Tagged: ai

Your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture.

[…] The math only works if the LLM decreases your maintenance costs, and by exactly the inverse of the rate it adds code. If you double your output and your cost of maintaining that output, two times two means you’ve quadrupled your maintenance costs. If you double your output and hold your maintenance costs steady, two times one means you’ve still doubled your maintenance costs.

No matter how rapidly technology changes, I am coalescing around some core beliefs:

1. Things that are worth doing are worth doing well.
2. Things that are done well require time and effort.
3. You make meaning through the doing.
4. Ideas are common; effort is not.
5. There are no shortcuts.

Just watched the latest Whiskey Web and Whatnot episode with Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert. No one would’ve guessed that I was watching a web dev podcast from how much I was laughing.

At one point in the episode Adam mentions, “holy crap, my job is now leftover tokens in a burn window”. If Adam can feel like AI is making his work redundant then what hope do I have? 🙈

• Good software depends on judgment, communication, and clear abstraction. AI has amplified this.
• AI coding is automation of implementation, so design and stewardship become more important.

When I consume AI art, it also evokes a feeling. Good, bad, neutral—whatever. Until I find out that it’s AI art. Then I feel deflated, grossed out, and maybe a little bit bored.

Jim Nielsen on the personal connections formed on the internet.

You could search the world and find someone who saw what you see, felt what you feel, went through what you’re going through.

And how these connections are increasingly being lost when we prompt an impersonal LLM instead.