And at the same time, its arguably the least toxic of all social networks.
Yes, cringeworthy but at least not addictive! Its like facebook all those years ago, i can IM friends from highschool without having to pay any attention to the feed.
I am not sure its super toxic. Does anyone take this stuff seriously?
Its a bunch of people virtue signalling, writing cringeworthy pieces on their ground breaking ideas on leveraging AI, stuff like this can't possibly be read by anyone with an above-room-temperature IQ, no? LinkedIn can reliably be used as a high functioning moron detector.
I mean, if there are people doom scrolling linkedin, they need help.
It is not trauma inducingly bad, but thoroughly disappointing. I went there a couple of weeks ago by accident and they were discussing how they wrote papers with the help of AI and how you should "at least make sure that the reference section is valid".
Religiously, routinely refactor. After almost every feature I do a feature level code analysis and refactoring, and every few features - codebase wide code analysis and refactoring.
I am quite happy with the resulting code - much less shameful than most things I've created in 40 years of being passionate about coding.
This. Historically there's been a lot of resistance to the idea of refactoring or refining features. The classic "It works, just ship it" mentality that leaves mountains of tech debt in its wake.
And there _was_ a good reason to resist refactoring. It takes time and effort! After "finishing" something, the timeline, the mental and physical energy, the institutional support, is all dried up. Just ship it and move on.
But LLMs change the equation. There's no reason to leave sloppy sub-optimal code around. If you see something, say something. Wholesale refactoring your PR is likely faster than running your test suite. Literally no excuses for bad code anymore.
You'd think it didn't need to be said but, given we have a tool to make coding vastly more efficient, some people use that tool to improve quality rather than just pump out more quantity.
We are becoming spec writers, wearing the PM/lead hats.
1) Do a gap and needs assessment.
2) Build business requirements.
3) Define scope of work to advance fulfillment.
4) Create functional and non-functional specs.
5) Divide-conquer-refine loop.
This is the main thing I have learned too. I've been building an internal tool for myself to annotate lines in each commit diff as good (green) / needs refactor (yellow) / needs rewrite (red) and it has helped me keep track of this kind of tech debt. Basically does what you could do with "TODO refactor" comments all over, but is more comprehensive and doesn't litter your source code. Plan to open source it once I've dog-fooded it a little more
Lots of companies buy saas, and then spend years customizing and effectively building what they thought they bought. And for big companies, it is costly - a few tens of millions for saas licenses, and maybe around 50-100m for system integrators leaching on the enterprise, and doing the integrations and customizations, usually dancing around the data model, api surface limitations of each of the saas tools they want to wire together.
I dont think going back to having own developers, owning the code is going to be a bad financial propositions for such companies. My company is now one month into trying this out and so far, so good. We kicked our outsystems addiction and are just went live with a react rewrite - and are well into rewriting an expensive to run document management system which we were at the same time under-utilizing and abusing. Our product people are loving it since for the first time in ages we dont need to tell them "well that would be real hard, considering we have salesforce crap underneath and it just doesnt do this or that well".
My thoughts are sort of similar. AI/LLMs have allowed many of the typical SaaS customers to think that maybe they could do at least some of this work themselves, and get better results.
For most companies this was always true, but LLMs have given them the confidence to actual start writing more software in house. The SAPs of the world have nothing to fear, companies aren't going to vibe code a CRM, but they are going to be able to more easily write integrations. At a previous job we frequently had bills for €10.000 for small integrations into our ERP, but once we figured out the API and gained more confidence in our abilities, all those integrations got pulled in house.
If your SaaS platform provides actual benefits, then you don't need to worry. If your business in writing integrations for other companies into platforms you don't own, yes, AI is going to hurt your business.
This should have happened regardless of AI though. The idea that companies (over a certain size, e.g. ~20 people) doesn't have a least on developer employed, regardless of industry always seemed like a missed business opportunity. We wrote so many tools for sales, warehousing, customer service and accounting and it's hard to imagine the business functioning without those tools. I might have spend two weeks writing a tool, but if it saves sales 20 hours a week punching in orders, we get a positive return in a month.
I'd rather not name names - but one of the major, popular ones.
We contracted a lot of usage, and are using it literally like a S3 bucket with a malware scanner attached to it, and ignoring the dozens and dozens of document management capabilities it has - that we don't need. (Because really, we only ever needed a S3 bucket with a virus scanner...). This alone will allow us not to renew that contract, and save, maybe, around 2M per year.
Sure, we will have to have our own API that will require support and what not, but... we already HAD to have our own API that requires support and what not, since we have a bunch of legacy document management platforms running in various countries, and we anyway have to operate an abstraction and a router.
I am sure ours might not be the most typical case, but there will be savings, and since the economy is what it is, my bosses are telling me to go for every saving I can find, and thats one of them.
(I'd not try to re-write an ERP system, for instance, or a CRM. But a lot of smaller things where we pay a substantial premium? Sure - we will try.).
I am in the middle of this - my audit committee just told me we need an exit plan "just in case".
I don't think this is practically possible. The governments are currently focusing on enabling sovereign clouds - there is real work in France and the Netherlands that I am familiar with.
However, almost any company uses a lot of SaaS stuff - also for very core capabilities such as IdP, employee productivity, not to mention the boring stuff - CRMs, ERPs, payment, etc.
Some (all, maybe?) have non-US variants, but as anyone who ever worked through an ERP upgrade or a CRM replacement - theoretically trivial exercises - this will be hell on earth.
And that does not begin to address the questions such as next gen productivity tools such as frontier models for coding. If Anthropic, Google and OpenAI decided to shut down the Europeans, we'd be screwed for a while.
On the positive side, the absolute toxic stuff that tech companies brought to the world - shorts, social media networks - would for a while be inaccessible too, so there is that.
I use a mac and a linux box. I'd never cross my mind that I cant leave some unsaved changes overnight. I leave unsaved changes for weeks across the many things I am working on.
I got a Commodore/PLUS 4 -
With almost no games (just Saboteur, Jet Set Willy and Booty), and my father taught me how to program in Basic 3.5 - and before I was 10
i was making trainers with 7501 assembly learned almost by trial and error. I knew back then what I wanted to do in life and followed that path to the fullest extent.
Yes, cringeworthy but at least not addictive! Its like facebook all those years ago, i can IM friends from highschool without having to pay any attention to the feed.
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