Yes, but null pointers are so pervasive in C code that we really can't afford to put assertions everywhere. It's often better to let the app crash on violations.
If I were doing a code review, I would probably accept the code either with or without the assertion. The context of curl_getenv() makes it clear that null is not acceptable. If the author of curl_getenv() had evidence that callers are frequently breaking the contract by passing null, then perhaps the assertion would help shed some light on violators. Otherwise, I would expect everyone to play by the rules, making the assertion unnecessary.
When I tell my coworkers to stop using AI to dress up their words, it's not because I care about human effort. The problem is that my coworkers often start with incorrect assumptions, and AI is good at amplifying bad assumptions and making them sound plausible. I have to spend extra time guessing at what the author originally wrote and then address the partly-hidden original points rather than what the AI generated. Give me your spelling errors, your grammar, your mumbles, your incoherent streams of thought, your doubt and uncertainty. Those things are extremely important, yet your robot obscures them.
Strangely, I've also observed that some customers respond very well to words dressed up by AI, even if the words oversimplify the truth. Now I'm working to understand why they want that. Are my customers not swimming in AI slop like the rest of us?
BTW, this doesn't mean I'm anti-AI. AI coding is an incredible superpower and I use it constantly, but it seems to me that AI coding works because code expresses the minutiae that is rightfully omitted from most other communication.
Sorry to break it to you, but on that timeline, the good things got poisoned. IBM enhanced Lisp with Enterprise Ready features like Spreadsheet Macro Builder, Microsoft took over development of Smalltalk and morphed it into BASIC 2.0, and the HURD community lost a bizarre copyright lawsuit. Fortunately for those folks, an intrepid hacker in the 90s saw some of the interesting ideas in MS-DOS and rebuilt it as LS-DOS. Today, most of their servers and mobile phones run LS-DOS or similar.
Your HN account is too new for me to be sure whether you're being sarcastic or not. Perhaps you know, or perhaps you don't, that all code is machine-translated, even assembly language. None of it is perfect, but it's not garbage. Today's AI merely provides a new level. It's a weird, non-deterministic level, but hiring an employee to write code for you is similarly non-deterministic.
These are also the markers of human journalists who write daily. Journalism is the reason AI acquired these habits. Gemini says this article is probably not generated by AI, particularly because it has original quotes.
I actually agree with this. Product designers and product managers are often essential and sometimes they do up to 99% of the work of figuring out how something should work. To accomplish that, they often do things well outside the role of a software developer. On the other hand, in my experience, only someone with a software development mindset seems to be able to complete the last 1% (or 10%, or whatever) that reveals and resolves certain kinds of logic issues.
Isn't that interesting? The job of exploring a theory or model to such an extent that it can be expressed in computer code always seems to fall on the shoulders of a software developer. Other people can write specifications and requirements all day long, but until a software developer has tackled the problem, the theory probably hasn't been explored well enough yet to express clearly in computer code. It feels like software developers are scientists who study their customers' knowledge domains.
Is that actually true, though? Even though it's not really my job, I find myself debugging certificates and keys at least once a month, and that's after automating as much as possible with certbot and cloud certificates. PKI always seems to demand attention.
This is an amazing resource. It was difficult to appreciate what this resource was for until I tried to create my own boards based on an ESP32. It's not really difficult to build around ESP32, it's just that I don't know what I don't know. With starting points like these, I can start with a lot more confidence. Thank you!
You hinted at an aspect I probably haven't considered enough: The code I'm working on already has many well-established, clean patterns and nearly all of Claude's work builds on those patterns. I would probably have a very different experience otherwise.
I'm either in a minority or a silent majority. Claude Code surpasses all my expectations. When it makes a mistake like over-editing, I explain the mistake, it fixes it, and I ask it to record what it learned in the relevant project-specific skills. It rarely makes that mistake again. When the skill file gets big, I ask Claude to clean and compact it. It does a great job.
It doesn't really make sense economically for me to write software for work anymore. I'm a teacher, architect, and infrastructure maintainer now. I hand over most development to my experienced team of Claude sessions. I review everything, but so does Claude (because Claude writes thorough tests also.) It has no problem handling a large project these days.
I don't mean for this post to be an ad for Claude. (Who knows what Anthropic will do to Claude tomorrow?) I intend for this post to be a question: what am I doing that makes Claude profoundly effective?
Also, I'm never running out of tokens anymore. I really only use the Opus model and I find it very efficient with tokens. Just last week I landed over 150 non-trivial commits, all with Claude's help, and used only 1/3 of the tokens allotted for the week. The most commits I could do before Claude was 25-30 per week.
(Gosh, it's hard to write that without coming across as an ad for Anthropic. Sorry.)
I wonder what the PGP signing concept does to thwart people who want to profit and don't care about the public good. It seems like anyone who attends a signing party can sell their key to the highest bidder, leading to bots and spammers all over again.
Also add a PR reviewer bot. Give it authority to reject the PR, but no authority to merge it. Let the AIs fight until the implementation AI and the reviewer AI come to an agreement. Also limit the number of rounds they're permitted to engage in, to avoid wasting resources. I haven't done this myself, but my naive brain thinks it's probably a good idea.