This is not the lament of the code getting worse (it's not) but the coders losing the knowledge of how to do it by hand without LLMs. If people really wanted to learn how to do things by hand, they can. In fact the AI is probably going to be infinitely more patient and knowledgable than any senior dev if you really wanna do this by hand. Just turn off the AI's ability to modify the code and just have it give you advice on the side.

The reason why nobody does that anymore is because most engineers work for capitalists not artists. It's the same reason I don't know how to farm my own food or make my own clothes like my ancestors did. Most people do programming because it's a job - not because it's an artistic passion. And that's OK.

Now imagine if only 10% of companies were allowed to use AI. Those companies would easily be willing to give 2-3 days off per week to their workers. Makes sense since those companies would easily outcompete the others and so they would have enough economic surplus to provide lavish benefits to their workers.

However, because 100% of companies and 100% of workers have access to AI, the competitive pressure on the deployment of capital means that no days off can be given.

New perks are only given to you if you, your company or your country has some sustainable systemic advantage over other employees, companies or countries.

In the absence of those sustainable systemic advantage, any perk given would put you, your company or your country at a competitive disadvantage against some other employee, company or country who are willing to work without such perk.

The only way to sustain such a perk in those situations is with anti-competitive practices: Labor Unions, protectionism, corruption, etc.

You can use AI to solve yesterday's problem or you can use AI to build the solution customers want today.

SEO was yesterday's problem.

Instant answer without the user having to worry about the sources is the solution the customers want.

The idea is: if sufficient consumers banded together and coordinated their spending power, they can drive decisions in the executive suite of the companies.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It's neither the spending of consumer nor even the spending of business that drive decisions. The only thing that drives decisions at that level is capital allocation - not spending allocation. Wealth drives these decision - not spending.

So if all these tech workers want to band together and do something about it, they would create their own ETF or mutual fund, and put all their wealth into that fund and then have the manager of that fund direct that capital based on their mission.

Of course you will see that this won't work because there just isn't enough capital here to move the market compared to the other capital allocators who are just trying to maximize returns.

Google was forced to do this and it's a miracle of their slow organizational gears that they took so long to do it. So many people have already transitioned to using ChatGPT as a replacement for Google. All of this is driven by consumer behavior and the desire to "just get an answer" rather than having to wade through all the sources and try to figure out what is SEO slop vs what is actual reputable information. Google SERP results have been gamed by SEO slop for economically valuable search terms long before the rise of AI. ChatGPT simply solved a huge problem waiting for a solution.

From the web content creator's POV, there are to paths:

1. If you are merely a publisher and rely on eyeballs on ads to drive your own revenue, you are screwed. AI is going to ignore all the ads and only extract the content.

2. If however you are serving helpful information out of the goodness of your heart or if the content itself references a product or service which from which you will derive economic benefit from, you are still good.

I don't see this as a bad thing. Ads on websites were a necessary evil and will be seen as a relic of the first 30 years of the internet. Ads will not go away but they will just migrate to the application layer (youTube, LLM interfaces etc) that will provide a much more targeted experience. There will be winners and losers from this transition but that's normal and healthy.

They delivered the product that every company wanted - make the box checking faster.

I'm happy that the investors and founders got a long and well deserved exit. I'm happy that the tech here will continue to see development and investment under Nvidia so we may one day get to use Claude Opus at 500 tokens per second.

Does it suck that certain employees got screwed over? Yes. Does this happen ALL THE TIME in startups? More often than you think. The expected value for employee options for this type of company is very very close to zero. Anyone who thinks otherwise is lying to themselves.

Does it suck that it didn't happen via a normal M&A process? As someone who used to work on tech M&As as an attorney, I would be first one to say that I hope this DOES become the norm. M&A sucks for the employees, the investors, the founders, the acquirers - it sucks for EVERYONE. The only people who it doesn't suck for are the lawyers and bankers who earn more fees the more complex and longer the process is. Best M&A I ever witnessed was the FB acquisition of Instagram that happened over the weekend (my old law firm was part of that deal).

Ask yourself: do you want to spend 2% of your funding round and 2 months on lawyers when you raise a $5m Series A? Then why do you want to do the same when you exit?

Most of the advice here focuses on Claude Code. Since your use case revolves around a very specific frameworks and refactoring workflow, my advice is to use AI tooling that will allow you to experiment with other models.

Opus 4.5 is my fav it simply can't be the best for every use case. My advice is to use cursor and switch between the various SOTA models to see which one serves your use case the best.

I'm not sure if you can also build something using AI that will help you automatically determine if the outputted component matches the Storybook story. That would be the first thing i try.

You can go farm rice or wheat by hand - is that a good part of life? You can ride a horse to go to work - is that a good part of life? You can use an abacus to do your accounting - is that a good part of life?

We don't want to go back to these things because we simply grew up in a world where were no longer values those activities as 'work'. We valued other things like memorizing ailments and legal doctrine, like typing computer code out one character at a time.

I think this argument about technology removing the joy of work hides the fact that technology has no interest in your joy for your work. It only has interest in the economic value of that work. You can continue to do the same work for joy - the only difference is you can no longer derive economic value from it. Basically if you enjoy being a translator that's great but maybe you will only be able to somehow do it as a hobby. And of course that's deeply unsatisfying for us because humans want to feel needed and useful. But this 'useful work' requires two parties - not just the one doing the work but the one needing the work. By focusing on the needs of the producer, we miss the needs of the buyer who would rather buy the service from a machine. The loss of the producer is the gain of the buyer who can now spend less on the good and buy more of everything else.

Of course we still have classical musicians despite there being Spotify because there will be a niche for them. And so there will always be a niche certain people doing artisanal stuff. And you can always do whatever you want as a hobby. Technology and capitalism doesn't prevent that. It just serves the interests of the buyers as well as the interests of the producers.

Clothing cost after accounting for inflation has actually not increased. There are many of high quality textiles companies that only produce hand made organic cotton sourced from sustainable farms etc. Some of them are actually not too expensive - check out Isto from Portugal. Yes, i'm willing to pay $50 for a tshirt instead of the usual $25 from Uniqlo or Zara but most people are not.

The article is from Spain - the birthplace of Zara, Inditex and fast fashion. Spain is also known for sitting on cheap plastic chairs outside drinking cheap beer for hours. The quality of housing interiors is pretty poor - despite wood parquet flooring being no more expensive than in other parts of the world, almost every house here (even after renovation) has laminate, concrete or ceramic flooring. Yet plenty of people here have the top of the latest Playstation or iPhone.

Which we all get - if housing start costing close to 40% of your paycheck which is typical for a young person in Spain, is that $50 high quality tshirt or $80 / sqm parquet really what you should logically do with your left over money?

High quality items has traditionally been a luxury good - one reserved for the rich. Back then we simply did not have the choice to buy low quality items which allowed us to shift more spending on things that we actually cared more about. The real lament is that most of us actually care less about the quality of clothing and furniture than we would like to believe.

I'm going to skip the obvious answer about how LLMs can actually improve code quality and reviewability and focus on a different argument: why engineers even care about code quality.

Most code is not written as a work of art but as an important functional piece to achieve return on capital. Programmers get paid by companies to produce code. The payment ultimately is driven by expectation of a return on investment of the code. Ultimately business owners and owners do not really care about code quality as long as it can deliver on return on capital. There are plenty of profitable businesses run on spaghetti code and old technology. However, engineers realized that bad code resulted in costly downstream consequences including consequences that affected ROI. Tech debt had to be paid not just in developer hours but also dollars and cents. Thus this obsession with code quality, code reviews, and this current debate.

Many including Andrew Ng at YC startup school recently are realizing that writing bad code is now a two way door instead of the one way door that it used to be. With LLMs you can deploy some bad code, realize it's bad, and rewrite that entire codebase tomorrow with near negligible cost. The fact that LLM can write some very very bad code is less important than the return on invested capital of that code especially when taking into account the speed at which that code can be fixed / completely re-written in the future, and especially when that in that future, LLMs will be even more capable than it is now.

Here's my advice: give in the shitty code and merge it. Claude 6 will refactor all of it to your liking very soon.

If the container doesn't run any workloads, it doesn't cost you anything. Most of the compute i pay for sit idle most of the time.

This is amazing pricing.

It's one thing to refuse entry to someone who doesn't have the right documents. The fear goes to a completely different level once people see tourists getting locked up.

As someone who lived in the US for 22 years legally and most of my social and business network there, I an not taking the risk of getting locked up in ICE jail any time soon, no matter how unlikely it is.

The lack of UK hardware startups is due to the lack of local VC appetite and the unwillingness of US VCs to fund a non-Delaware incorporated company. Therefore the investment from a VC to a startup is generally "bounded" by geography.

The lack of UK VC appetite is due to the fact that there are just not that many LPs that want to give their money to a UK VC given their choice internationally. The LP investment to VC is "unbounded" - meaning it just follows exactly where the returns are highest.

What we really need is for UK startups to break the international border between silicon valley and the UK (or anywhere else for that matter). This means setting up a Delaware C corp, selling to the US, but keeping most of the talent in the UK.

Everything on this site looks like it could have been built by AI in like 20 minutes.

1. This list is tiny. They have pass on 10000 more companies than the ones on this list. Most of that passing was done correctly

2. VCs rightly over-index on the big winners. The Facebooks and Airbnbs of the world are completely outsized in terms of one key thing: how much money they make for the GPs and LPs. However, as builders, we should not focus on these because they are few and far in between and you don't need to be a founder of one of these to have a life changing event. You just need a good 7 or 8 figure exit. VCs don't make money on an 8 figure exit so they train us to go big or go home. This webpage is another piece of that propaganda.

This is not you - this is just the nature of the cycle. You got to enjoy the high but how you have to survive the lows. Conserve cash; do work for comp that you once thought was once below you. The good times will come again. Don't get too down about it but also don't get too stubborn about maintaining what you once had.