forgejo has been great for us. It scales remarkably far with the built in sqlite db also. Single binary, no deps. You ofc have the option to hook it up to a proper database server.
I'm just saying that I already see that people are outsourcing all the thinking to the models - not only code generation and reviews, but even design - the part that "senior engineers" without imagination think only they are capable of doing.
It's worrying how much trust is being put in those systems. And my worry is not about the job anymore, but our future in general.
I think those of us who have years of experience under our belt our safe. If we're older the knowledge is ingrained and atrophy of this knowledge will be limited based on the fact that it's already "imprinted" onto our brains.
Our futures are safe in this sense, in fact it's even beneficial as we may be the last generation to have these skills. Humanities future on the other hand is another open question.
It's a bit of a weird place to be in as a senior engineer who has spent 2 decades perfecting his craft.
So, on one hand, I'm also kinda sad and how quickly we've thrown the guardrails away, but on the other -- it's... Well. It's just work.
Turns out, no one ever really cared how elegant or robust our code was and how clever we were to think up some design or other, or that we had an eye on the future; just that it worked well enough to enable X business process / sale / whatever.
And now we're basically commoditised, even if the quality isn't great, more people can solve these problems. So, being honest, I think a lot of my pushback is just a kinda internal rebellion against admitting that actually, we're not all that special after all.
I'm just glad I got to spend 20 years doing my hobby professionally, got paid really well for it, and often times was forced to solve complicated problems no one else could -- that kept me from boredom.
I think the shift we are seeing now, as 'previously' knowledge workers is that work becomes a lot more like manual labour than what we've really been doing up until now. When there's no 'I don't know' anymore, then you're not really doing knowledge work, right?
I guess I'll just ride the wave, spew out LLM crap at work, and save the craft for some personal projects, I'll certainly have the capacity now work is a no-op.
Yeah, but the thing is, it's not "just work". Software now has really big impact on the world and actual lives.
In a corporate world, we are typically detached from real world consequences and looking at people around me, people really don't think about such things - but I do. And I really care, because "relaxed" standards might result in errors that amount to stuff like identity thefts, or stolen money, shit like this, even on the smallest scale.
Obviously we can't prevent everything, but it seems like we, as industry, decided to collectively YOLO and stop giving shit at all. And personally I don't like that it is me who is losing sleep over this, while people who happily delegate all their thinking over to LLMs sleep better than ever now.
Yeah that's a tough spot to be in; I think though, your responsibility really ends with you at work, unless you're very high up on the management chain.
Keep it simple right; in everything you do, make things a bit better than you found them. It's enough. You're never going to win the fight to get everyone (or maybe even ANYONE depending how messed up your org is) to care; so why lose sleep on things you can't change?
At least, that's what I started doing some years ago by now having lost lots of those fights, and I'm sleeping fine again.
Maybe I have some neurological issue or something but whenever I quit coffee I find it extremely difficult to maintain any kind of motivation to sit in an open plan office and code. Coffee makes me a worker bee, I can understand why employers give it away for free.
Yeah, exactly. I can totally relate to this. I have actually monitored my productivity on an excel sheet and the days with coffee win by a large margin. I am not sure if it's withdrawal symptoms on the days without, though.
There’s this great feeling standing infront of a couple loaded billy bookcases trying to pick what to read that i just don’t get from looking at the directory listing on my kobo. (I can reccommend a kobo, it runs linux and with koreader you can even open a terminal emulator on it, ssh into it etc).
I like and use both, but yeah the feeling just isn’t the same reading on a screen vs a nice folio society hardcover.
I grew up having a lot of books around, mostly non-fiction, mostly from library book sales, garage sales, and used bookstores. There is a magnetic pull to a large well sorted bookcase. Pair it with a comfortable chair free of distractions. The best entertainment to my mind.
It’s got a bunch of decent ssh clients; I use mine quite often for this. With a hdmi capture thingy it’s also the display for a bunch of my rpis when they don’t boot etc..
VS Code online supports tunnels, or you can run your own "code-server" (OSS VS Code bundled in a docker container).
I daily drive VS Code remote SSH and had a (honestly inexplicable) thing for Chromebooks for a while. Before the included Linux environment let me install "real" VS Code, these options worked well for me.
Ah fair enough, mostly i’m living in tmux/vim for those scenarios. Real dev work I’d want an IDE too, but seeing the Jetbrains splash on my holidays would ruin my holidays.
I don't want to see it either, but as I run my app business, I much prefer being able to fix the issue if it happens, without taking my $2000+ MBP for a two week road trip full of sand and dirt.
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