> I'm not defending the blog post as a great way to build the biggest bestest community. Clearly it isn't.
This has been everyone's point the entire time. You agree with everyone here. No one is suggesting a binding contract exists, but a _social_ contract does exist -- and you concede that with the above recognition of how clearly this post violates it.
I mean you’re not wrong, the only power his community has is to vote with their feet, and that’s what will happen. We’ve seen it before in other languages where the BDFL had an unchecked ego problem. Others brought up Elm and Evan and I agree. We all saw how that turned out.
To be precise, they said “the kind of contributors you attract with this kind of writing are just assholes” not “the community is only assholes” and also not “anyone who associates with him is an asshole". You’re strawmanning.
I think if one is going to call someone else's code slop, it's up to one to a) define the term because it's meaningless and b) to actually give at least one example. Not idiomatic or exemplary is one thing, but as I understand it, slop means that no care was put into creating it.
> you won't make the attempt to engage with it with any other frame of mind?
I told you, I engaged with it with the frame of mind that the author is a role model to me. My conclusion having read the words was that this was an intentional snipe.
People are calling this honest, but I consider it deeply dishonest to make the litany of personal attacks that he did while trying to pretend "I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred".
Either Andrew isn't being honest with his audience, or he's not honest with himself. We can leave that as the most charitable framing. Either way it's just not true.
> you view it the same as the worst living human
I didn't say that. I only make the comparison in that they are both emotionally driven to say rude and mean things when they feel attacked.
Professional criticism of code: This code is sloppy, here is a citation to the line, a reason it is bad to write that way, and how it could be made less sloppy.
Personal attack: this person writes sloppy code, and is bad for it.
I think he’s being completely sincere in this attempt to assassinate this person’s character. I say this as someone who before this day regarded Kelley as a role model. Now I see him in the same category as a Musk like character. Don’t blame “unmasked neurodivergence” for this, plenty of neurodivergent people can communicate effectively and professionally to a wide audience without attacking someone’s professional character.
For example, given the number of claims made here there’s very little actual evidence and support. Kelley says Jared is a bad manager and credits rumors. He says he writes slop code and doesn’t provide a single example or prove that statement. If this were his “neurodivergence” coming through I’d expect more thorough argument and less “stinky manager” grade school insults.
> Those people talked to each other. Everybody talked to everybody. The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.
There’s a big gap between corpo speak and “stinky manager”. That’s nowhere close to professional writing. And he’s not giving us his personal opinion, Kelley is telling us the conclusion of the “grape vine” - he’s reporting on rumors and gossip, and agreeing with it.
Right I think the correct term is “character assassination”. It starts by calling him a novice, goes on to call him a “stinky manager”, and then lands the deepest cut possible in this profession: his code sucks. At least Kelley thanked him for his money.
This is not refreshing, I usually expect better from Kelley. The best move would have been to say nothing at all except “best of luck, Zig will miss him but”. Now all Ziglings must wonder if they’re going to receive a hit piece from the Zig founder if they cross him.
> You're the one holding him to a standard that it be "truly life changing" when that was never what he was addressing in his comment.
Then maybe he shouldn't have quoted a portion asking for "truly life changing examples that can't be done without AI" with examples that are not lifechanging, and then concede that yes, his job can still be done without AI.
No one argues that AI provides marginal benefits and makes some people's tasks more efficient. But people are noticing that leaders of AI companies have promised everything from "universal high income" to "universal basic compute" and none of that is really happening.
Meanwhile, the big negatives are here now -- job losses, pay cuts, data centers taking over land, poisoning water, and straining electricity grids. If we're going to put up with those downsides, it's reasonable for people to ask where the truly lifechanging upsides are (the whole point of TFA and this entire Hacker News thread), and "I don't have to debug my PRs anymore" is decidedly not that.
The original intent of TFA was "Show me something truly life changing" (emphasis mine). "No longer look at log files, or look up implementation details, or don't try to debug" are marginal improvements to already existing processes, not truly life changing. It's just more of the same but more efficient.
The point is that with this AI technology, we're putting up with a lot of shit -- everything is getting worse across the board -- on the promise of incredible upsides, so where are they? "I'm X% better at my job" is not seriously responsive to "Show me something truly life changing." That kind of technological progress is routine, so why do we have to put up with all the shit for routine technical progress we could get in any number of other ways that don't enshittify everything.
I dunno if it’s exclusively his innovation, but Zuckerberg’s insight was that you could actually lie to your users by presenting yourself as trustworthy, while having malicious intent to violate their privacy by selling their data to advertisers, and there are no business repercussions for doing so.
The only introspection will be along the lines of “we should have moved faster and broken more things”; because of (1) and (2), it can’t progress to the level of “maybe we were completely wrong in a fundamental sense”, because they just don’t perceive human minds outside of their own (they really do view us as NPCs).
This has been everyone's point the entire time. You agree with everyone here. No one is suggesting a binding contract exists, but a _social_ contract does exist -- and you concede that with the above recognition of how clearly this post violates it.