I view the delays during launch and the extra time spent during updates as a “load on the system.”

Also, it entirely depends on your deployment environment. I develop system images that go out on thousands of devices deployed in “Cybersecuity Sensitive” environments, meaning: we have to document what’s on the system and justify when anything in the SBOM (list of every software package installed on the machine) is identified as having any applicable CVEs… soooo… keeping old versions of software anywhere on the machine is a problem (significant additional documentation load) for those security audits. Don’t argue with logic, these are our customers and they have established their own procedures, so if we want their money, we will provide them with the documentation they demand, and that documentation is simplest when EVERYTHING on the system has ALL the latest patches.

The most secure systems are those that don’t do anything at all. You can’t hack a brick.

i think rust actually is quite well suited to agentic development workflows, it just needs to mature more.

I agree. The agents also need to mature more to handle multi-level structures - work on a collection of smaller modules to get a larger system with more functionality. I can see the path forward for those tools, but the ones I have access to definitely aren’t there yet.

The more exacting the shop, the better they pay.

That hasn’t been my experience, but it sounds like good advice anyway. My experience has been that the more profitable the parent company, the better the job security and the better the pay too. Once “in,” tune in to the culture and align with the people at your level and above who seem like they’ll be sticking around long term. If the company isn’t financially secure, all bets are off and you should be seeking, and taking, a better offer when you can find one.

I knocked around startups for 10/22 years (depending on how you characterize that one 12 year gig that ended with everybody laid off…) The pay was good enough, but job security just wasn’t on the menu. Finally, one got bought by a big fish and I’ve been in the belly of the beast for 11 years now.

Yeah, sometimes the requirements write themselves and in those cases successful execution is “on the critical path.”

Unfortunately, our requirements are filtered from our paying customers through an ever rotating cast of Marketing and Sales characters who, nominally, are our direct customers so we make product for them - but they rarely have any clear or consistent vision of what they want, but they know they want new stuff - that’s for sure.

Probably just to save money really.

That always helps. It also helps politically that M$ is based in a country that’s outraging the Danish people on a fairly regular basis…

same thing with 365 but we do a lot of traveling

Back in 1990-something, I got our office using Ami Pro - it was a vastly superior word processor to anything else available at the time. Then, a couple of years later, we started sharing documents back and forth with business partners via dial-up internet and that was the end of Ami Pro, all our partners used M$ and file format translation / import / export was nigh impossible in those days.

I did this in my personal usage 20 years ago. I even was demonstrating to colleagues at work in 2005 how Open Office was better at integrating large numbers of digital photos into documents than Word was.

I’ve been R&D forever, so at my level the question isn’t “does the code work?” we pretty much assume that will take care of itself, eventually. Our critical question is: “is the code trying to do something valuable, or not?” We make all kinds of stuff do what the requirements call for it to do, but so often those requirements are asking for worthless or even counterproductive things…

I have been more successful with baby steps like: “Write a python 3 program that converts X to Y.” Tweak prompt until that’s working as desired, then: “make it work recursively through all subdirectories” - and again tweak with specifics like converting the files in place, etc. Always very specific, also - force it to fix its own bugs so you can move forward with a clean example as you add complexity. Complexity seems to cap out at a couple of pages of code, at which point “Ooops, something went wrong.”

I was 0/6 on various trials of AI for Rust over the past 6 months, then I caught a success. Turns out, I was asking it to use a difficult library - I can’t make the thing I want work in that library either (library docs say it’s possible, but…) when I posed a more open ended request without specifying the library to use, it succeeded - after a fashion. It will give you code with cargo build errors, I copy-paste the error back to it like “address: <pasted error message>” and a bit more than half of the time it is able to respond with a working fix.

Inescapable movie reference: The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

He’s developing a toxic relationship with his AI agent. I don’t think it’s the best way to get what you want (demonstrating how to be abusive to the AI), but maybe it’s the only method he is capable of getting results with.

I frequently find myself prompting it: “now show me the whole program with all the errors corrected.” Sometimes I have to ask that two or three times, different ways, before it coughs up the next iteration ready to copy-paste-test. Most times when it gives errors I’ll just write "address: " and copy-paste the error message in - frequently the text of the AI response will apologize, less frequently it will actually fix the error.

Well, I very literally lived the “one can never go back home” reality while away at University, my home town doubled in population. So, most of the old places I remember are still there, but there’s all the expanded roadways and bigger crowds everywhere you go. Half of it was built after I left, so the half I remember is now the dingy old stuff.

Of course we all change as life goes on, I find that home is wherever I am, and the longer I’m there the more it feels like “my home.”

My big trip was across Europe (I’m from the US), and there’s a strong tradition in Europe of the “wanderjahr” taking a year off before, after or even during University to travel and see other places, meet other people, etc. I only got to do “wanderjahr light” and I ended up going back the following summer for an encore. I definitely learned more in those 4.5 months than I did any two years in school or University.

The first half dozen times I tried AI for code, across the past year or so, it failed pretty much as you describe.

Finally, I hit on some things it can do. For me: keeping the instructions more general, not specifying certain libraries for instance, was the key to getting something that actually does something. Also, if it doesn’t show you the whole program, get it to show you the whole thing, and make it fix its own mistakes so you can build on working code with later requests.

There’s a certain amount of: “if this isn’t going to take over the world, I’m going to just take my money and put it in something that will” mentality out there. It’s not 100% of all investors, but it’s pervasive enough that the “potential world beaters” are seriously over-funded as compared to their more modest reliable inflation+10% YoY return alternatives.

Yes, absolutely. However, on $14K/yr income (in 1990), with a beater car, ramen diet and cheap room rent, I was taking summers off and flying to Europe. Sure, I’d stay in youth hostels and travel on the train pass or rented bike, but 3 months in Europe didn’t even cost $4000 out of my $14K income.

Domestic trips in the beater car were of course even cheaper, as long as I mooched lodging off of friends and family.

Yes, but the test code “writes itself” - the path is clear, you just have to fill in the blanks.

Writing the proper product code in the first place, that’s the valuable challenge.

Jimmy, is that you? Little Jimmy from the house across the creek! Oh, we had such fun together.

10 years ago, if I saw 5 seconds of movie preview, I would know if I had seen it before and generally be able to tell you the whole plot, etc. These days, I can be 30 minutes into a movie I saw 10 years ago before I recognize anything in it, and still be surprised by later parts after recognizing that I have seen it before.

Which is good, because the vast majority of new stuff coming out looks like crap to me.

Pain I can manage. It’s the loss of senses that really sucks for me in old age. I used to have 20/10 eyesight, this crap they implant for cataract repair may be 20/20, but it’s the suckiest 20/20 I have ever experienced. Hearing is getting muffled, smell comes and goes… if I live to be 150, I don’t want to do it “locked in” a sensory deprivation box.