Don’t trust internet strangers to weigh in on this. Talk to a therapist or someone you trust to thoroughly consider the details that you haven’t (and shouldn’t) share here. Without the details, we’re just guessing, but even then a single post-and-reply exchange is not a good substitute for a full IRL conversation.

Here’s the thing… code is much closer to doing group therapy than it is to flipping burgers. The final produced artifact is somewhat less important than converging on the tiny itty-bitty details of how to collaborate on the journey of getting there. This is especially true for open source projects.

Spending time trying to understand the perspective of a chatbot-managed contributor is a waste of time. You’re not going to be able to build a community around having a good developer experience for doing XYZ if half of the people weighing in on “how to do that” are not developers who are directly experiencing the thing they’re poking at.

Edit: Also, on testing specifically… this is something I see teams get wrong all the time. The real value of a test suite is not from making sure your system works correctly, but from making sure it’s easy to inspect how your system works. If it’s hard to write or modify tests, that’s an indication that you’ve got some unwieldy abstractions floating around. LLMs don’t care about whether the friction of test-writing is increasing.

Except that code is generally made of… other code. And generally gets transformed from some kind of source form to some kind of deployment form. And then executed by some kind of runtime, made of code. On some kind of OS, made of code.

The level of abstraction at which you make paper by hand is pretty much constant. The level of abstraction at which you make even a “hello world” program by hand is extremely flexible.

Depending on your operating environment, even an incredibly complex and impressive task may just be a matter of passing the right flag to a CLI tool that you already use.

Being attentive to the manual experience of how a codebase “feels” is pretty important for making sure a system has a coherent (read: not over-engineered) approach to bridging the high and low levels of the tasks it performs.

Not paying attention to that, because you can delegate it to a chatbot, is kind of like forgoing having light switches in a room because you can just keep a crane parked outside and have it slam a lighting fixture through the ceiling when you need it and then dump a mound of dirt to cover the hole when you don’t need it.

Like, that functions and accomplishes the task in a pinch, but you do not want to try occupying that room in person at any point to do any kind of detail work.

In order to be effective at software engineering, you must be familiar with the problem space, and this requires thinking and wrestling with the problem. You can’t truly know the pain of using an API by just reading its documentation or implementation. You have to use it to experience it. The act of writing code, despite being slower, was a way for me to wrestle with the problem space, a way for me to find out that my initial ideas didn’t work, a way for thinking. Vibe coding interfered with that.

If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.

– Leslie Lamport

Yep. This what I don’t get about people who are using these spaghetti-bots. How do they figure out the right solution to a problem without actually walking around the whole perimeter of the problem?

My guess is they are not, and they’re just waiting until someone complains and they’ll get a job somewhere else and leave the mess for someone else(‘s chatbot) to clean up.

Between that and the death of open source, our industry is about to become a disaster area.

The “dark forest” internet is in full swing

I mourn it too, because there are dumbasses like this who are buying the hype and setting the industry back by decades as a result.

If hardware cost/availability is an issue, there are a few hardware simulators out there. Wokwi (ESP32 sim) is free for personal open-source use.

I’ll let someone much smarter than me speak to this:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM&t=4420

Exclusive, luxury

Just waiting for another xz utils situation

Hey there, cutter.

If you’re really after the deconstruction aspect, then I’m not sure there’s a whole lot out there. But if you zoom out to the level of “methodically tinkering with a system that requires careful attention”, there’s a lot of those.

Hardship Breakspacer is part of a (pseudo-)genre known as “dad games”.

• Powerwash Sim
• Viscera Cleanup Detail
• Goblin Cleanup
• Pacific Drive
• Papers Please
• Quarantine Zone
• House Flipper 2
• Star Trucker
• Dredge

On the “hardcore nerd” end of the spectrum, there’s even:

• Satisfactory
• Factorio
• Scrap Mechanic
• Any Zachtronics game

A little more chill:

• Unpacking
• Potion Craft
• Please Fix The Road

Edit: Or for the “scraping my way through out in space” vibe, but less tinkering:

• Endless Sky (free and open source!)
• FTL

Edit 2: Also, repair is probably an applicable theme:

• ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs
• Car Mechanic Simulator
• Space Mechanic Simulator

Pleads for asylum for a persecuted refugee

DHS: “And I took that personally”

The horrible names of these things…

o4-mini, not to be confused with 4o-mini

And 4o, not to be confused with 4 (aka 4.0 or v4, but 4V is different)

The loot boxes require skill? How?

Found this study, but no mention of skill influencing the outcome of opening a loot box.

Ehh, x86 SoC consoles will always have an advantage vs x86 SoC PCs, because PCs need to treat iGPUs as PCIe peripherals rather than co-processors, which has significant performance penalties and a low ceiling due to bottlenecked heat dissipation.

The Steam Frame should get you worried about x86 consoles, because if devs start publishing native ARM builds for desktop then this whole accidental iGPU performance moat goes away.

Buuut it should also get you excited about ARM consoles.

Star Ocean

Kinda more like:

I dig it. Wishlisted.

I have a rare disease where I can only buy Steam games that are on sale, but the next time that happens I’m all over it.

X axis: % of public support a measure

Y axis: % of legislators who support a measure

AI has ruined the rhetorical technique of “this isn’t just <basic neutral descriptor> — it’s <related descriptor with specific connotation>”