Going back to code as bunch of carefully arranged ascii chars feels like a regression.

This isn't necessarily anti-AI. Imagine a tool that could quiz you, provide context for decisions, and make sure you're up to date on your knowledge of the codebase - instead of just writing code for you. IOW an AI-based system could intentionally add the right kind of friction to improve understanding.

The evidence against seed oils is not quite as convincing. I see seed oils as a low quality food to be avoided - goes rancid too easily, requires chemical processing, etc. - but it's not strictly poison. These oils are in virtually every industrial "food product" which makes them unhealthy by association. Stop eating highly processed crap and you'll see the benefits - cutting out seed oils is a side effect.

Quite frankly it was embrassing. We've had tools for static analysis for ages. Use them.

Someone with better knowledge could work 100x faster using 100x fewer resources. They did it the slow, expensive way but at least didn't have to think? Odd flex.

This 100x. "Story points" are evil, simply because they can't be measured. The qualitative nature of story points means that planning assumptions are NEVER checked against reality. It's a strong incentive for management to avoid any responsibility; stay "agile", use "story points", and never ever assess your actual performance or velocity.

The worst managers I've seen straight up forbid talking about the story points. Anyone asking for more information or discussion gets shot down; story points are "just an estimate" after all. Then when that lack of information becomes a problem, employees are forbidden from referring back to previous estimates. Even calibrating story points in a relative sense is expressly forbidden. There is no feedback mechansim to correct poor planning. And that's by design; the system protects and shields mediocre managers from accountability, period.

Well put! Now that we have a magic tool that can generate tokens on demand, the quality of the underlying idea gains enormous importance relative to the code. Tokens are cheap. Good ideas are not.

I would like to hope that some people take advantage of this newfound agentic power to create better theories. But there's a sizable population that seems intent on generating more and more code, regardless of quality.

The plant still need solar energy. They still need electricity within the tissues of the organism to survive (ATP and krebs cycle). Humans have always burned organic matter for light.

Not trying to be a pedant but "Light without electricity" falls down when examined from any angle. It's not a serious claim.

GeoJSON is firmly rooted in the "simple features" model of spatial data. Sometimes called the "vector data model", this is ubiquitous in GIS. Each geographic entity (aka "Feature") has a single geometry and many non-geometry attributes. Each feature is independent.

The vector data model (for better or worse) is the basis of many systems because it fits the tabular/relational style so closely. What is a feature but a row in a table plus a special column describing its geometry? Topological relationships are ignored by design.

TopoJSON, ESRI coverages, the internal OpenStreetMap data model, and a few others are notable exceptions. They explicitly handle spatial relationships, at the cost of making the model unintelligible to row-based processing.

One could hope that we'd use these newfound agentic coding powers to actually realize value, improve quality, etc. Instead I see enshittification and stagnation. What are we even doing with all these tokens?

But the flipside is, I see the same gym crowd at the coffee shop next door and we always have a good chat there. Context matters.

Fully agree. I never mentioned velocity or advocated for lower quality. In fact, this statement very well sums up my point: we should care about the thing we're producing, not our personal experience of coding it.

BTW, there's nothing preventing you from using AI agents and staying in the flow state. If you want that, the universe is not stopping you. In fact, not dealing with the minutia of source code may well free us up and allow even greater flow experiences.

But I found myself laughing at the style; just ranting about software like a cartoon villain in his bathrobe. No fucks given.

Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work? Now that coding is automated, we have to elevate our ambitions.

Ironically, Phish's music emerges from egoless expression (to paraphrase keyboardist Page McConnell). Giving up your own personal stake in the process is literally what brings something as beautiful as Phish's music into existence. We need to do the same with our software; give up the notion that "our" code is meaningful.

    claude-local () {
     MODEL=$(curl --silent localhost:1234/api/v1/models | jq 'first(.models[].loaded_instances[].id)') 
     ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:1234 ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN='' claude --model $MODEL
    }

The Story of CO2 taught me something I had never considered. It wasn't exactly that photosynthetic life started pumping out O2 and chilled the planet. Snowball earth happened way later. It was photosynthetic life that got buried in sediment and locked it away from aerobic respiration. The amount of carbon stored in the earth's crust is insane. Fossil fuels are just a minuscule fraction of that.

This has some implications for our current climate: If we want to use biology to sequester carbon (growing trees, algae, etc), it's only a temporary sink unless we lock it away for eons. Once it's eaten/burned, the CO2 is right back in the atmosphere. In short, we gotta physically put it back into the earth's crust if we want to draw down carbon.