Owning code is getting more and more expensive.

SWEs sacrificed their jobs so that SREs could have unlimited job security.

We're starting to see engineers running into bugs and roadblocks feed input into AI and not only root causing the problem, but suggesting and implementing the fix and taking it into review.

My point is that SWEs are living on a prayer that AI will be perched on a knifes edge where there is still be some amount of technical work to make our profession sustainable and from what I'm seeing that's not going to be the case. It won't happen overnight, but I doubt my kids will ever even think about a computer science degree or doing what I did for work.

The irony is that I haven't seen AI have nearly as large of an impact anywhere else. We truly have automated ourselves out of work, people are just catching up with that fact and the people that just wanted to make money from software can now finally stop pretending that "passion" for "the craft" was every really part of their motivating calculus.

Being able to write simple expressions to filter email, mass delete, and avoid embedded javascript are killer features. I can run all html through w3m and still have nicely rendered emails.

I still use a phone app for on the go browsing, but during work hours I have mutt open alongside neovim all day long.

The beauty of XDP is that it's all eBPF. Completely customizable by injecting policy where it's needed and native to the kernel.

In the non XDP case (ebpf on TC) you have to allocate a sk buff and initialize it. This is very expensive, there's tons of accounting in the struct itself, and components that track every sk buff. Then there are the various CPU bound routing layers.

Overall the network core of Linux is very efficient. The actual page pool buffer isn't copied until the user reads data. But there's a million features the stack needs to support, and all of these cost efficiency.

You can't compare the efficiency of the frameworks without talking about the specific setups on the host. The major advantage of XDP is that it is completely baked into the kernel. All you need to do is bring your eBPF program and attach it. DPDK requires a great deal of setup and user space libraries to work.

The only instances I've seen so far are from developers who are really, really bad at coding, but, under the false delusion of the Dunning-Kruger effect, believe they're generating reams of "high quality" code.

Unfortunately this isn't like isn't a rare occurrence at all.

For the early MIT hackers, and for many of us still today, it absolutely is.

It's also not about the input mechanisms, which have changed over the years. Solving problems, turning complexity into simplicity, cool hacks, that's what the hacker ethos is about. It's not about driving "value".

I suppose you also feel that there's no value in learning a musical instrument either.