Tootfinder

“The barrier to creating software has genuinely dropped. That is not hype. What it means for professional engineers is not that their skills are less valuable, but that the skills that matter have shifted up the stack, as they have in every previous transition.
The developers who thrived after the move from assembly to C were not the ones who could write the most clever assembly. They were the ones who understood what the machine needed to do and could express that intent clearly in a higher-level language. The developers who thrived after the move to managed languages and frameworks were not the ones most resistant to garbage collection. They were the ones who saw the freed-up cognitive capacity as an opportunity to solve harder problems.
The developers who will thrive in the agentic era are the ones who understand this as another step in the same arc and invest accordingly. Not in resisting the tools. Not in deferring to them uncritically. In developing the judgment, clarity, and systems thinking that make the tools maximally effective.
That means writing better specs. Investing in test infrastructure. Developing genuine architectural understanding rather than surface familiarity. Building the taste to evaluate output rigorously. Practicing problem decomposition until it becomes second nature.
The era of programming as primarily a keystroke activity is over. The era of programming as primarily a thinking and judgment activity has been accelerating for decades and just shifted into a higher gear.”
#AITransition
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https://addyosmani.com/blog/factory-model/

In summary then, it is indeed quite like being at school. Half hour lessons on things that probably won't ever actually be useful to know in your particular job of varying levels of interest. Mostly pretty low interest honestly. Bumping into colleagues between lessons.
Learned the names of a couple of tools I might try. One google search would have gotten me those but I guess it's a question of thinking to look for them.
If you can judge the mood of an industry from a random selection of talks from a single conference then the industry is very optimistic that they can make AI write a lot of software.
It seems to think this is likely to mean fewer programmers rather than there being more software meaning more workers.
It wasn't as AI heavy as I thought when I first glanced at the program. Managed to mostly be not-ai I think.
Nobody talking about the ethical implications or suggesting joining a union and only one talk about the environment issue at all, it not really noting how much power the industry is about to take.
Liked having a few meals in amserdam with colleagues I never usually see (mostly remote workers, including me). The boss is pretty good at picking people really.
Get a day or so of holiday now too.
#devWorld

So I look through my pile of 8" floppies for @… thinking I'll have a few random ones to send him, and I find a motherload of Perq floppies!
#retrocomputing

Fascists, cryptobros, young men who play tons of video games and have very little ethical thinking skill and frame everything as a competition to be won, seasoned software engineers, accelerationists, business guys, Business Guy Grifters, hyper-neoliberal technocrats, wannabe software engineers, kids who dream of creating video games, product designers who want to prototype things, capitalist hangers-on and investmentbros who are looking for the next gamble for their money, Chinese tech company employees, third world techies who use these tools to be able to play at the rich countries tech industry table, edgy young men who want to “decensor" everything including open models, tech enthusiasts who want to try every new thing.
And very, _very_ few women. And very, very few experts.

Honest curiosity: are current interviews for software development positions asking candidates to use AI to solve the problems?
If not familiar with tools, then the candidate will now face three challenges: solving the problem, explaining the line of thinking, and using the tools to display the work.

How is there no space for people in the humanities who actually work with *and* interrogate AI? not knee-jerk condemnation and not fanboy acceptance, but using the tools and thinking through their consequences. so strange.