Smaller businesses in particular - not so long past the COVID disruption and already facing significant challenges in areas like logistics and energy supply costs - will not necessarily have the reserves that older and larger businesses often do to withstand another multi-year price shock.

I don't know what that means but I have seen no evidence so far that if you don't apply those practices then your code will be anything other than unmanageable spaghetti if you leave AI to maintain it for long.

Coding has never been the bottleneck for good developers. Part of the reason for that is that good developers know how to isolate different aspects of a system and so keep each individual aspect relatively simple and self-contained. Another part is that good developers were already standardising and automating a lot of the grunt work. These traits are also advantageous for keeping generative AI on the right track and keeping its proposed changes manageable.

If there's a second thing the generative AI tools have shown beyond any doubt it's that many of the more modern (relatively speaking) "best practices" that have always been over-hyped and questionably-evidenced really do tend to produce worse results. LLMs take these methods to their logical conclusions and show us the end result much sooner. You can't just iterate your way to a solution when you don't even know what problem you're trying to solve. If you don't have a clear spec then you don't know what a correct product looks like. You need to invest time in reviewing code properly. If you don't keep the big picture in mind then the big picture becomes a mess.

Maybe one day the LLMs will leave me out of a job but at least I'll feel validated first!

Even Stripe - once legendary for the quality of its support - has apparently given up now. I had to deal with it recently over a case where the merchant was seeing an unexpected change in the way it was collecting payments and the AI bot was worse than useless - it actively suggested incorrect explanations and resulted in several days of trying to change the wrong things while the problem persisted.

For my own businesses we give this issue a heavy weight when choosing which services to use. We have even seriously considered moving existing integrations to different services over this one issue recently. If we're integrating with a service then we want to know there's a real person who can actually help if we have questions or anything goes wrong. Failing to provide that because it's cheaper to push everyone through the AI bot is a statement of intent about how much you value your customers.

Obviously Signal don't owe me anything. I'm not paying for the product and I appreciate what it does offer and makes available for free. But it would be much better if it also supported local backups under the user's control.

Though I suppose then I have to give a negative % to all the systems that have insecure online backups. This whole area is a train wreck really.

The British government and public sector are constantly limiting themselves by being unwilling to pay market rates for the skills they need. Then they contract out needs like tech to work around the bureaucracy - but they demand so many strings attached that the little guys who are more cost effective don't want anything to do with it. And so they mostly outsource to large firms or sometimes specialist agencies who have jumped through the hoops to get all the right certifications. Naturally those suppliers are in a position to charge premium rates even for relatively simple work.

If the Civil Service built up a capable IT function staffed by properly qualified and experienced people that would surely save billions in budget and years in timescales for some of the (in)famous government IT projects and probably significantly increase the odds of successfully delivering something usable at the end of them. But as anyone who's working in our Civil Service can tell you the emphasis on ranks and pay scales and other very specific rules about career advancement are unlikely to go anywhere any time soon. Even if they did the culture of people moving around the Civil Service like interchangeable parts instead of building up deep expertise in specific areas would still be a problem.

We saw a similar philosophy in TDD advocacy many years ago. Search for something like "Sudoku Jeffries" to see how that went. Then search for "Sudoku Norvig" to see what it looks like when you actually understand the problem.

The idea that you can somehow iterate your way to a solution when you have no idea where you're trying to go or even which direction your next step should be in has always seemed absurd to some of us but in the era of LLMs there's no longer any doubt. In the agentic era (can we call a few months an "era"?) I estimate that 90% or more of the writing I've read about how to use agents most effectively came down to making sure there is a clear specification for what they need to implement first and then imposing extensive guard rails to make sure their output does in fact follow that specification. It's all about doing enough design work up front to remove any ambiguity before coding the next part of the implementation and almost everyone claiming any sort of real world success with coding agents seems to have reached a similar conclusion.

Surveys here have been showing a trend towards greater public support for the EU. Its advocates have been pushing for closer integration and even talking of a referendum on rejoining. Although of course this also has to be viewed cautiously because the polls before the Brexit referendum had also pointed towards remaining and one of the biggest fans of the EU recently has been that unpopular PM who might not be in office for much longer.