Making all this (for example) work nicely together can be tricky: Vite, ESLint, Prettier, Typescript and React, especially if it's full stack with SSR.
Although about 98%* of that is because ESLint keeps making breaking changes and getting everything else to work compatibly with ESLint requires 27,573* additional dependencies.
Things I work on have been moving over to Biome recently (mostly these are Vue projects rather than React these days) for formatting and linting and it's so much simpler and avoids all the "What ESLint-related package broke our build process this week?" discussions entirely.
*Some numbers here may be made up. Or they might not.
This is global trade and comparative advantage at work. If someone outside the country can produce an equivalent product to what a local producer would make, they can supply it to our market more efficiently than our local producers, and there are no moral qualms (for example people working under conditions that are unacceptable by our standards) then everyone benefits from the import arrangement except for the local producers who can't compete.
From an economic perspective the local producer then needs to become more efficient and/or produce a better product to remain competitive. Alternatively they can do something else that is a more productive use of their time and skills. Again this is just a free market at work. The economic principle is no different if another local producer opened down the road from the existing local producer and they were the ones making the same product cheaper or a better product for the same price.
Protectionism arguably has a place. For vital interests like national defence there is an argument for making certain things locally so you have complete control because of the security implications and because the normal rules of international trade and diplomacy might not be working properly at the time when you need those products. But even in fields like defence and strategic infrastructure and perhaps the most obvious example of simply putting enough food on everyone's plate to survive there are few if any Western nations that don't rely significantly on international trade.
There is an example I always remember from the Brexit debates here in the UK. The Remain campaigners talked a lot about the advantages of being in the EU's Single Market and Customs Union. (These are the two big economic arrangements in the EU that allow member states to trade freely among themselves without tariffs or non-tariff barriers.) And certainly for intra-EU trade they do offer many economic advantages.
However the cost of being under the protectionist umbrella was much less discussed - surprisingly even by Leave campaigners. All member states are required to apply the common EU-based tariffs to anything coming into their country from outside the union. So when the EU introduced extremely high tariffs to protect the fruit growers in its Mediterranean member states that was good for those growers. But we don't exactly grow a lot of citrus fruit in the UK with our milder northern European climate. We also already had some established trade routes with north African nations that could supply similar products at potentially lower cost and would have liked to increase that trade with us - a mutual benefit for both their suppliers and our consumers that would have cost neither of us anything directly. The EU tariffs made that financially unviable and therefore benefitted some of the southern member states but at the expense of both consumers in the UK (also an EU member state at the time!) and the more efficient suppliers from Africa.
Protectionism is inherently inefficient economically. Sometimes it might be appropriate for other reasons but in purely financial terms it's almost always a negative effect.
I agree that one doesn't preclude the other. But the sky high valuations we've been seeing for the AI industry recently can only be justified if they bring about a fundamental change in our society and those companies continue to bring in the lion's share of the resulting profits. I don't see why everyone else in our society - particularly other large businesses with lots of money to invest - is going to play a game by the AI companies' rules once they can take their ball and go home and still have most of the fun without paying much for it by comparison.
It might have been regulatory capture - though I have seen no specific evidence of that myself. It might simply have been the old story about a road and good intentions. At this point it doesn't really matter how it happened - it would be better if the situation were fixed in any case.
This is why I'm bearish on Anthropic, OpenAI, and friends. I am not confident that we will continue to see the same pace of improvement in frontier model capabilities as we have seen over the past year or two - not using similar mathematics at least. But I think that getting results that are close enough to the same standard to be a realistic substitute but in a model small enough to run locally may well happen quite quickly. And if it does - where is the moat to defend these AI organisations with their astronomical budgets when they're already starting to price more realistically and that's already killing a lot of the hype they've enjoyed until very recently? They have an accidental moat because they bought up the global supply chain for storage but that surely isn't going to last once the data centres to hold that storage are becoming liabilities.
Indeed. It's a triumph of consumer protection laws failing to protect consumers. Merchants here have to set their prices a bit higher to compensate for the fees and you still have to pay those higher prices as a customer even if you're using a more efficient payment method. I will never understand why the law wasn't set the other way - requiring explicit disclosure of payment fees to end customers and prohibiting payment services from incorporating these kinds of anticompetitive terms in merchant agreements - so that everyone could make an informed choice and market pressures would push the transaction overheads down.
That would seem like a logical solution. So wouldn't it be convenient for the expensive payment methods if legalities prevented merchants from charging higher fees to customers using them?
The problem is that the medium term prospects are irrelevant to all the businesses that won't be around long enough to enjoy them.
Smaller businesses in particular - not so long past the COVID disruption and already facing significant challenges in areas like logistics and energy supply costs - will not necessarily have the reserves that older and larger businesses often do to withstand another multi-year price shock.
If you apply those practice, then quickly you find yourself using the agent as merely a writing boost.
I don't know what that means but I have seen no evidence so far that if you don't apply those practices then your code will be anything other than unmanageable spaghetti if you leave AI to maintain it for long.
Coding has never been the bottleneck for good developers. Part of the reason for that is that good developers know how to isolate different aspects of a system and so keep each individual aspect relatively simple and self-contained. Another part is that good developers were already standardising and automating a lot of the grunt work. These traits are also advantageous for keeping generative AI on the right track and keeping its proposed changes manageable.
Your version sounds like it's potentially useful. The thing that winds me up is when the online chat that used to be talking with real support people gets quietly replaced with some LLM-backed noise generator and there's no way to contact real support people any more (possibly because 95% of them were laid off).
If there is one good thing that the generative AI tools have shown beyond any doubt it's that the classic "good programming" practices are still useful and effective. Self-documenting code. Modular design. Clearly defined architecture. Incremental development. Coding standards. Automated tests. Automated everything.
If there's a second thing the generative AI tools have shown beyond any doubt it's that many of the more modern (relatively speaking) "best practices" that have always been over-hyped and questionably-evidenced really do tend to produce worse results. LLMs take these methods to their logical conclusions and show us the end result much sooner. You can't just iterate your way to a solution when you don't even know what problem you're trying to solve. If you don't have a clear spec then you don't know what a correct product looks like. You need to invest time in reviewing code properly. If you don't keep the big picture in mind then the big picture becomes a mess.
Maybe one day the LLMs will leave me out of a job but at least I'll feel validated first!
The big difference IME is that first-tier support at decent companies at least had the grace to recognise when they couldn't help and needed to escalate. I can count the number of times I've seen an AI bot automatically escalate when it was unable to find the solution on zero hands.
I'm not sure FAANG does look good on a CV any more. The skill set to be effective in those environments is quite specialised and crucially it's very different to what you need in a lot of other software development organisations. There appeared to be a happy cycle for a while where very well paid devs working in one of the few FAANG or FAANG-adjacent companies could jump to one of the others because they were "in the club" and had experience of working at a truly global scale that most software never needs. Those days seem to be over with the mass layoffs and hiring limits. And if you're not working at that scale - and outside that small world almost nobody actually is - those skills aren't always very transferrable and other types of experience often have more value.
I am also increasingly worried by the potential for violence here. This is a social experiment that is harming the daily lives of millions of people in very obvious ways already. The environmental costs for the data centres are not insignificant. The economic damage from allowing AI to have so much funny money when it doesn't make much real money to justify it could be disastrous on a generational scale. Governments aren't making any serious attempt to regulate and if anything are drinking the Kool-Aid. We might be on a path that literally collapses the established Western capitalist order within a generation but historically societal change of that scale usually has a body count and I have no idea what comes afterwards.
AI "support" bots that just attempt to read the published documentation for you are possibly the most annoying thing to have come out of the current AI plague.
Even Stripe - once legendary for the quality of its support - has apparently given up now. I had to deal with it recently over a case where the merchant was seeing an unexpected change in the way it was collecting payments and the AI bot was worse than useless - it actively suggested incorrect explanations and resulted in several days of trying to change the wrong things while the problem persisted.
For my own businesses we give this issue a heavy weight when choosing which services to use. We have even seriously considered moving existing integrations to different services over this one issue recently. If we're integrating with a service then we want to know there's a real person who can actually help if we have questions or anything goes wrong. Failing to provide that because it's cheaper to push everyone through the AI bot is a statement of intent about how much you value your customers.
It's not a matter of belief. Signal does not provide a way for me to download my own messages off my own devices and safely store them using my own secure backup facility.
Obviously Signal don't owe me anything. I'm not paying for the product and I appreciate what it does offer and makes available for free. But it would be much better if it also supported local backups under the user's control.
And presumably the instructions for this have been on display on our local planning department in Alpha Centauri? If a user isn't even aware that their local disk is being encrypted without their knowledge or consent then why would they think to set up recovery keys?
The GDS is one of the more credible parts of government IT in the UK and IME generally well respected. The government websites and online services have largely been well done. But there are limits on how much that organisation can take on with the resources it has and it's still subject to the same challenges around compensation and working environment I mentioned in another comment that make it difficult to hire and retain good people. Unfortunately it's not realistic to build all government IT projects in house that way at the moment.
Although about 98%* of that is because ESLint keeps making breaking changes and getting everything else to work compatibly with ESLint requires 27,573* additional dependencies.
Things I work on have been moving over to Biome recently (mostly these are Vue projects rather than React these days) for formatting and linting and it's so much simpler and avoids all the "What ESLint-related package broke our build process this week?" discussions entirely.
*Some numbers here may be made up. Or they might not.