I was 7 years old

I get that it's not going to work as well as hosted/subscription services like Claude/Gemini/Codex/..., but sometimes those aren't an option

As an industry, we've been preaching the benefits of running lots of small experiments to see what works vs what doesn't, try out different approaches to implementing features, and so on. Pre-AI, lots of these ideas never got implemented because they'd take too much time for no definitive benefit.

You might spend hours thinking up cool/interesting ideas, but not have the time available to try them out.

Now, I can quickly kick off a coding agent to try out any hare-brained ideas I might come up with. The cost of doing so is very low (in terms of time and $$$), so I get to try out far more and weirder approaches than before when the costs were higher. If those ideas don't play out, fine, but I have a good enough success rate with left-field ideas to make it far more justifiable than before.

Also, it makes playing around with one-person projects a lot practical. Like most people with partner & kids, my down time is pretty precious, and tends to come in small chunks that are largely unplannable. For example, last night I spent 10 minutes waiting in a drive-through queue - that gave me about 8 minutes to kick off the next chunk of my one-person project development via my phone, review the results, then kick off the next chunk of development. Absolutely useful to me personally, whereas last year I would've simply sat there annoyed waiting to be serviced.

I know some people have an "outsourcing Lego" type mentality when it comes to AI coding - it's like buying a cool Lego kit, then watching someone else assemble it for you, removing 99% of the enjoyment in the process. I get that, but I prefer to think of it in terms of being able to achieve orders of magnitude more in the time I have available, at close to zero extra cost.

I work in a space where I get to build and optimise AI tools for my own and my team's use pretty much daily. As such I focus mainly on AI'ing the crap out of boring & time-consuming stuff that doesn't interest any of us any more, and luckily enough there's a whole lot of low hanging fruit in that space where AI is a genuine time, cost and sanity saver.

However any activity that requires directed conscious thought and decision making where the end state isn't clearly definable up front tends to be really difficult for AI. So much of that work relies on a level of intuition and knowledge that is very hard to explain to a layman - let alone eidetic idiots like most AIs.

One example is trying to get AI to identify security IT incidents in real time and take proactive action. Skilled practitioners can fairly easily use AI to detect anomalous events in near real time, but getting AI to take the next step to work out which combinations of "anomalous" activities equate to "likely security incident" is much harder. A reasonably competent human can usually do that relatively quickly, but often can't explain how they do it.

Working out what action is appropriate once the "likely security incident" has been identified is another task that a reasonably competent human can do, but where AIs are hopeless. In most cases, a competent human is WAAAY better at identifying a reasonable way forward based on insufficient knowledge. In those cases, a good decision made quickly is preferable to a perfect decision made slowly, and humans understand this fairly intuitively.

I started coding in the 70s, loved it then, still love it now and LOVING the emergence of Gen AI tools.

For perspective, the IT industry went through a similar change with the emergence of search engines ~30 years ago. At that time, a big part of the value of a software "expert" was in their ability to remember and recall lots of info (most of it of dubious value, to be fair). These experts usually had shelves of well-thumbed books on all sorts of topics, and could recall obscure info from these books seemingly at will. With the emergence of AskJeeves, AltaVista and eventually Google, suddenly nobody needed to remember anything OR even know where to find it - with a simple search, you could get nearly all the info you needed.

I can still remember the panicked response to this brutal change from the senior IT people I worked with at the time...

Did the demand for skilled developers dry up? No

Nor did it end with

- introduction of COBOL (designed so that non-coders could write code),

- PCs (surely leading to the end of systems programming as a career),

- spreadsheets (so accountants no longer needed programmers),

- 4GLs (designed to greatly simplify coding; report writing in particular),

- Visual BASIC (so the world would no longer need C programmers; anyone could learn to write BASIC),

- Microsoft SQL Server (nobody would need mainframe databases any more, so all those mainframe jobs would disappear)

- object oriented coding (all those code reuse possibilities! Very quickly programming should devolve to just glueing together other peoples' code),

- open source (because inevitably any tool of value would soon have a competitor that was free, destroying the value proposition of companies that wrote software to sell),

- Linux (how could Windows compete with free? Shed a tear for all those soon-to-be-unemployed Windows experts)

- NoSQL (because the need for "legacy" databases like Oracle, DB2, Postgres, MySQL etc. would surely go away) - etc., etc., etc.

The reality is that you still need a grounding in software development to do coding well, even with AIs. I'm absolutely loving how quickly I can create solid code with the assistance of Gen AI - lots of tasks that used to take me a week I can now knock over in a few hours.

I also notice how many people are struggling with how to use Gen AI tools for coding tasks - my take is there's 2 distinct skills you need: knowledge of how to do software development well, and knowledge of how to use Gen AI tools for coding. Having the first doesn't automatically lead to the 2nd - you have to put in the time to learn about Gen AI, THEN work out how to fit Gen AI tools around your current workflow, THEN work out how to optimise the way you work with your new idiot savant buddy that has perfect recall.

That whole process (new tool appears -> learn about it -> work out how to fit it into my current workflow -> optimise my workflow) has basically been my entire career in a nutshell.

People have been predicting the demise of programmers for my entire career (40+ years now), and so far they've been wrong every time. For each new disruption that appears, the key has been to embrace it and adapt how you work accordingly.

Gen AI may indeed be different and kill off all programming careers overnight, but so far I'm not seeing it

I think this is the problem that should be addressed.

Musicians went through a similar process in reverse order: first Napster ("piracy") then streaming services (analogous to Kindle/Amazon, where a huge 3rd party inserts themselves between content creator & consumer). Eventually some musicians twigged that they were getting screwed every way, so they set up ways for fans to pay them directly or via a less money-hungry intermediary (e.g. Bandcamp).

Not a perfect solution by any means, but if book authors feel their situation is bad enough, they could look into how musicians are dealing with it.

I'm probably not alone in thinking I'd far rather pay an author directly than Amazon or book publishers.

"Bookcamp", anyone?

While I've done more than enough Powerpoint presentations telling clients what they already knew but didn't want to say out loud, there are some circumstances where bringing in a consultancy is a very good option.

Some examples:

As a software/cloud/data/AI/cyber guy (I wore a few different hats over the years...), I regularly caught up with buddies working in legal, tax, audit, retail, space travel(!!) etc. for coffee chats. It's surprising how often those of us who specialise in one domain had breakthrough moments from offhand chats with specialists in other domains. Very few people get the opportunity to have these sorts of conversations, and it's amazing how often you learn something relevant for your own work situation over a quick coffee.

When I needed expertise in one of those domains into one of my projects, I could send a message and almost always get someone on a call within a few hours. Very few organisations could get e.g. a high-ranking ex-NASA official on a call quickly to pick their brains, but I could.

Lots of times organisations don't have the deep expertise and/or available people to deliver on their internal projects. When a major rail transport provider needs to work out how to going to deal with new government critical infrastructure regulations for their IT systems, it's consultancies who can pull all the right skills together to help them out.

When there's a critical shortage of available IT skills in the marketplace, companies use consultancies to top up their workforce. Here in Australia, there were nowhere near enough GCP experts to go around for the last 4-5 years, so companies could either try to hire the very few people around at exorbitant rates, or tap a consultancy for resources.

Big 4 consultancies in particular throw high-quality training at their technical staff like nowhere else I've seen. One reason: quality training = billable hours. I had people around me burn out from too much training, and I'm pretty sure regular companies don't have that problem. For all the pointless Powerpoint presentations we did, there's a sh1tload of technical expertise sitting in Big 4 consultancies, waiting to be tapped.

Companies are always struggling with how to use the latest IT shiny tools properly. Right now it's AI - how can I use it to save costs or increase productivity? What are the ethical and legal implications that come with AI, and how can we deal with them? How can we deploy AI solutions securely? Which of our business problems are the best fit for AI solutions? How do we train our ops staff to keep these AI solutions running? - the list goes on and on.

Now a lot of people here in HN know how to do these things, but how does a regular business tap into that expertise and filter out the bullshitters? The answer is they go to a consultancy that (they feel) they can hold accountable.

On that point, sometimes execs in a company simply need someone to shield them from blame for unpopular decisions like mass layoffs. It's pretty well know that consultancies do a lot of that type of work, and they (justifiably or otherwise) cop a lot of crap over it so some exec can say "I didn't do it".

I'm probably coming across as a huge fanboy of consultancies, but remember - I'm an ex Big 4 guy. I think their influence is too large, particularly in government policy making; I've encountered way more sociopaths in Big 4 leadership roles for it to be down to chance; by any measure staff turnover and burn out is very high, and I'm convinced that's by design.

However, they have their place.

Not a 100% fit, but https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005009196849357.html is pretty close. It's not offline, and it's slightly larger than a ping pong ball.

My grandkids (5 and 3) spent about 2 minutes learning how to use it, then bombarded it with "tell me a story about a unicorn named Bob", "can dogs be friends with monkeys?" and so on. In every case it gave a reasonable answer within a few seconds.

I'll be amazed if these things don't wind up embedded inside toys by Xmas. When they do, I'll be in the queue to buy one

In the short term I'll keep using OpenAI, Llama, Claude and Perplexity for what each does best. In the mid term, I'm looking for replacements for all 4

At first glance I questioned your choice of bash over something like Python, but you're right - bash is everywhere and every competent Linux admin knows how to use it. There's a zillion unprotected Linux servers out there where this would be very handy.

In terms of next steps, it might be worth documenting more about the notification framework and some simple examples of how we might use it. I can see you've mentioned integrations with email, Slack and webhooks in the tech paper, but I can't spot anything about how to use them

Congratulations on a really worthy project

The Melbourne city council has started petitioning the government to force govt employees to return to the CBD for work. Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels, which means employees need to start coming into the CBD more often. Apparently this is getting serious consideration.

It's not like we home-based workers stopped going out to buy lunch on workdays. We still go to the local shops most days for coffee and food; as those shops aren't paying CBD-type rents, their food and coffee is generally cheaper and/or better quality, the service is friendlier and the local school kids have a lot more job opportunities. The past 4 years has seen a real community feel spring up around where I live, whereas before it was just another dormitory suburb where nearly all the workers disappeared during the day.

From my perspective, we moved from pre-COVID, in-office work arrangements to post-COVID, remote arrangements, and that genii is now out of the bottle. We've all conclusively proved we can be productive working from home, and any attempt to roll that back is going to hit resistance in one form or another. It's gonna take a recession where the supply of workers exceeds the demand for everyone to come back into the office each day, and even then I don't think it'll stick long term.

3 months on: I love this little thing and carry it everywhere. Although it's just slightly smaller than my Pixel 8 Pro, it feels close to weightless. It's small and light enough that I can just drop it in a pocket and head out for the day, then pull it out and read when I'm e.g. waiting in a supermarket queue. I find it hard to imagine a better form factor for reading in these types of ad-hoc situations that come up several times a day.

Battery life is fine - given how I use it, I drop it on a charger for a few minutes each day and it never goes flat. No idea how many days the battery would last if I didn't do that, but I don't use it the same way as I use my 7" ebook reader so it's not a concern.

Similarly although it's notionally an Android tablet, I don't think it would work as a replacement for a typical tablet or phone. FWIW, I currently have 700+ apps installed on my Pixel 8 Pro, and just 6 on the Moaan Plus: - F-Droid (essentially a replacement for the Google Play store) - KOReader, which meets all my reading needs in combination with Calibre on laptop and Wallabag - Koofr, so I can access all my ebooks whenever I can sync via an Internet connection - Markor, for capturing notes in Markdown - DuckDuckGo, because eventually I'll need a browser at some point - Simple Keyboard, to replace the supplied Chinese keyboard app which is useless to me

Downsides of the device: - it's Android 11, which may or may not be a concern for you (given how I use it, it's not a concern for me) - no Google Play, so you're going to have to install software from somewhere else. F-Droid is a pretty good substitute, but doesn't have all the apps you might want. The big one missing for me is Zotero, which I'd love to have on this device - no fingerprint or facial recognition, which would concern me if this thing didn't live in my pocket 99% of the time

Upsides: - it's small enough that you can carry it with you anywhere, and close to weightless compared to a phone. If you're someone who reads a lot, this can be a game changer as you can carry a bunch of books in just about any situation - it's about half the price of a Boox Palma - 2Gb RAM and 64Gb of storage, more than enough for ebooks - fast enough - eInk screen, which is way easier on the eyes than reading on a LCD screen - limited set of features, which means I'm not tempted to install more apps on it to try to make it do more than I need

These days, with nationalism and populism rampant across the world, I think we need a solution where no one country (or country's leader) can simply decide to turn off critical infrastructure for the rest of the world and/or hold the rest of the world to ransom. Then you run into questions of "do we really want (insert bad country) to be able to expose IOT source code to their evil hackers?".

This is a really difficult problem to solve, but ultimately I think ownership of the "keys" to unlock escrowed code needs to reside with (winging it here...) a body such as IEEE or ISO. Or possibly something like a global council where e.g. any 5 countries out of 7 can collaborate via a sharing of keys to release source code, but no one country is able to do so.

I work at Deloitte. Every time I chat with my counterparts in Tax, Audit, Wealth, ... I come up with ideas that may or may not be worth pursuing further. After that, it's just a matter of seeking out vicious rejection of all the bad ideas, till you land on one where the best objection is "well, we just don't do things that way around here".

There's also just being the guy in the right place at the right time, and being open to learning new stuff. I ran into a guy ~20 years ago who'd found a niche in building software emulators for ATMs. He didn't have a coding background, but after asking lots of questions of his buddies who worked in banking and taking a few night classes on Visual Basic coding he'd built a multi-million dollar business on his own to fill a gap that almost nobody knew existed. Thousands of better coders working in banking could've done what he did, but none thought to even look at the opportunity that was staring them in the face

I work for several different organisations that use Slack. Every time I start working at one, I turn off notifications and mark myself as busy or away, then jump onto Slack at logical intervals during the day to respond. Within a day or so, I have people asking if I'm OK, then when I explain, I get told that there's an expectation that "people should be always accessible via Slack" (generally a mealy-mouthed version of that, but the message is clear).

To me, Slack is like sitting in the desk next to the only coffee machine in a large office - constant interruptions and zero chance to get into a flow state.

When I focus on building a really flaky version of a thing as quickly as possible, then I quickly land on all the edge cases and more-complex-than-I-thought areas I need to deal with.

Sometimes I can refactor my flaky code to deal with those, but more often than not it's easier and faster to just throw it away and start again with my new-and-improved knowledge of what needs to be done.

The challenge is then (a) working out how far to go down the quick-but-flaky path before starting over, (b) working out whether to keep sections of that flaky code or rewrite it, and (c) trying to not get scrum masters over-excited that I built a barely-working thing in 1 day when the working-well thing is still a week away