While I managed to avoid it for a long time, using generative AI to drive my day to day work life while resisting the pressure to become a meat proxy, I will admit that since joining an "AI native" startup I have become one. Whenever I'm trying to triage 20 different urgent things all day, every day, the economics of personalizing every message just isn't there anymore. It's not realistic. I do still try to way to filter down every AI-generated message into something digestible, but I feel like I'm in a mutually assured destruction type scenario where I can only survive the tidal wave of slop with more slop. I think we're in uncharted territory here in terms of the kind of workload generative AI can drown you in, especially when it's being used without strong discipline.
I do still think there are still places where being a meat proxy is legitimately okay or even desirable, such as PR comments. If everyone's code is generated by AI, and AI will ultimately be the primary consumer of the PR comments, it seems reasonable to me to allow AI to write the comments. Maybe I've just lost my mind though.
I had one of these and loved it, taking it everywhere. I vaguely remember it running some flavor of Linux that was pretty usable at the time. Sometime in 2012 the display started having issues and then it stopped powering on shortly thereafter. I would spend the next decade trying to recreate something resembling the experience through Chromebooks but never really getting there, eventually surrendering to the 13-inch MacBook Air.
Same here! I still have it in has tiny laptop bag, back then it worked wonderfully for me as a mobile Linux development machine. I had more battery lifetime than with ANY machine after that (10+ hours screen time), but to fair I only run the bare minimum on it.
However the charging broke and I never got around trying to repair it.
Yes, very much so, although I've come believe that the corporate jobs outside of SWE might be even more performative. It also seems like something that has become way worse since the late 2010s, in tech specifically at least.
Yeah it exists all over. Talk to your friends who were business majors in school what they are doing now. It is shocking what some of them actually do day in day out and they know full well it's bullshit jobs sort of stuff that just pays the bills.
I also feel like giving a shout out to the PDF version of the official PostgreSQL manual. It was one of the most enjoyable and engaging tech books I've ever read, and seems like pretty much the gold standard in what official documentation can look like. It took me a while to figure this out though, because the UX of the standard HTML version of the manual is pretty clunky.
Almost every single post on the ClaudeAI subreddit is like this. I use Opus 4.5 in my day to day work life and it has quickly become my main axe for agentic stuff but its output is not a world-shattering divergence from Anthropic's previous, also great iterations. The religious zealotry I see with these things is something else.
I suspect that recurring visitors of that subreddit may not be the greatest IT professionals, but a mixture of juniors (even those with 20 years of experience but still junior) and vibe coders.
Otherwise, with all due respect, there's very little of value to learn in that subreddit.
100%. I would also say that this broadly applies to pretty much all of the AI subreddits, and much of AI Twitter as well. Very little nuanced or thoughtful discussions to be found. Looks more like a bunch of people arguing about their favorite sports teams.
This exactly. The /r/codex subreddit is equally full of juniors and vibe-coders. In fact, it's surprisingly a ghost-town, given how useful Codex CLI is.
Yes, as far as I can tell infinite scroll + 2010s era social media recommendation algorithms alone have already decimated the wider human collective's ability to think for themselves, and has subsequently eroded sane discourse and democratic norms in societies all across the globe.
Then you should probably add kotlin and java together as well. They share the same purpose, use the same VM, usually live in the same project, have native compatibility, are used with the same frameworks, etc.
Especially considering Kotlin is used as a drop in replacement for Java in a lot of projects. Especially when using the type of frameworks often associated with Java (Spring, Quarkus, etc.).
Personally, I think statistics like this are biased towards the median of the past few decades and do not necessarily tell much about the future; other than that things apparently move very slowly and people are mostly conservative and stuck in their ways.
Cobol is still in that list. Right above Elixir, which apparently is a bit of a niche language. Kotlin has only been around for about 15 years, and the 1.0 release was actually only nine years ago. Java was released 30 years ago and it's been dominant in enterprise development for 25 years now. So, no surprise that Java is nearer to the top.
Python is surprising but it's been around for quite long and gained a lot of popularity outside the traditional computer science crowd. I know biochemists, physicists, etc. that all use python. And it's a great language for beginners obviously. It's not so much that people switched to python but that it is driving the growth of the overall programmer community. Most new programmers use python these days and that explains why it is the #1.
Javascript has had a virtual monopoly on basically anything that runs in a browser, which is of course the most popular way to distribute code these days. Especially since plugins were deprecated and things like applets, flash, etc. disappeared around fifteen years ago. Anything that ran on the web was either written in Javascript; or transpiled/compiled to it. WASM is starting to change that but it's early days.
What the past 25 years tell us is that things definitely change. But very slowly. C++ still outranks Javascript. That's because it's mostly browsers where it is used. It's a lot less popular for other things.
I like Kotlin, so I'm biased. But it's obviously not the most popular thing by a long shot. But popular doesn't mean good. I actually like python for small unimportant things. But I reach for Kotlin if I need to do it properly. I used to reach for Java. But Kotlin simply became the better tool for the job; at least for me. I even prefer it over typescript and I do occasionally use it for web frontend development. The transpiler is pretty good. And there's a WASM compiler too and Compose for WASM just entered beta. Kotlin seems future proof and it seems to be growing into wider adoption. There are a few million programmers around by Jetbrains counts. It's not nothing.
C++ is still very popular where you need raw perfomance but not so raw as C. Especially with the fact that python is used as a more user friendly interface.
But TS is not valid JS and nobody uses TS because they can write JS in a file with a different extension. You also get 0 benefit from running `tsc` on a JS file. You could argue that C is valid C++ so there's no reason to discern them either.
You can also easily have Objective-C, C, and C++ in the same Swift project and have them interop. That’s a feature of Swift. But adding their numbers together wouldn’t make sense.
I like where Scala 3 is headed (finally). Martin seems to realize that the simpler "direct" programming model is better and that will make the language more attractive to regular people who aren't FP purists. Though it does feel like it might be too little too late.
Doesn't really bring benefit. With Java you are more quickly useful in C++ and can write server apps without fuss. Very little benefit in using a different language when Java literally does the same and is used everywhere else.
I also find them very developer-centric — testers get forced into upfront design work that doesn’t fit how they naturally test, and many struggle with it. I’ve had better results by expressing behavior directly and keeping UI concerns thin, instead of using a wrapper around page structure.
I'm sorry, but if your testers are not comfortable getting involved in the early design stages of your software in a 21st century world, then there's at least a 90% chance that their primary role at your company is perpetuating organizational dysfunction.
Most of my career has been defined by cleaning up the gargantuan messes the culture of "throw tickets over the wall to QA" created, and it has been very, very ugly. It defies common sense how culture around tools and processes for dev and ops roles continues to evolve over time, but for some reason testers are still trying to test software off in a silo, like it's released once or twice a year on CD-ROM.
Not me. More than half of my 20s were mostly defined by working service industry jobs, hanging around with party kids, staying awake until the sun came up, and basically getting by doing the bare minimum for everything. It was probably the lowest point of my life cognitively. It wasn't really until sometime around my mid-30s that I started feeling pretty sharp and performing well on cognitive tests. I didn't grow up in an environment where there were any cultural expectations of achievement in anything. I had to find all of that on my own through a lot of trial and error. That being said, who knows where I would be today if a nice chunk of my 20s had been less dumb? I ruminate about it fairly often.
I do still think there are still places where being a meat proxy is legitimately okay or even desirable, such as PR comments. If everyone's code is generated by AI, and AI will ultimately be the primary consumer of the PR comments, it seems reasonable to me to allow AI to write the comments. Maybe I've just lost my mind though.