somewhere between a majority and a vast majority of iOS users opt out when given that choice. How much that costs advertisers is harder to reason about (a lot of the data comes from advertisers themselves, who are hardly unbiased), but the data are at least consistent in arguing that ATT opt outs produce a quantifiable drop in ad engagement (clicks, etc) and ad spend.

I’m personally a big fan of ATT. You shouldn’t have to be a savvy user to opt out of surveillance capitalism. I also don’t personally care that much about how effective online advertising networks are. But I think LG and similar companies are probably not off base to worry about making it possible to cleanly opt out of everything. From their perspective, that wouldn’t be a great outcome.

driven by our mission to create meaningful connections between brands and their audiences

Oh fuck off with this.

Having used these at my day job I can understand the policy against them. Ours is fairly well tuned by the people who operate it, adapted to our codebase, and its comments are usually on point, but its false positive rate for my own PRs is still in the low double digit percent range (feedback that’s factually wrong, not relevant to the PR, not scoped appropriately, etc). Before all that tuning, back when we first started using it, I probably went days or weeks without seeing a well-founded suggestion from the tool. Incorrect comments still create work for the PR author (investigating, double checking, etc), they create noise for human reviewers, and ambiguity about whether a change is ready to be merged. I read that policy as being against random people pointing their own review tools at PRs for this project, which I assume would be more on the high false positive/high noise end of the spectrum (i.e., not being tuned for this specific project). I can totally see why already busy maintainers would want to spare themselves from a bunch of poorly calibrated noise.

One nice thing about them compared to human reviewers is that you can just tell them to (professionally) fuck off if they’re wrong without hurting their feelings or having an HR conversation.

I was half joking. 😅 Of all the tradesfolk I’ve hired to do work on my house, my arborist is the only one who’s job I could see myself actually liking. He gets paid to be a nerd about something (trees, tree health, tree care), the work itself seems a lot more pleasant than dealing with plumbing or electrical repairs, and at least my guy is a one man band who just shows up and does his thing, which is certainly appealing after a career of various EMs, PMs, TPMs, and other people who need to be appeased when doing work. Also the fun tools.

Nothing wrong with being an arborist.

There’s a residential stroad near me that does this without advertising it. It’s a neat trick if you know about it, but a solid majority of the folks I see on that street just haul ass from red light to red light (and I catch up to them right when it turns green again).

I’m not too optimistic about traffic calming coming up in this road’s future. Maybe it’ll get speed cameras.

There’s a parallel universe where the US continued supporting its own domestic EV industry with more tax credits, more charging infrastructure, more grid investments and stricter corporate fuel economy standards. Maybe in that universe the automakers would attempt to compete with Chinese EVs instead of whining. Instead we elected orange man. Oh well.

A couple observations on reading this (as someone who heavily uses agentic coding at work and is mostly OK with it):

• Maybe I’m weird, but I don’t find “we always plan the implementation and make decisions first, and only then do we write the code” to describe my work style that well. If I don’t know how I want something to look, I will frequently just start writing whatever code comes to mind about that something. Most of the code will suck, and I’ll probably throw much of it away, but I find that it’s often a much more efficient way to get to a design that I like than sitting and debating tradeoffs in the abstract. Me writing the code might be slower than an agent writing the code, but that misses the point of the exercise: me writing the code is a way for me to build my own understanding of the problem.
• The text translation analogy at the beginning is illustrative, I think. A piece of writing has information, but also elements of the author’s wit, humor, tone, their assumptions about us as readers, and the cultural frame they write within. Good writing combines all of those things in an appealing way. At some basic level translation is about translating words correctly, but “correctly” there does a lot of work. It can be very hard to translate a work from one language to another without losing those less obvious characteristics (wit, tone, etc) that make it appealing, especially if you’re translating (e.g.) idioms or slang that don’t have a clear counterpart in your destination language. This is probably familiar to folks who read authors who’ve been translated outside of their native language: the right (or wrong) translator can have a huge impact on what you experience while reading. That’s not a bar we hold for all text (we’ve all seen very poorly translated manuals for cheap consumer electronics that are nonetheless fine because we can figure out what they’re trying to say), and similarly isn’t a bar that holds for all code, but there is some code where the nuances that automatic translation misses are actually important, and where a human touch is useful.

I was getting unregistered jalopy vibes from the condition of the truck (dirty, preexisting body damage). Often also means uninsured, and an owner who doesn’t have anything to pay for the damage they cause. The good news is that this driver may not ever get his truck out of impound (in addition to towing + storage fees they’ll need to pay to get registration current, they probably wouldn’t have let it lapse in the first place if they could afford to do that), so he may be off the road for a while. The bad news is that he’ll probably never make the city whole for the damage caused here, though maybe they’ll recoup something by auctioning the truck.

I don’t have a problem believing it. They have an infinite money supply (to date), the negative consequences of this are borne by other people, and they probably have plenty of leadership from other tech firms who are used to making narrow ROI arguments based on what benefits the company. Easy enough to imagine “hey, let’s unfuck our crawler!” getting dismissed at not a priority.

There are also enough engineers looking for jobs that companies can be picky and only hire the ones who seem agreeable and inoffensive, which reinforces the dynamic. “Idealistic” folks accumulate employment gaps that they have to explain or which cause AI ATS systems to auto reject their application before a human ever sees it, meanwhile management and hiring panels become increasingly corporate and less tolerant of difference because that’s who gets hired.

I don’t disagree with a lot of the advice here as a practical thing (e.g., having a scrubbed public image online, assuming that someone evaluating your job application will research you), but I also remember a time when you didn’t have to do that to work in the industry. A lot of the smartest, most creative folks in my CS program were also outspoken on (e.g.) privacy or civil rights in ways that could be tied to their real name, and it makes me kind of sad to think that they’d probably have to hide that today if they wanted to get hired as a new grad.