1. super responsive

2. arrow keys!! why this is impossible is beyond me

3. easy access to text editor and undo redo via the long pressing of the enter button

4. easy resizing and im using a floating mode so it's all near my thumb and no awkward bends, just my phone being too heavy for my pinky because phones are massive these days

5. offline voice is comparable at a glance to the offline voice input app I was using with heliboard. that's with their biggest ugliest English model and my phone is from 2022 at the newest.

6. have I mentioned how performance is great on this app yet? pleasantly surprised.

y'all do you but I am keeping this FUTO keyboard.

If these loopers mean we all have to move at this continuous wave of software happening, then we get to the highest levels of logical information system design and its all human judgement and balancing of business requirements to fit a given niche in a company or market. So all the programmers have to become business analysts/market researchers/businessmen...except the specific niches where AI tooling can't really clank well...or the end of the subsidized AI token era makes all this looping too expensive to continue. This feels like expert systems and symbolics lisps machines redux, where we briefly ran into the fact that its not so much the code itself not being able to do stuff, it's that your company's org always gets shipped, so if you can't change your company org, your software only has so much flexibility.

Dataflow diagrams and domain knowledge / domain modeling / ubiquitous languages may become the metalanguage that we start to use and set the standards for quality, functional, and non-functional standards and conventions. We make the "looper clankers" ensure that they fulfill that data / behavior / performance contracts before saying what "done" is, because "done" is no longer just code that compiles, code that builds, code that deploys, or even code that sits in production; it's code that fulfills all of the user requirements, operator requirements, and maintainer requirements. So, the language used may be required to make us all turn into business analysts and software architects more than syntax knowers. The revenge of UML and the return of declarative / logical design / BDD triumphing?

(Typo scan by gemma4-12b but I didn't let it alter my message)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477851

Points: 163

# Comments: 33

I've done each of the 3 for side projects below to pretty good effects.

> This website will be run by IE6 and Windows Mobile 6, so use no dependencies, semantic HTML, a 3-pane layout, and only use JS (es3!) where absolutely necessary (and where necessary, put the script at the end of the body).

When I'm not specifically targeting support for retrocomputers I do something like this, then iterate until it looks right.

> Go look at Dokuwiki, django defaults, and common web 2.0 color schemes, use those for UI inspiration. Keep a 3-pane desktop-first layout, but enable mobile responsiveness with media queries. Use semantic html5 and prefer older boring solutions like surgical jquery or htmx-style islands of interactivity where needed, otherwise do not bring in dependencies without my say so.

And finally, if I'm doing a web app that I'm vibing out with the web stack because I want it one-shotted and not trying to do a good rust core with strong ports/adapters API surface for web or native client callers, I do something like this:

> This is a local web app, the frontend, backend, and desktop are all on the same machine. Use naive and simple development patterns that you document the style as you go, pick a boring web framework and use it idiomatically, but remember that some tricks that are intended to keep network round trips down are not as necessary because network penalties are not as bad as real traffic.

Granted, the above I don't like as much, but it does produce more 'modern' looking sites by default.

Less because of the iPad itself (though it was the first mainstream 'consumption first' device in my mind) and more because of those sorts of early user-hostile and spyware-first models that were coming out around that time.

None of us know the future.

Having said that, while your programming career will be different from mine (I started in the twilight of the pre-pandemic era) because of AI tool abilities, the AI tools, while improving a lot, require good judgement to be put to useful work.

In a world where the AI is so smart that it does not need your judgement, then the business is so smart that it does not need any employees at all.

"Coding" as in "I can hand type syntax" will likely be more commoditized.

But being able to design and implement systems that automate and accomplish work useful to business workflows that are ill-defined, have lots of stakeholders who don't necessarily know the entire domain of the work, and need integration of a chain of people's workflows in order to make all the gears of industry go?

That makes you a good programmer. Add on the ability to socialize / network with people, identify an underserved market and bring a profitable product to it? That makes you a full on businessman.

Specific technical skills like digital logic understanding, algorithms and data structures familiarity, set theory, data-intensive application design, SQL (everything eventually becomes SQL with databases), C (still a lingua franca that in some form or fashion will be directly present or a heavy influence in whatever programs one works in), and yes, confidence bred from experience working in the industry, will make you valuable enough to be on whatever short list of humans hired, even if an AI agent is smart enough to handle or give educated guesses about whatever class of problems were commonly known and solved pre 2022.

Your value is no longer only or mainly in "I can follow the process of writing source code that compiles to a program somewhere" - your value is in your developing judgement and experience that lets you take the imperfect world of now, see a goal that the business needs to get to, and use various technical skills to bring that future world into the present state.

AI agents will eagerly and over-politely try to help, but beyond their limitations, your work will be needed then.

You can still do a full career in programming / technical fields, no it is not a wild hiring frenzy like it was 5 years ago, but you can still pursue this field - it's not as obsolete as lots of us like to complain about over here.

While I still follow the general privacy first tenets, I have ended up backing off on some tools (noscript and librewolf) at the extremes of privacy because if every site is going to track everything by my IP or by my ASN or browser fingerprint, I do have a happy medium of being private enough while not being utterly broken in my browsing.

Roughly that looks like email aliases on demand via sieve rules, ublock origin with liberal use of filter lists, different handles and a password manager, frozen credit ratings, and Tailscale exit nodes or Mozilla(Mullvad) VPN for uncontrolled WiFi access points for my jnrootabke android device and mostly signal for comms.

I'm getting to old to be a privacy extreme enthusiast when all of my family side channels everything straight to Facebook, so this is the impure level of privacy I can sustain.

But with the state of digital goods disrepect for the customer and locking us in mustache twirling reasons, I have better ways to spend my income. Yes I am not above reading shadow copies of books at times, but I'd rather kindle sell all titles as DRM free on rootable devices and their convenient storefront would be enough for me to direct my business there more.

But email is a least common denominator, and like how plan9 failed to take over from unix bc unix inertia, JMAP or deltachat IM over email won't take over bc of network effect inertia, I suspect.

Im still bummed the web won the UI wars.

I used to do morning pages each day, but i stopped because it seemed to be too hard to maintain the discipline. Everything takes discipline for me to do, if I want to act better than an overgrown toddler, i do have adhd but thats a challenge not a get out of grow up jail free card.

Whoever robbed me of my joyous hope and reward for doing good like journalling, just know I will start that back up someday. Perhaps tomorrow

Sure you can see that users emit messages in the pds but you dint know if its for your former group or other activitt