You suggest adding it as a "bonus", but for whom? Recording what on the walk? How would you advertise that along the main feature people actually buy the thing for? If not, what purpose does it serve? It's a few cents, but that's still a few cents too much if that's not what you're convincing people to buy.

Try to think of someone who didn't buy a walkman because it lacked a recording feature. What's their story? Can that easily be represented in the marketing material?

There are some positive side effects to this, which is probably the reason we're so tolerant of their presence.

I will probably be dealing with them in the future more than in the past because chatbots bypass the process by which unskilled people generally become skilled people.

Previously in my career, a junior making a mistake and being told why it was a mistake would learn from that and improve. The junior-chatbot duo will not. The junior will feed my comment into the chatbot, and the chatbot will superficially give the impression of having learned from the mistake and fix the code while introducing the same problem somewhere else, and the junior will have learned nothing.

This all requires that I review code as though it was created by some kind of cursed monkey's paw with an endless number of fingers that each grants a wish of the operator with a devastating caveat through idiotic interpretation.

If you give a toddler who can otherwise not operate a chainsaw -- for the simple reason that they don't have the strength to start it using the starter rope -- access to a robot who will turn on the chainsaw for them on command, you've created a problem which didn't exist before.

I can already see the change. What I need to know is why, not how exactly. It should be clear from a commit message why a change was made. If it's not, that problem should be addressed during review. I shouldn't have to watch a recap of your conversation with a virtual idiot to understand your commit. If the tools you use to generate code can't be coaxed into producing that level of quality, or if you don't understand the output of your generative tools to the extent that you can describe for someone else why they made a particular change, you have a tooling and competency problem.

If further tooling can solve these problems, then I'm all for it, but the idea here seems to be to not solve that problem, but to burden anyone interrogating the history of a repository with also scrolling through chat histories so that virtual idiots can keep shitting out low-quality changes and so that operators can keep accepting those changes as-is without thinking too much about why.

I guess it doesn't help that tools like GitHub don't really care about commit messages. You can't even comment directly on commit messages during review.

So you didn't just let an AI go nuts with access to the source code of Git so as to produce a derivative work?

It's sharing this advantage with every other free, third party managed communication service I can choose to depend on. It's also sharing the weakness that it puts me at the mercy of whatever third party I am relying on. It introduces a new weakness in that the third party being relied on here never intended for their infrastructure to be used in this way.

> If I need to run databases, message brokers, servers and monitoring just to send my mom “please cook macaroni”, I’ve already lost interest.

So don't. To that end, what specific problem does this address that other free third party communication service providers don't? My mother will have seen my email or SMS before you have instructed your mother on how to join GitHub and get an API token. We don't even need to agree on or stick to a provider.

To that end, requiring the use of GitHub for your application to work is a dead end.

"Macaroni Messenger is a distributed messaging system"

No.

"The backend does not exist."

Unless by "backend" you mean the underlying infrastructure and server logic you've made the clients depend on for the exchange of messages to happen.

Discussion is of course a kind of social interaction. You've posted this, which discusses a topic that is only tangentially related to the news item if at all. You can talk about framing all you want, but it ultimately is what it is: spontaneous social interaction between users on the kind of winding paths "unsupervised" discussions naturally take.

I'd be surprised if half of people supposedly discussing the "news to be discussed" have RTFA. That doesn't stop interesting discussion on a wide range of topics from happening here.

It's not "social in the same way", but Twitter and Facebook aren't "social in the same way" either.