Is it? I'm no expert, by any stretch, but where does this theory come from?

I don't think anyone knows what consciousness is, or why we appear to have it, or even if we do have it. I don't even know that you're conscious. I could be the only conscious being in the universe and the rest of you are just zombies, with all the right external outputs to fool me, but no actual consciousness.

This part of your comment has slipped through but is very worrying for me. I _think_ we're passing the point now where programmers are accepting that LLMs writing code are the real deal. Lots of antagonism along the way, but the reality is these things are good, and getting better all the time.

What this means in reality, in my opinion, is that if you're an independent programmer, or smaller company trying to compete with others to earn a living, you're almost certainly going to have to use coding agents, which means your competitiveness in the market is going to be gated by the big model providers until we have more options. If you somehow get banned from a few of them, which seems like it can happen through no fault of your own, you're going to be seriously negatively impacted.

That's quite worrying having gatekeepers to our industry where it was previously in our own hands.

Missing socks (and containers or their lids) are still great unsolved problems in 2026. Solving this issue is like fusion, always 10 years away.

"Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act"

In the company I work for, there is a team that has isolated itself to some extent from other teams and works at a furious pace to keep their particular section of the business happy. We're lucky enough that they spun up their own repo to do their work on, so they don't actually impact other teams, but if the quality of the commit messages is anything to go by, I am 100% certain they're going to end up in a huge mess, if they aren't already. The team lead encourages this, and certainly doesn't care about commit messages etc.

Developers who care about other developers tend to write better quality code, because they care what other developers think of them. If you care about other developers, you will most likely write decent quality commit messages too.

I have seen over many years the types of developers who only care about moving their own code into production as fast as possible and getting to the next thing. There is a very high correlation with a mess at the end, which they inevitably won't have to tidy up because they'll be doing the next thing. These types of developers hate owning stuff in production, so they don't do it, so they don't actually care how maintainable their "clever" code is. I am very certain that a number of people reading this will be those types of developers.

How is that an EU problem? Without the EU, like here in the UK, we had non-elected lobbyists pressuring our elected government to implement age checks, message scanning, etc. And it is still continuing.

You're fighting the wrong fight by blaming the EU for this.

People don't want you to look deeper. They want you only have the most shallow understanding, because that allows them to manipulate more easily.

They're just like the civil service in the UK, or any other country. They do the bidding of our nationally elected governments. Nearly all proposals coming from the commission originate from the national governments.

So a law:

Starts with member states directly elected ministers pushing and agenda or the council (again elected) agreeing to push an agenda -> Commissioners take this agenda and work with it to propose law (using EU civil service like any other country does) -> The law then gets voted on by the EU directly elected ministers, who are meant to (and do) represent the people of the states more directly.

Everything in that step is as democratic as any other nation (or nearly).

Most people really don't understand the EU - and yes, it is confusing. This unfortunately makes it easy for certain interests to weaponise this misunderstanding. I've spent years (and years) explaining these concepts, but ultimately like any other argument, this is not a debate from logic, everyone has already made up their minds on emotion or ideology and nothing will make a difference.

So a law:

Starts with member states directly elected ministers pushing and agenda or the council (again elected) agreeing to push an agenda -> Commissioners take this agenda and work with it to propose law (using EU civil service like any other country does) -> The law then gets voted on by the EU directly elected ministers, who are meant to (and do) represent the people of the states more directly.

Everything in that step is as democratic as any other nation (or nearly).

Most people really don't understand the EU - and yes, it is confusing. This unfortunately makes it easy for certain interests to weaponise this misunderstanding. I've spent years (and years) explaining these concepts, but ultimately like any other argument, this is not a debate from logic, everyone has already made up their minds on emotion or ideology and nothing will make a difference.

You might not consider this productive, but they do, so what you think literally doesn't matter to them.

Coding agents work. At some point you're going to not just look contrarian, you're going to look like a troll to keep denying it.

You may not like it, that's a perfectly valid take, but to deny they're good at coding at this point is silly.

What's this?

I think this all stems from you objecting to this statement:

"I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique."

I think you're being uncharitable in how you interpret that. Human's are unique in the most literal reading of this sentence, we don't have anything else like humans. But the context is the ability to reason and people denying that a machine is reasoning, even though it looks like reasoning.

Obviously not. Insulting to programmers who use them, hence I object to the term "brain-rot". Clearly the insinuation is we're just suffering from brain rot.

"but whom's English"

This is really insulting. I think you're wrong, AI agent programming is very good now, and you will have to admit it at some point.

You should definitely go in to the office!

But why make everyone return? We're all workers, shouldn't we stick up for each other? A huge number of people, including me, way prefer to work remotely most of the week, for all the reasons you're already aware of.

It seems to me that we should all be looking to make workers lives better, rather than worse. I whole heartedly support your choice to work in the office or remotely.