code

When everything becomes relative to AI

I have to be honest: I feel I’m taking crazy pills recently.

There were a growing number of posts, in the past, praising AI for coding; then, it started to grow, and grow, and now, on LinkedIn, almost all the posts that come to me are about AI and coding, how good they are, how the “game has changed”, etc, etc, etc.

But here’s the catch: every bad practice that we fought against, over and over, for literal decades is now being praised because “AI is doing it”.

Every. Little. Thing.

From the most obvious to the less, against all good judgment, against academic research that shows that AI usage decreases contribution between coworkers, or that they make programmers slower while they think they are faster, that the code quality is lower, or that it makes people work longer hours, it seems that all rules are off when it comes to AI.
(more…)

By Maurício Szabo, ago

I have to be honest: I feel I’m taking crazy pills recently.

There were a growing number of posts, in the past, praising AI for coding; then, it started to grow, and grow, and now, on LinkedIn, almost all the posts that come to me are about AI and coding, how good they are, how the “game has changed”, etc, etc, etc.

But here’s the catch: every bad practice that we fought against, over and over, for literal decades is now being praised because “AI is doing it”.

Every. Little. Thing.

From the most obvious to the less, against all good judgment, against academic research that shows that AI usage decreases contribution between coworkers, or that they make programmers slower while they think they are faster, that the code quality is lower, or that it makes people work longer hours, it seems that all rules are off when it comes to AI.
(more…)

By Maurício Szabo, ago

The path to mediocrity and gatekeeping

So, I left GitHub. Thankfully so. Only at my work, and because I’m working on Atom, I keep code on that service.

For a while GitHub was degrading into a service that I felt I was not the target client anymore. In the beginning, GitHub felt like a social network for nerds – a place where we could share code, make pull requests, make the code talk instead of other things. Forking was not a bad thing anymore, because we could track who forked, what they were working on, and how to contribute or get their changes in any time.

Now, GitHub feels more like a enterprise thing where things are bureaucratic and you can’t trust anyone. A place filled over the top with telemetry, where you and your code are the product (regardless of which license you choose for your code) and where you must add “rules” for everything otherwise you’ll be bothered over and over again.

I’m referring to the new “please protect you branches” and “add requirements to merge PRs” popups, obviously.
(more…)

By Maurício Szabo, ago