Personally I’m thrilled that I can get trivial, one-off programs developed for a few cents and the cost of a clear written description of the problem. Engaging internal developers or consulting developers to do anything at all is a horrible experience. I would waste weeks on politics, get no guarantees, and waste thousands of dollars and still hear nonsense like, “you want a form input added to a web page? Aw shucks, that’s going to take at least another month” or “we expect to spend a few days a month maintaining a completely static code base” from some clown billing me $200/hr.

My unsolicited advice is I would expect Owner-side administrators (IT people) to direct sales decisions, and they don’t care about users or working products. I have only ever met one CTO in the AEC space who even considered end user benefit. Unfortunately, this means your product quality and utility is not actually important as evidenced by the whole Bentley product line, but integration with existing products is. Nobody seems to make big money in tech for white-collar AEC unless Bentley or Autodesk buy your IP. Then they will crudely bolt it onto their garbage software and their missionaries embedded in large companies disguised as technologists and CAD managers will sell it.

My opinion is con-tech is totally broken for very complicated reasons with the private market (commercial architecture) being the only small voice of sanity since they compete on price sometimes.

I see it as a pay cut where commute and prep hours are uncompensated, and I adjust my valuation of the job accordingly.

Stable and polished are not words that ever came to my mind while using any Microsoft product.

OpenAI is probably already getting dark money for AI products of dubious worth.

I work at a consulting firm, and, trust me, you want state employees doing the absolute minimum amount of work necessary. Ideally, you just have enough people to administer the funds and then all work anyone cares about should be routed to private entities through a competitive process (market discipline for consultants is key here). My experience is that the people at the state are highly likable, but in terms of productivity are close to worthless or are a major obstacle to productive work. I work for a department of transportation where the leadership in the materials division does not actually know what density is or that it is measurable. I would expect someone with good grades in high school to understand this. Every single construction contract for highways has about a 15% overage on crushed rock. The weight to the material is determined by a “50% compaction factor“ and if you’re thinking “that sounds like a made up concept“ you would be correct. This has been happening for years and nobody is allowed to use the correct number because that would embarrass someone with a long tenure. The state Congress needs to liquidate the whole agency.

A doctor can’t give you aspirin without 2+ layers of administration to do the medical coding. I can only guess what bullshit liability insurance and licensure entails.

Knowledge work is usually paid because it isn’t trivial.

“Yes, we have a super secret model, for your eyes only, general. This one is definitely not indistinguishable from everyone else’s model and it doesn’t produce bullshit because we pinky promise. So we need $1T.”

I love LLMs, but OpenAI’s marketing tactics are shameful.

Maybe we will get out of this without having to survive on cat food, but I’m not holding my breath.

I love Cline and Copilot. If you carefully specify your task, provide context for uncommon APIs, and keep the scope limited, then the results are often very good. It’s code completion for whole classes and methods or whole utility scripts for common use cases.

Refactoring to taste may be under specified.

- put a fig leaf over Victoria Nuland’s hubris and ineptitude

- create a political football

- make a productive peace with Russia impossible for another century

Who knows. Victory is not a goal. I don’t think it’s possible if it were.