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by ako 35 days ago
I see it even on my GitHub project, issues and pull request comments get longer, responses get longer, all generated by ai and read by ai. This text is no longer for human consumption, but to provide context to ai.

See also this video from Nate B Jones: https://youtu.be/FDkvRl1RlT0?si=WUK2WJTXvKAWKD0r

1 comments

Seems like we risk the atrophy of western software while surpassed by software developed in places and cultures where they don't "move fast and break things".

We have never needed to "move slow and fix things" more than right now.

  > move slow and fix things
I'm not opposed to "move fast and break things" but our problem is that's the only lever we pull. For every "... and break things" there needs to be a phase of "clean up, everybody do your share". It seems the modern development framework is allergic to cleaning up. There's so many excuses given but if you don't clean up you can't move fast.

In physical reverse engineering there's a common pattern people use: buy 3. One to break, one to modify, one to reference. You need the one to break because you're going in blind. The problem has a lot of unknown unknowns. It's often difficult to take things apart (especially these days) without breaking them. But the second time it is much easier to do nondestructively.

But I'm also a big fan of taking time to think and understand. To gain deep understanding of things. I've always found this to be helpful and allowed me to move faster in the long run but I often face resistance to this because everyone wants me to "move fast".

The problem is I think people have the illusion that you can run a marathon by doing consecutive 100m dashes. It sounds nice in theory but I think there's no surprise that burnout is at an all time high and things are getting sloppy.

It's weird, we've systematically created a work structure that has the same principles as scams: frame everything as an emergency so the mark doesn't have time to think. Why the fuck are we scamming ourselves?