🔗 Trusting your own judgement on ‘AI’ is a huge risk:

Many intelligent and talented people believe in homeopathy, psychics, or naturopathy. It isn’t a question of their integrity as they are sincere in their beliefs. Nor is it a question of their intelligence as subjective validation is not dependent on a lack of intelligence. Education will only protect you insofar as some education – none of which engineers or software developers will ever encounter – teaches you to not subject yourself to situations where your own biases and subjective experiences can fool you.

🔗 Change and risk:

At most places I’ve worked at, any amount of change feels extremely risky and that sentiment at one point or another moves out of the codebase and into every meeting and discussion. So I think that as a small dev team, where every moment is precious, perhaps the most important thing is reliability in a codebase.

And this problem is compounded by the dynamic wherein larger, more complex organizations tend to product larger and more complex architectures and codebases. So then in addition to change being risky because of the codebase itself, it is made even more risky by the organizational structures and politics that have to be navigated in order to make any changes.

Mike Masnick spent some time using an AI tool to build himself a personal task management app:

Intend got me 65% of the way there. L’il Alex is already at 85% and climbing. More importantly: when my needs change, the tool adapts. I’m not locked into someone else’s vision.

This is exactly what vibe coding is for: solving personal friction points without waiting for permission from product managers whose incentives don’t align with yours.

🔗 Humiliation:

every band I loved as a kid eventually sold me out, too. They disappointed me by turning into right wing weirdos or being horrendous and violent or having terribly useless opinions about the world, but—but!—Nine Inch Nails never did. Reznor and Ross never compromised themselves, never embarrassed me in the way that a drunk parent might.

I have been a pretty huge NIN fan since seeing them live a bunch of times in small Cleveland clubs back in the Pretty Hate Machine days and, but I had never really thought about it this way.

I have spent a bit of time messing around with Lovable.dev this weekend, and while it’s not bad for creating some nifty little personal apps, it seems like, at scale, it would mean even more garbage apps that all look basically the same, as well as a bunch of out-of-work devs, pilfered intellectual property, and more matches set to our already raging environmental/climate bonfire.

I seriously question whether that is worth me having a productivity/workflow webapp that fits my personal quirks