LLMs are great at producing plausible BS. If your job involves creating plausible BS, then it could be done much faster by "AI". As a low-level programmer, I am much less concerned :-)
It's the very reason why I don't get this brutal attempt to replace developers with AI. I would have considered a more reasonable approach to use it for things were "chatting" is the main skill.
I wonder if this is less about the environmental impact (which can be greenwashed as necessary), and more about the power consumption of individual data centres.
Well datacenters ARE rated by their power usage. And then there is a PUE ratio which indicates how much power is to be used by feeding the equipment vs overall usage for supporting equipment (cooling).
Just this week we launched a datacenter hat runs 100% on renewable energy even in case when diesel engines have to turn on and seeking LEED certification: https://delska.com/about/news-resources/delska-newsroom/dels... - the available energy to the DC is always trumpeted in topic. Yeah, we are kind of proud of technical achievements and efficiency achieved.
But we have the luxury as being slightly nordic, not needing to consume water for cooling. And what is not widespread but taking effect is that datacenters are able to give the heat for useful purposes like heating homes. It needs datacenter to be in city and cooperation for gov agencies, but this is the path that is being taken across countries: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/sustainable-data-cen...
Modern datacenters use local power generation that means lots of bad pollution worse than most factories. There is really bad sound pollution from many of them. They are enormous and create barriers where people should be able to move around.
Hmm. I wonder what it would look like if you added the corresponding "minute" labels (eight, five, four, etc) at the appropriate places. It might make it at least a little feasible to read the time!
This part will go away over the next year. You doing it will be too slow, when an agent can do it in 5 to 30 minutes.
Technically it's not needed now, but everything's so new, it's understandable. Everyone's workflow hasn't migrated yet. You should go take a look.
We all mourn the loss of the craft, but the wheel turns. People still make furniture by hand sometimes,
even if most furniture is made in a factory now.
Why hasn't it gone away already? ChatGPT at least has been around for over 3 years.
Why is my AI-first colleage constantly having to get more expensive AI subscriptions approved?
>most furniture is made in a factory now
Terrible analogy. Software is not like a mass-produced item - it is written significantly less often than it is executed!
You could say that AI will allow many more variations of softwares to be written in the same time frame, but I'm still sure I can produce quality output in a competitive time.
Why hasn't it gone away already? ChatGPT at least has been around for over 3 years.
Because the models only got good enough to be trusted in the past few months and the developer tooling and agent abstractions are still rounding off the sharp corners to make it easy to use.
ChatGPT didn't have your whole codebase in context, the ability to automatically pull and push information to JIRA to plan code changes, and the ability to break your problems down into manageable pieces and sub-divide them among a fleet of sub-agents.
Developers didn't yet have the "Ask -> Plan -> Implement -> Review" workflow that results in the best agent-written code.
Now the tools and developers do and it works incredibly well.
>Because the models only got good enough to be trusted in the past few months
They have got noticably worse over the past few months! It looks like we are going in the direction I've been predicting for a while - the cost of AI will increase until it's similar in cost/benefit to hiring a recent graduate, who can also do all of those things you mention (and will get better at it).
Also a lot of software should be small. The only reason they aren’t (especially web) is because the trend is to bring in frameworks instead of using libraries. I spend more times tweaking code than adding features. The time spent on coding is way smaller than the time spent discussing about those tweaks
We all could live in fantastical universes where CEOs tell the truth and shareholders put other things over profits, but that's not the case. Another such case of a fantastical world, that contends with what Tolkien might have come up with, is believing LLMs are reliable, secure, or have any intelligence.
For one, I'm at peace with all these obituaries, like yours. If they're written by technical people, I rest assured of my job security. If they're not written by tech people, I'm at peace too, for time, as always, will come back with the invoice for their piss-poor hype-driven, sanguine mandates on the technical side of things.
I mean to say, it is a sad state, has always been, how informal software engineering compared to other engineering fields.
It is actually true though, I only use tmux nowadays when I am SSHed into a server that I need to do some work on.
The only issues I've had with it is that sometimes it's hot keys conflict with vim, but you can easily turn it temporarily off with ctrl+ g.
If you're already used to tmux I'm not sure you would benefit much from changing, but it definitely has a better out of the box with pane hints, names, and more user friendly hot keys.
Maybe give terminal windows in vim a try? vim is not a terminal multiplexer, but if all you need is multiple terminals windows:
:term to open a terminal in a new vim window (or :vert term)
Standard window movements apply (by default the window prefix is Ctrl-W), most important are: Ctrl-W,{hjkl} to switch between windows, Ctrl-W,{<>+-} to resize windows, Ctrl-W,{HJKL} to move windows to edges, Ctrl-W,{qc} to (force) close windows
Enter normal mode of a terminal buffer with Ctrl-W,N: now you can perform vim motions and scroll the output
Enter insert mode with i and you can type into the terminal again
In insert mode: Ctrl-W "x to paste register x, Ctrl-W . to send a literal Ctrl-W. If too annoying, you can change the window prefix of vim
This goes for vim, neovim also has a terminal mode but it works differently I think
I see everyone complaining about this but as a new tmux user as of a few months ago, I had an LLM assist me with configuring it how I wished and it did a bang-up job. Stuff like using “-“ to split horizontal and “|” to split vertical so you don’t even have to remember it…
Good on you. We were 'one and done'. Two sounds more than 100% more difficult, if only just because the number of edges in the relationship graph going up.
My parents managed four kids, albeit for most of that time there were only 3 living in the home at a time (13 years between the oldest and youngest).
A friend of mine had eleven (!!!) siblings. That horrifies me. Cliques could form in that size population! Utter craziness.
Then what is the point? If what I'm doing can be done by Claude, as operated by someone who "doesn't need to get up to speed", then I really need to look at another career.
A significant source of electricty is generated from waste-to-power plants in the Nordics. Several of those countries import rubbish by the shipload to turn into power.
For that matter, it's probably a net positive to put most plastic "recycling" into such schemes, as we're just turning plastic products into lower and lower grade pieces, with the associated generation of microplastics.
Yes that's the best use of waste (next to not producing the waste in the first place). Also, those powerplants are usually combined type of powerplants which make them highly effective, i.e. they are producing both heat and electricity.
Nordics countries generally need lot of heating because of cold climate, which in cities is typically district heating, i.e. delivering the heat as hot water from big heating plants. Heat pumps are also very popular (air-to-air, air-to-water, geothermal).
For example, my house is entirely heated with 3 heat pumps, even in -25°C. From April to September 10 kW solar panels provide the most of energy, also charging my Tesla.
Combustion with energy recovery is slightly lower down the "Waste hierarchy" than recycling. Nordics get even more bonus points if they use the waste heat for district heating after generating electricity but I think it still comes out as a bit worse than recycling overall.
There's complicated interactions though, removing the plastics can affect the makeup of the fuel and the post combustion products can free recyclable metal from other materials they were combined with. Recycling processes often have an unrecyclable fraction which can be burned etc.
> Nordics get even more bonus points if they use the waste heat for district heating after generating electricity.
Waste -> district heating is definitely happening in Sweden. Probably more so than waste -> electricity. There are better ways to generate electricity and we need heating anyway big part of the season.
And people wonder why I laugh when they say "non-mechanical devices are more reliable." Sure mechanical devices need pieces to stay moving in the same way over and over again, but electronic devices need a huge number of very precisely-placed atoms to not move in any way, including chemically.
There's a question about the right units here. Your CPU performs more operations in its first millisecond* than most mechanical devices do in their entire lifetime. So in per operation units, they are staggeringly reliable.
Actual operating life is often determined by the economic feedback loop which causes manufacturers to cut costs until basically all consumer products have roughly the same expected lifetime, regardless of the potential of the underlying technology.
* Or at least, the first millisecond after it starts using its normal operating clock, which might not be the very first millisecond
> Actual operating life is often determined by the economic feedback loop which causes manufacturers to cut costs until basically all consumer products have roughly the same expected lifetime, regardless of the potential of the underlying technology.
Which is why, despite being a huge BEV proponent, laugh when I hear people say things as "BEV are inherently more reliable due to having no transmission and less moving parts that could break". It might have been true in the early stage, that we're currently at the end of, but we already know that the reliability of a second-hand mid-range ICE car is what market has been bearing for decades, so we can be certain BEVs will be "value-optimized" until they are just as unreliable.
Yes. Cars have fixed cost ranges for people so the end result is pretty much predetermined - electric cars settling at the same price and quality points as ICE cars are today.
You can easily make it more reliable just by making larger features, and then no mechanical thing can even come close to compare to how reliable digital circuits are. There is a reason 40 year old NES consoles still works today, they are very reliable because the circuits are so large. To break those old machines you have to essentially melt them.
I know quite a few people who've had SNESes with failing ICs in recent years (mainly PPU and APU chips). That's pretty annoying because the only way to get replacement parts is from a donor console.
Ok, but how are you going to make a billion mechanical transistors? Even if you could, latency would be limited by the speed of sound in whatever materials you use.
In what context are people saying this? I’ve never heard anyone proclaim that electronic devices are more reliable than mechanical devices. See for example how people desire cars with “no computers”.
Anyone that has had to deal with a carbureted engine, or old school hydraulic ‘computer’ based automatic transmission is never going to extol their reliability or ease of repair.
Those also are doing 1/10th of the work (for things like automatic engine tuning, wear adjustment, on the fly power band adjustment, altitude adjustment, anti-pollution adjustment, etc).
The reason why people complain about modern cars is because computers have made it exceptionally easy to add massive amounts of new (and poorly tested, in many cases) functionality.
And even the equivalent of DRM.
If if you used current tech to implement the old feature set, and spent even a little effort making it open instead of DRM-ish, it could be even simpler and more reliable. But no one is doing that. Because it’s more profitable using it ‘for evil’, as it were.
The problem is not that modern cars are somehow less reliable than old cars. They are much more reliable. But they’re also much less repairable without specialized equipment. You can with somewhat accessible technology repair almost all defects on a purely mechanical car. You cannot do the same for a modern car unless you happen to have a chip fab.
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