There's a Joel On Software post [1] in the same vein as this, which totally changed the way I think about writing software. You should aim to write software which can be verified locally with the smallest window of context. It's informed a lot of my decisions around linters, static analyzers, assertions, etc. I'm always looking for assertions that narrow state and reduce the number of lines you need to read to verify the correctness.
Rust has definitely caught my eyes a few times here, since most of what I described is manual. Particularly in the embedded space RTIC [2] has some really neat stuff going on. Other languages have good type systems and spatial memory safety, but nothing else seems to have Rust's killer features around concurrency.
> Isolated QA should not exist because anything a QA engineer can do manually can be automated.
I almost entirely agree. You'd certainly want a majority of QA responsibilities to fall to devs since that keeps the feedback loop tight. Also with the amount of compute we have you can trivially outpace a typical QA team with a single dev working on fuzz tests and property based tests. If you really still feel the need to outsource then there are cool tools like Antithesis [1] which let you trade money for compute in their complicated fuzz testing suite.
Where that falls apart imo is when your software interacts with hardware in any non-trivial way. Fuzz testing doesn't really work when your system is spinning big and heavy things for example. Real hardware that interacts with the world will always create this gap where the devs don't know how to fully test it. Your systems engineers are best equipped to handle this and ensure certain controls follow the right curves, but they typically don't have the bandwidth or are very inexperienced with software. I think a QA organization _can_ fill this gap and deliver value. But I'd almost always prefer hiring another 1 or 2 system engineers who can work towards this problem full time instead. It's much easier to train someone in software than it is to train them in motor control or sealed systems.
But they're not willing. And they'll often just cause more damage/loss than they provide in benefit to the company. Even the most benign drug which people claim is fine is one that makes you lazy and slow. Why would you employ someone so addicted to it that they can't abstain for a few weeks?
"Piss tests" filter out a lot of anti-social behavior.
I think it mostly comes down to the standard library guiding you down this path explicitly. The C stdlib is quite outdated and is full of bad design that affects both performance and ergonomics. It certainly doesn't guide you down the path of smart design.
Zig _the language_ barely does any of the heavy lifting on this front. The allocator and io stories are both just stdlib interfaces. Really the language just exists to facilitate the great toolchain and stdlib. From my experience the stdlib seems to make all the right choices, and the only time it doesn't is when the API was quickly created to get things working, but hasn't been revisited since.
A great case study of the stdlib being almost perfect is SinglyLinkedList [1]. Many other languages implement it as a container, but Zig has opted to implement it as an intrusively embedded element. This might confuse a beginner who would expect SinglyLinkedList(T) instead, but it has implications surrounding allocation and it turns out that embedding it gives you a more powerful API. And of course all operations are defined with performance in mind. prepend is given to you since it's cheap, but if you want postpend you have to implement it yourself (it's a one liner, but clearly more expensive to the reader).
Little decisions add up to make the language feel great to use and genuinely impressive for learning new things.
Antithesis talks about some very particular use cases, but they're not the first to explore this. SQLite has something similar in the form of their `testcase` macro. [1]
What's most shocking about their whole website is how it goes to show how unserious the software industry is at large with regards to testing. It's not surprising when a good chunk of the programmers I know are vehemently opposed to "adding too many assertions", let alone something like this.
I don't think it was that strong of an over-generalization. AI doesn't seem to help out in the same way a human would. My teammates will push back and ask for proof of effort (a PR, some typedefs, a diagram, etc.). And sometimes they'll even know how to solve my problem since they have experience with the codebase.
On the other hand you have AI which, out of the box, seems content to go along with anything and will happily write code for me. And I've never seen it have a single insight on the same level as my teammates. All of which is to say, AI doesn't really feel like something you can properly "ask" something. It's especially far away from that when it's just generating code and nothing else.
I think what the article gets at, but doesn't quite deliver on, is similar to this great take from Casey Muratori [1] about how programming with a learning-based mindset means that AI is inherently not useful to you.
I personally find AI code gen most useful for one-off throwaway code where I have zero intent to learn. I imagine this means that the opposite end of the spectrum where learning is maximized is one where the AI doesn't generate any code for me.
I'm sure there are some people for which the "AI-Driven Engineering" approach would be beneficial, but at least for me I find that replacing those AI coding blocks with just writing the code myself is much more enjoyable, and thus more sustainable to actually delivering something at the end.
Type hints seem fantastic for when you're in maintenance mode and want to add sanity back to a system via automated tooling.
However for new projects I find that I'd much rather pick technologies that start me off with a sanity floor which is higher than Python's sanity ceiling. At this point I don't want to touch a dynamically typed language ever again.
Rust has definitely caught my eyes a few times here, since most of what I described is manual. Particularly in the embedded space RTIC [2] has some really neat stuff going on. Other languages have good type systems and spatial memory safety, but nothing else seems to have Rust's killer features around concurrency.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...
[2] https://rtic.rs/2/book/en/