What does “my code...for my clients” mean (is it yours or theirs)? If it’s theirs let them house it and delegate access to you. If they want to risk it being, ahem...borrowed, that’s their business decision to make.

If it’s yours, you can host it yourself and maintain privacy, but the long tail risk of maintaining it is not as trivial as it seems on the surface. You need to have backups, encrypted, at different locations, geographically distant, so either you need physical security, or you’re using the cloud and need monitoring and alerting, and then need something to monitor the monitor.

It’s like life. Freedom means freedom from tyranny, not freedom from obligation. Choosing a community or living solo in the wilderness both come with different obligations. You can pay taxes (and hope you’re not getting screwed, too much), or you can fight off bears yourself, etc.

It will just decay until it’s a short squeeze into oligarchy or worse (the corrupt will be forced into an arms race of accelerating corruption as opportunity becomes scarce). Then some other country who isn’t leaving it up to their society to do the right thing will be in charge. Until the same happens to them.

This is the value of religion historically, one of the few ways of coercing a population into doing the right thing for their own good. But every group can be spoiled or hijacked by a small handful of bad actors who are willing to do what others are not.

But also you’re right that even a pretty good (but not perfect) predictor doesn’t change the scenario.

What I find interesting is to change the amounts. If the open box has $0.01 instead of $1000, you’re not thinking ”at least I got something”, and you just one-box.

But if both boxes contain equal amounts, or you swap the amounts in each box, two-boxing is always better.

All that to say, the idea that the right strategy here is to ”be the kind of person who one-boxes” isn’t a universe virtue. If the amounts change, the virtues change.

So, never.

Greg Kroah-Hartman was once asked by his boss, ”when will Linux be done?” and he said, ”when people stop making new hardware”, that even today, when we assume the hardware won’t lie, much of the work in maintaining Linux is around hardware bugs.

So even at the lowest levels of software development, you can’t know the bugs you’re going to have until you partially solve the problem and find out that this combination of hardware and drivers produces an error, and you only find that out because someone with that combination tried it. There is no way to prevent that by “make better spec”.

But that’s always been true. Basically it’s the 3-body-problem. On the spectrum of simple-complicated-complex, you can calculate the future state of a system if it’s simple, or “only complicated” (sometimes), but you literally cannot know the future state of complex systems without simulating them, running each step and finding out.

And it gets worse. Software ranges from simple to complicated to complex. But it exists within a complex hardware environment, and also within a complex business environment where people change and interest rates change and motives change from month to month.

There is no “correct spec”.

I love Streamlit and mermaid, but if these are the shining examples this isn’t a good sign. These have hard ceilings and there’s only so much you can work around the model of “rerun the entire Python script every time the page changes”.

As long as humans are involved the UI will matter. Maybe the importance is not on the end-user facing UI, and maybe it’s more on the backend SRE-level observability UI that gives insight into whether the wheels are still on the bus, but it will matter.

Some people are getting the AI to handle that too, and like all demos, that will work until it doesn’t. I’m sure NASA or someone can engineer it well enough to work, but it’s always going to be a tradeoff: how fast you can go depends more on the magnitude of the crash you can survive, than the top speed someone achieves once and lives to tell about it.

Faster than what? You will be faster than your previous self, just like all of your competitors. Where’s the net gain here? Even if you somehow managed to capture more value for yourself, you’ve stopped providing value to 5-10x that many employees who are no longer employed.

When costs approach zero on a large scale, margins do not increase. Low costs = you’re not paying anyone = your competitors aren’t paying anyone = your customers no longer have money = your revenue follows your costs straight to zero.

Companies that provide physical services can’t scale without hiring. A one-man “crew” isn’t putting a roof on a data center.

I want to be wrong. Tell me why you think any of this is wrong.

    

      

        Because Tailwind is so low-level, it never encourages you to design the same site twice. Some of your favorite sites are built with Tailwind, and you probably had no idea.
      
    

You’re right about DRY and code reuse very often being a premiere (wrong) abstraction, which is usually more of a problem than a few copy/pastes, because premature wrong abstractions become entrenched and harder to displace.

The power doesn’t stay on solely from people with keyboards and phones.

Yes. Docs it produces are generally very generic, like it could be the docs for anything, with project-specifics sprinkled in, and pieces that are definitely incorrect about how the code works.

> for some stuff we have to trust LLMs to be correct 99% of the time

No. We don’t.

This sounds like never. Most businesses are still shuffling paper and couldn’t give you the requirements for a CRUD app if their lives depended on it.

You’re right, in theory, but it’s like saying you could predict the future if you could just model the universe in perfect detail. But it’s not possible, even in theory.

If you can fully describe what you need to the degree ambiguity is removed, you’ve already built the thing.

If you can’t fully describe the thing, like some general “make more profit” or “lower costs”, you’re in paper clip maximizer territory.

Take a couple screenshots of your legacy app, write a short paragraph describing it, and the web tool will give you a self-contained HTML file that’s a fully interactive mock-up.

But it’s still a mock-up. So software dev in general will be fine, it will evolve. But unless the AI companies run out of money and it turns out the $20/mo plan actually costs $1000/mo without VC subsidies, Figma is cooked.

- Workflowy is great for taking notes in meetings, allowing ad-hoc moving things around. It’s also great for reference material (what was that long command SQL query I use). But yes it’s also a graveyard.

- AirTable worked somewhat to keep moving projects forward, without growing unbounded. But only when there is a workflow. That looks like: dump tasks into rows, then create the steps as views of those tasks with different filters. So tasks essentially move systematically from uncategorized, no time estimate, no schedule, to getting tagged with all of that, and then I can narrow it down to see just what’s on the agenda for today’s date. I also have it show the sum of estimated time per date, because I inevitably end up scheduling 30 hours of tasks for a day, so that helps keep me honest on what’s achievable. I did the same thing in Workflowy with custom JavaScript but AirTable seemed more effective for this. Tasks also get linked to project buckets, and I basically then just try to keep every bucket moving forward (don’t let any active bucket get starved).

- I could throw all of this into an LLM and have it tell me what I should be working on, remind me about what I’m forgetting, and so on. But I’m basically not interested, because I’d have to give it additional context that would be beyond what I’m interested or allowed to share. Like, I’ll ask a generic question for advice to an LLM but if an LLM is going to remind me to ”call Robert about Project Mayhem, then it needs to know about Robert and Project Mayhem.

Do they block the front camera? I’ve only seen one case that even attempted to block it, and it was kind of flimsy and would uncover the front camera when you took it out of your pocket.

Plus you can’t block the front camera very well without impacting facial recognition.

(puts on tin-foil hat) and you’ll notice that all new models only support facial recognition and no longer offer fingerprint unlock.

Documentation is insufficient for protection.

Stuxnet happened, despite correct documentation of Siemens PLCs.