Alternatively, if they could reassign that 50% of their headcount to bring Mountain Lion or Mavericks to the working state (updating cryptographic stacks, patching vulnerabilities) and just don't... touch... the... UI?

And I wouldn't write this article 3 months ago. Since then the quality of the output jumped significantly, it is now possible to put the agent into a proper harness (plan/edit/review/test) and the output is good — and if it's not, you discard it and try again, or point out a detail for the next cycle of improvements.

Yes, this requires a lot of forethought to set up, but it works.

I'm not talking only about "web things", I'm working on a project that involves engineering calculations and a lot of optimization of hot paths, both CPU and GPU.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46932797

Points: 50

# Comments: 77

My faviourite configuration pattern for SaaS code: all the configuration for all targets, from local development setup, to unit tests, to CI throwaway deployments, to production is in a single Go package. The current environment is selected by a single environment variable.

Need something else configured beyond your code? Write Go code to emit configs for the current environment, in "gen-config some-tool && some-tool" stanza.

Linux caught Kent when he tried to sneak in non-bugfixes into a RC, and berated him.

After that (not before, this is a critical distinction) Kent said "I don't want to abide by the rules, because I have my concerns".

This is very similar to the situation I have described, except that in Linux it was Linus who was skipping reviews on Kent's code trusting him not to subvert the rules, and in situation I described the team collectively was trusting each other not to subvert the rules.

Except one person.

I have had a similar experience with a team member who was quietly unhappy about a rule. Instead of raising a discussion about the rule (like the rest of the team members did) he tried to quietly ignore it in his work, usually via requesting reviews from less stringent reviewers.

As a result, after a while I started documenting every single instance of his sneaky rule-breakage, sending every instance straight to his manager, and the person was out pretty soon.

In the company I work for we use real PostgreSQL in unit tests — it's cheap to start one at the beginning of a suite, load the schema and go, and then shut it down and discard its file store.

I keep thinking of moving that file store to tmpfs when run on Linux, but it's nowhere near the top of the performance improvements for the test suite.

So: no more mocks or subsitute databases with their tiny inconsistencies.

Cray 1 was released 1975, teletypes were old tech at that time.

For me switching the career, after spending more than 20 years in this as well... is very hard. I spent all my career outside of high-pay places like SV telling myself "I have all the time in the world, I don't need to grab most amount of money as soon as possible", so retiring is not an option.

So, switch to what? Any well-paid profession is going to be under pressure to be LLMized as much as possible.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41175792

Points: 1

# Comments: 0