2025 is such old news that this just isn't relevant.
METR already redid the study at a later date and now finds a likely 18% speedup
"For the subset of the original developers who participated in the later study, we now estimate a speedup of -18% with a confidence interval between -38% and +9%" (note their use of - and + here could be slightly confusing but they do mean 18% faster per the post)
Most of the best engineers I know leave faang because the work at faang sucks. It is not orthogonal. The majority of faang work is not highly impactful work like trivially because the amount of work outstrips the amount of interesting work by an easy oom.
FAANG doesn't straightforwardly retain the best technical talent, and the median task there is routine.
> Turns out for most people, there's not much better to do during your 9 to 5 than solving problems for half a million a year.
Lol. I don't know I was talking with a guy yesterday who left a FAANG clearing 1.4 million / yr who's now running his own successful startup. My sample is successful founders backed by top tier VCs or exited founders who have done much better than FAANG. If you can't do more you stick around the FAANG, those who can go and do it.
> I strongly believe that you cannot evaluate how good a system design is if you don't implement it by hand.
Fwiw we both agree that LLMs should not design systems. I do the design, but otherwise I don't get how this is true, the success of a design is indicated by long term success in the system it built. You can measure this against success in the task it was deployed for via performance metrics for one. And then from a developer standpoint how easy it was to maintain later on. Success of a system is a measurement over time, but it's not some quality that can only be measured by those who built it.
> Off-topic but having worked in other companies as well, I can guarantee you that this is not the case. The skill of engineers in FAANGs and other "top tier" companies is much higher than average.
I have first hand knowledge of this so I agree to disagree. Being surrounded by google, aws, and meta folks my understanding is the best people leave faang when they get the itch to do something better with their time.
We love our open source models. GLM 5.2 came out recently and the timeline for closing the gap to closed source shrank to something like 2 weeks by popular measurements.
Edit: Mis remembered the timeline I saw not 2 weeks, 3 months, but still I think my point stands.
Idk man my system design game is better than its ever been because I put in the effort to use these tools and recognize they can't do software design better than I can and because I've increased the scope of what I'm building I often have to think more deeply about the problem up front. A typical speccing sessions lasts a few hours for me on big work before I have AI start writing that work where I'm just going back and forth on what I want, points of consideration for performance, usability, structure etc pushing back on where AI (always) chooses the most naive way it wants to do something.
Every time I see an anecdote like this, A it reaffirms my belief that FAANG devs are fairly mediocre on the whole (not saying this is you, obviously there are good FAANG devs) and B it reaffirms my belief that the developers who kind of give up their thinking like this are really using the tool wrong or didn't really care about the work before AI either so its now just a quick means to an end.
Tool use typically follows this curve. If you want to preserve a skill you have to actually preserve it. This isn't inherently bad by itself, tools enable us to do much more than we can without them and its a point of contention whether or not any skill is inherently important when a tool comes along that does it for us.
As someone who lived in New York for over a decade and grew up in the general area, there is not a single person who would think its normal if you're trying to strike up a conversation on the subway or even really when walking down the street.
The etiquette is to keep to yourself, airpods aren't creating that dynamic. The normal assumption if you don't know the person in most contexts them interacting with you in NYC is they're up to something and that's just normal US city dynamics with > 10 million people on a busy day.
The dynamic changes when you're hanging out in front of your apartment for say a cigarette or something or at a bar or sitting in the park but even then its not wrong to signal you're not open to interaction in those situations its simply more normal to chat with neighbors or other people hanging out.
Most new builds don't even use evaporative cooling afaik, this will probably be closed loop. The implications being you're not risking the local water table and overall consumption is lower, a lot lower.
Everyone is working on personal agents but their identity model is wrong. They act as you, risk your reputation, your data and more. Nym is a personal agent that has (and can make) all of its own accounts and only gets selective read only access to yours.
The goal is to make reliable agents that are able to operate safely in the world to help you do what you want, without exposing your accounts and personal identity to potential harms.
For instance nyms have their own e-mail addresses at nym-mail.com, you can CC them on chains and they can only respond to people on that chain with a lease of 5 days, or permanently for people you specifically add.
Everyone is working on personal agents but their identity model is wrong. They act as you, risk your reputation, your data and more. Nym is a personal agent that has (and can make) all of its own accounts and only gets selective read only access to yours.
The goal is to make reliable agents that are able to operate safely in the world to help you do what you want, without exposing your accounts and personal identity to potential harms.
For instance nyms have their own e-mail addresses at nym-mail.com, you can CC them on chains and they can only respond to people on that chain with a lease of 5 days, or permanently for people you specifically add.
I didn't intend it that way, but I guess I can see it now. The point they made had not crossed my mind (as evidenced by my response of how I usually make projects, it wouldn't have) So to me the OP was complaining about something I saw as what would be a normal process for like a whole bunch of developers working on normal projects.
Frankly I think this is faux outrage now that a lot of people are getting wise to the fact a substantial amount of modern programming is basically simple pipefitting.
It was always true that the amount of people providing the foundations the rest of us do work on was super tiny and that was just kind of accepted as fact at least from my > 11 years in industry and overall 20+ years of programming now. It's only now that the pipefitting may be devalued are people getting in a tizzy.
Now to answer substantially, no frankly unless I'm legally required to I don't credit things. I usually specifically go for licenses that let me do whatever I want. I don't think I've ever credited a library I didn't have to I just use them and make things with them. That's the point of them and no one would raise your point in a pre LLM world imo.
Edit: Like as the point of absurdity no one is thanking the creators of postgres for every project that happens to use postgres. You still made a thing even if you didn't write your database from scratch.
Right and words matter. Valuable is a relative term that asserts a measurable quantity and they're trying to assert something non relative and not measurable.
I don't take issue with their point. Just that we can use a stronger word.
First I'll say the disambiguation of discerning intent as the driver behind whether something is slop or not was very interesting.
But, I'll take one point in their article a step further you can just say "Humans are invaluable." instead.
I don't like defining humans in terms of valuable at all. Maybe because I feel like that word is very concrete and measured and to actually judge that on any one person requires perspective and capabilities none of us existing or have ever existed possess.
The complexity of the sum total of a human life is so great that I think its folly to try measure the value at all. Those who have tried are often reflected in history as the worst among us.
METR already redid the study at a later date and now finds a likely 18% speedup
"For the subset of the original developers who participated in the later study, we now estimate a speedup of -18% with a confidence interval between -38% and +9%" (note their use of - and + here could be slightly confusing but they do mean 18% faster per the post)
https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/