If this is not typical for you, then you are surrounded by people who disrespect you and your time.

Maybe this is a problem at huge companies.

I agree that the two aren't exactly the same, but public transport users have a right to safe, comfortable, unobstructed travel. There's a difference between preventing a class of people from using public transport to travel, vs preventing everyone from using public transport to sleep.

I also note that the case of long distance travel is an exception, because you might legitimately need to sleep at a station between legs. I'm talking about people who sleep in train stations with no intent of travelling anywhere.

I don't think most engineers really disagree with this. Saying code is a liability is technically incorrect but pithy shorthand to communicate that it comes with the associated baggage of maintenance, obligation, and risk; these things suck up money the same way a liability does. Tech debt is also not real debt. It's a figure of speech.

I don't think it's good practice for the interviewer to require the ability to dissemble from software engineers, though.

Trains are transportation infrastructure. Drivers don't have to put up with people setting up a queen bed in the middle of their lane on the highway. If a country doesn't protect its public transport infrastructure, then the rich and the middle class stop taking the train, the poor have to put up with things, and the mentally ill get an overpriced and noisy mobile homeless shelter. One that costs more and helps less than crisis accommodation.

Your link refers to an article which is very American and very 2018. Lots of large font size headings about race and sexuality and gender. I don't think it's a productive take on how to manage the tension. Racially homogenous societies still need to decide how to handle people who try to sleep at train stations and yell at the commuters.

Sending me a message saying "Hi, I'm getting a Frobnizzle not found error" is a waste of both our time. Explain what you're doing so that I can reproduce it, even if it takes a few paragraphs. Maybe send me your user ID so I can check our logs. I don't care if you're declaring "these are the facts" because the facts are what I need to help you.

If it's a massive wall of text with a defensive tone during a discussion, yeah, sure, that's bad. Do you work somewhere where that's common?

The tasks are obviously all of the form "Go do this, and if you get the following output you passed". Setting up a web server apparently takes 15 minutes for a human, which is news to me since I'm able to search for https://gist.github.com/willurd/5720255, find the python one-liner, and copy it within about ten seconds.

Anyway, this is cool but it does not mean Claude can perform any human tasks that take less than 8 hours and are within its physical capabilities.

Abstractions are like the structural elements of a house, security is like plumbing or electrical, but individual features are like carpet and paint. When it's working on the superficial stuff, who cares what it gets wrong? Just go rip up the carpet and do it again if you have to.

You can point to a sector with high GDP, sure. But US tech ascendancy has its roots in DARPA spending around the bay area, which was enabled by US economic and military supremacy, which was in turn driven by the US having a lot of oil and staying out of WW2 and a host of other factors.

I agree with the point that investment vs austerity looks more impactful than the history of DARPA spending, but I just find economic analysis an overwhelming problem to even think about.

Argument B: AI means you don't learn as much, and the single most useful work product of a software engineer is knowing how the code functions, so it's depriving your company of the main benefit of your work. Also, layoffs are terrible business strategy because every lost employee is years of knowledge walking out the door, every new hire is a risk, and red PRs are derisking the business.

Institutional and personal knowledge seem similar, but the implications of each are radically different.

What if one child wraps a skipping rope around another's neck and begins to choke them? Do you expect the adult staff to stand off to the side and do nothing?

Violence as punishment is different, of course.

It also fails to write abstractions unless they're carbon copies of a well established pattern, and when abstractions already exist, it needs babysitting to ensure it will use them appropriately. It won't introspect about its current direction unless forced to by the user or by an error, and when forced it will happily "fix" non-issues just because you pointed them out, since it's a happy little yes-man.

Because of this, code written by a good engineer is more likely to start out broken but converges towards correctness as more abstractions get built, while code written by AI duplicates abstraction layers, leaks between them, and never converges towards anything.