I was building a tool to do exploratory data analysis. The data is manufacturing stuff (data from 10s of factories, having low level sensor data, human enrichments, all the way up to pre-agregated OEE performance KPIs). I didn't even have to give it any documentation on how the factories work - it just knew from the data what it was dealing with and it is very accurate to the extent I can evaluate. People who actually know the domain are raving about it.

You can also setup way more elaborate verification systems. Don't just do a static analyis of the code, but actually deploy it and let the LLM hammer at it with all kinds of creative paths. Then let it debug why it's broken. It's relentless at debugging - I've found issues in external tools I normally would've let go (maybe created an issue for), that I can now debug and even propose a fix for, without much effort from my side.

So yeah, I agree that the boring part has become the more important part right now (speccing well and letting it build what you want is pretty much solved), but let's then automate that. Because if anything, that's what I love about this job: I get to automate work, so that my users (often myself) can be lazy and focus on stuff that's more valuable/enjoyable/satisfying.

I notice that I'm even changing my writing style the moment I feel like I'm writing how an AI might write. Doesn't feel good either.

The rest of my time goes to prepping those big features (designing, speccing, talking, thinking, walking).

Going to see how big a feature can be before the quality suffers too much and it becomes unmaintainable. This highly depends on how good I spec it out and how good I orchestrate the agentic workflow.

They haven't branched off into making chips themselves. They keep their focus on selling the factories.

I think they haven't, because ASML itself doesn't have production lines. Every machine is one off. It even gets delivered with a team of engineers to keep it running.

The same probably holds true for software factories: the best ones are assembled by the smartest people (wielding AI in ways most of us don't). They are not in the business to produce software at scale, they are in the business to ensure others can do that using increasingly advanced software factories.

This relies on the premise that such a factory cannot produce a more advanced factory without significant human intervention (e.g. high ingenuity and/or lots of elbow grease). If this doesn't hold true, then we are in for some interesting times x100.

What I believe is going to be interesting is what happens when non-engineers adopt building with agentic AI. Maybe 70 or 80% of their needs will be met without anyone else directly involved. My suspicion is that it will just create more work: making those generated apps work in a trustworthy manner, giving the agents more access to build context and make decisions, turning those one off generated apps into something maintainable, etc.

It's absolutely not a given that the European democracies will survive, people here need to step up in strengthening it against illiberal forces as well, but it's in a much better starting position.

Example: in the Netherlands there was a government with an illiberal far right party (Wilder's PVV). They didn't achieve much, but there was a year of stagnation and the far right talking points have become even more normalized. Other democratic institutions, like judges had to be more on the defense. However, nothing fundamental is broken.

1. https://cpsblog.isr.umich.edu/?p=3417

The poor audio quality can be seen as desired feature btw. It brings a certain lofi or warmth with it.

Tbh, I don't know what the truth is. I'm a Dutch citizen and what is happening now is unheard of. I don't know what the motivation is and it seems to have happened out of the blue. Maybe the motivation literally is protecting the European semiconductor industry.

I seriously doubt it is aimed against China. Europe is not looking for a trade war, especially now that the US is an unpredictable ally (if they still are) and basically the whole geopolitical situation is shifting. China is also not a topic for Dutch politicians, so it's not winning anyone votes.

Python is dynamically typed, which you can patch a bit with type hints, but it's still easy to go to production with incompatible types, leading to panics in prod. It's uncompiled nature also makes it very slow.

SQL is pretty much impossible to unit test, yet often you will end up with logic that you want to test. E.g. to optimize a query.

For SQL I don't have a solution. It's a 50 year old language that lacks a lot of features you would expect. It's also the defacto standard for database access.

For Python I would say that we should start adopting statically typed compiled languages. Rust has polars as dataframe package, but the language itself isn't that easy to pick up. Go is very easy to learn, but has no serious dataframe package, so you end up doing a lot of that work yourself in goroutines. Maybe there are better options out there.

You're still dealing with notebooks. Back then there was a tool to connect your IDE to a Databricks cluster. That got killed, not sure if they have something new.

The inflation did correct itself the years after (aka lower than usual). The perception with many people still is that the euro made everything more expensive, but that's only based on feelings. The inflation numbers tell a different story.

Only problem is that there are no deadlines and it's up to the country to make a plan for adopting the euro.

This has been agreed multiple times, most notably the Paris agreement of 2015, which set deadlines for countries to achieve carbon neutrality.

The plan failed in e.g. the US because politicians didn't follow through. Trump literally withdrew from the Paris agreement.

All but 3 countries in the world participate in the Paris agreement. This includes all big CO2 emitters, like China, US (now withdrawn), India and EU countries.

To me AI is just another tool that helps me solve problems with code. An auto complete on steroids. A context aware stack overflow search. Not wanting to adopt or not even work somewhere where colleagues use it, sounds to me like coding in notepad AND in the process scoffing those who use an IDE.

Besides, if AI gets to the point it can replace you, it will replace you. Better to start learning how to work with it so you can fill whatever gap AI can't.