I like to think of myself as pretty well-versed when it comes to hardware and software and even some RF. But this conversation has me hitting search a lot, lol. It's fascinating reading experts talk about a domain I have less experience in.
Showing its age is also a pretty significant plus, for such a critical part of one's infrastructure. That means it's been beat up on and run through the ringer for a decade plus at this point and had lots of chances to fix CVEs and other bugs. Not to say there won't be more, but being older and time-proven for an IdP is a major positive.
I hope/wonder if it will go the way computers did. We may learn to more effectively build RAM or parallel compute, and use it more effectively, in the coming decade in such a way that we can democratize more and more like we did with processors to the point that they're ubiquitous.
I would call it clever. I'm not sure I'd call it genius.
When I'm working with data I'm working in a specific set of languages. Usually one. Yeah, other people might be working in other languages, but no individual author really needs a language-agnostic way of accessing data beyond compile time. Add to that the likely runtime boundaries that may need to be crossed instead of e.g. inlined by the compiler because it's in-language and dealing with known offsets or tags (depends on the data format of course). To the other commenter's point, am I going to have to sandbox all data access code just to be sure it's not able to do something unexpected? There's a lot of complexity here. And the inherent risk is going to slow down the operation that should be the simplest and fastest: interpreting bytes.
Not to mention how many features that used to work have been summarily broken with no indication on whether we'll ever get them back, due to the wholesale replacement of previous functions with LLM-driven functions.
I can't even press the "favorite" button for my google photos on my google home device any more. It just says "I don't have access to photos" whether I use the button or voice (both of which obviously used to work).
Because I work across a dozen repos any given week, and I have my own side projects I play with as well. It blurs together. Global git hooks are another data source for the project, which I'd forgotten to add, so that data is in there too.
It's a user daemon that runs on my machine and exposes a unix socket, and then a bunch of hooks in claude, zsh, vim, etc, that report directory and commands I've run and all that, pipes it to claude Haiku for summary, and then stores context in sqlite. It also exposes that data as MCP so I can use claude to say "hey what was I doing yesterday," or any arbitrary time range.
I find that in the age of using AI agents, "Wtf was I working on yesterday" is an even harder thing to remember for me, so this helps me kind of track everything with a database that a) has AI summaries already and b) can be accessed by AI as well as a CLI.
Or they can move to NY "full time", if I'm understanding correctly, which will likely also improve the city's tax revenue from more of that person's expenses incurring city taxes.
I have ADHD and have done quite a bit of reading and study on it, so I'm pretty familiar with how dopamine and dopamine disorders work. I've also been in the workforce as a software engineer long enough to have done some really hard things. So my life and career have both been plenty challenging lol.
And I'm not alone here. Like I said, I was discussing this with a bunch of friends who are also quite senior and accomplished in their engineering careers, and the sentiment was familiar for us all.
I was talking to some friends about this over drinks the other day. I feel it has the same effects as any drug (or behavior) that triggers dopamine. If I can get a dopamine hit for lower effort AI in 10 minutes, and maybe a tiny bit better of a hit doing it myself after a day, why would my brain go for anything but AI? Especially when my DIY muscles are a bit atrophied.
And of course the hedonic treadmill (if that's even valid any more, IDK) has reset the baseline so that anything less than the quick gratification feels like nothing. It makes the stuff I used to absolutely love feel like more of a chore compared to just cranking out features with code only an AI can love.
I'm on board with your gut that this feels more YOLO than careful but to be fair, in the engineering world fly by wire is very much precedented. I'm specifically thinking of the B2 bomber where it's essentially unflyable without a computer between the inputs and the outputs. Partially just keeping the plane from turning into a frisbee by reacting faster than a human possibly could, but also treating the controls inputs as the intent and manipulating the control surfaces programmatically in order to make that work. It's not quite the same thing of course but I think there's some carryover.
Still. Not a huge fan of this announcement or the general ways the landscape is evolving these days.
One thing you and the OP are not addressing is that most of these modern tactics are also necessitated by the fact that building an air force, navy, or cavalry that can beat modern superpowers is just a complete non-starter.
I'm not so sure the F-35 is built for the wrong war as much as the war would probably call for the F-35 if it didn't already exist.
You know, that's also true. I am where I am because I'm stubborn AF and just keep hacking on things until they work. Maybe one of the biggest differences is just ego, lol.
Honestly I feel sometimes like about the only thing they do successfully is hacking. Not just in the sense of breaking into systems that are assumed to be secure although also in that sense. They're just, highly effective at fumbling around with a hatchet until something works. We just happen to have version control and automated testing that generally makes that approach somewhat viable for the task of programming. But while I've been genuinely impressed at how much it can put features into a workable state, I've never been confident looking at its output that it's going to do more than POC quality at the current state of things. But it's pretty dang effective at that given enough time and a space safe to hack away and reset until the product looks close enough.
I mean, it's a post a week. I think that's pretty plausible. The worst part of this era is just not knowing if I'm reading generated output or genuine human thought.
https://github.com/microcumulus