> Garg acknowledges he’s “hard-nosed” and the famous Zoom layoffs severely damaged the company’s reputation — a mistake he knows will continue to haunt him.
I really hope Garg is here reading this. It’s not just a mistake that will continue to haunt him, it’s all he’s ever going to be. It’s how he was introduced in this headline. It’s how he’ll be referred to when he starts his next venture. If newspapers publish his obituary someday, it’ll be in the first few sentences explaining why anyone knows his name.
Wondering why he's taking the heat out of literally everyone else, it's not like layoffs were rare to begin with and that this is the last poor bastard we will ever know to be responsible.
I'm asking because here everyone seems to be making a big deal out of this particular case. But it's hardly anything new. If you wanna make a comment on the person responsible or turn of events that leads here you gotta zoom out a little. It's the whole goddam system that allows this.
Is someone remembered only for being shitty "new"?
> It's the whole goddam system that allows this.
It allows me and others the same things and yet we don't do them. This idea that you have to talk about everything at once first is just absolving individual doers of specific deeds, not to mention the idea that anyone would have stolen from a blind beggar, we need to heal blindness first etc.
It sounds more cultured when you talk about "incentives" and even "incentive structures", but sometimes it really isn't more than "why was she wearing a short skirt in the bad part of town?"
I'm surprised, is all. Mass layoffs are going on for a couple years. I couldn't figure out why it is only making noise now? It's possible I wasn't paying attention before. I only heard from people who were laid off themselves and were pissed off, all the while everyone else were acting like it's how things are done, get over it.
I think I expected a harder backlash than any of this, it does work surprisingly well with large companies. That must cause them to avoid overhiring or risk their entire reputation if they dare to consider mass layoffs, not a readily available option that they can play whenever they want.
Then more power to you! It's interesting that what I read as "downplaying it" was just your genuine frustration based on actually caring, I assumed too much.
And you're right, and of course scapegoating a guy isn't the solution, or a really great way forward. At first I wanted to add "it can't hurt", but it actually can, when it's really just projecting all the frustration that should be aimed at making bigger changes at the person we happen to know by name.
But it's of course hard to tell when that is the case, when the anger at an individual case takes away from the other, I mean. I don't think it can be generally assumed, maybe by really hating the guts of this particular person, a few people end up getting introduced to (more of) politics and economics in that otherwise wouldn't have? Different people have different learning styles ^^
I noticed that the framing you subconsciously leave out because it's clear as day in your own mind (eg mass layoffs are freaking insane) will change the entire message you are trying to communicate and you won't be able to get it across without taking some (potentially) undeserved punches, but punches nonetheless. Doesn't always work because you can never fully anticipate what either side is assuming to begin with.
I think, generally speaking, the decision to enforce a linter in CI/CD pipelines is well within a project lead’s or technical director’s purview, and there seems to be a pretty broad consensus that they add value, so they’ll almost always be in CI/CD pipelines. So just use the same linter locally and format on save so you catch any issues like your comment getting folded example.
I think you should just focus on the road because most of us are just trying to get home safely to our families. Some of us are even biking beside the road on a lightly-protected bike lane.
I think you need to give some concrete examples, considering the US happily let its companies offshore a lot of work to China over the years, and Chinese funds own large chunks of American companies.
* We continue to embargo Cuba instead of letting it succeed or fail on its own merits - while also controlling their own land for a Black Ops prison and having attempted repeatedly to assassinate their leaders or create coups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...
* Our centralization of global finance and status as a reserve currency lets us dictate global policy on everything from Intellectual Property to National Defense, meaning companies generally have to "play ball" or the host country will incur penalties
I can go on, but really, Wikipedia is right there. If you're looking for a specific analogue to "we kidnapped CEOs and demanded a foreign company unwind their merger", I don't think I can provide that right away; however, if instead you're looking for examples of "country used threats and force to foment an outcome favorable to its domestic policies", well then, boy howdy are there tons and tons of examples out there just a cursory search away.
You basically just parroted a bunch of Howard Zinn agitprop and didn't cite a single example that was remotely similar to this specific incident, because you literally can't. What exactly is your motivation here, because it's certainly not truth-seeking.
Since you think Cuba and China are such nice places, perhaps try living there. You'll quickly find out about their "merits" (such as the fact that they execute dissidents).
it'd be nice if one of these environment labs made an environment for cross-architecture porting, it'd be really cool to see some old ppc mac programs running natively, or compiled to wasm (yes, yes I know the visual elements would need to be ported as well)
And even then - I still read the code it generates, and if I see a better way of doing something I just step in, write a partial solution, and then sketch out how the complete solution should work.
i could be wrong, but i'm pretty sure that end-users get upset when a change takes a long time or it ends up breaking something for them.
just because people are finding that agents or whatever are speeding changes up now doesn't necessarily mean they won't encounter a slow-down later when the codebase becomes an un-maintainable mess. technical debt is always a thing, even with machines doing the work (the agent/machine still has to parse a codebase to make changes).
What makes you think that AI couldn’t make the same changes without breaking it whether you modify the code or not? And you do have automated unit tests don’t you?
Right now I have a 5000 line monolithic vibe coded internal website that is at most going to be used by 3 people. It mixes Python, inline CSS and Javasript with the API. I haven’t looked at a line of code. My IAM permissions for the Lambda runtime has limited permissions (meaning the code can’t do anything that the permissions won’t allow it to). I used AWS Cognito for authorization and validated the security of the endpoints and I validated the permissions of the database user.
Neither Claude nor Codex have any issues adding pages, features and API endpoints without breaking changes.
By definition, coding agents are the worse they will be right now.
i have a rule of thumb based on past experience. circa 10k per developer involved, reducing as the codebase size increases.
> 5000 line
so that's currently half a developer according to my rule of thumb.
what happens when that gets to 20,000 lines...? that's over the line in my experience for a human who was the person who wrote it. it takes longer to make changes. change that are made increasingly go out in a more and more broken state. etc. etc. more and more tests have to be written for each change to try and stop it going out in a broken state. more work needs to be done for a feature with equal complexity compared to when we started, because now the rest of the codebase is what adds complexity to us making changes. etc. etc. and that gets worse the more we add.
these agent things have a tendency and propensity to add more code, rather than adding the most maintainable code. it's why people have to review and edit the majority of generated code features beyond CRUD webapp functionality (or similar boilerplate). so, given time and more features, 5k --> 10k --> 20k --> ... too much for a single human being if the agent tools are no longer available.
so let's take it to a bit of a hyperbolic conclusion ... what about agents and a 5,000,000 line codebase...? do you think these agents will take the same amount of time to make a change in a codebase of that size versus 5,000 lines? how much more expensive do you think it could get to run the agents at that size? how about increases in error rate when making changes? how many extra tests need to be added for each feature to ensure zero breakage?
do you see my point?
(fyi: the 5 million LoC is a thought experiment to get you to critically think about the problem technical debt related to agents as codebase size increases, i'm not saying your website's code will get that big)
(also, sorry i basically wrote most of this over the 20 minutes or so since i first posted... my adhd is killing me today)
20K lines of code is well within the context window of any modern LLM. But just like no person tries to understand everything and keep the entire context in their brain, neither do modern LLMs.
Also documentation in the form of MD files becomes important to explain the why and the methodology.
Generally speaking, I try to ensure that the LLM is using core abstractions throughout the codebase in a consistent manner. This makes it easier for me to review any changes it makes.
Sort of a devils advocate question. If you write and review your tests and the functional and non functional requirements
and the human tests for usability pass, why does the code matter?
Non functional requirements: performance, security, reliability, logging etc?
This line of thought is honestly a bit silly - uv is just a package manager that actually does its job for resolving dependencies. You’re talking about a completely orthogonal problem.
> uv is just a package manager that actually does its job for resolving dependencies.
Pip resolves dependencies just fine. It just also lets you try to build the environment incrementally (which is actually useful, especially for people who aren't "developers" on a "project"), and is slow (for a lot of reasons).
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