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180714370
comment
bytwdorris
2026 @06:38AM
(#65962250)
Attached to: AI Use at Work Has Increased, Gallup Poll Finds
I just wrote up a slightly different take on the exact same situation you described. As a fellow "advanced" gray beard with decades of experience and broad knowledge of all the various "cool architectures du jour" that have popped up and gone away in that time, I feel that I am (as you are) fully qualified in writing code that others consider to be of "superior" quality.
The hands of such a person, these tools can build our knowledge. But only because we have all these learned system architectures upon which we can base our read and understanding of whatever new thing we're looking at.
Yeah, in a way we're "novices" in that field, but dude...we're novices with a vast knowledge library to build upon. Even without these tools, we can dive into an area we're entirely unfamiliar with and come up to full competency FAR faster than most true "novices".
The novices of concern here and being referred to by the author you replied to are those that aren't yet able to, as you wrote, "review the tests the LLM had written and direct it to improve them" in the same way you and I can. *Those* are the novices I am / we are concerned about never advancing beyond "novice" level.
Now...what we do not know is the long term playout of this. There was a time, I'm sure because I was there as I suspect you were as well, where higher level compilers were considered suspect. I've had to review the assembly they spit out to find floating point bugs I *knew* weren't in my code. But now? In 2026? I haven't reviewed compiler output in at least 2 decades, maybe almost 3...certainly not to the extent I was 4 decades ago when C compilers for the 65816 were first coming out, for example...
Is that where we are now in this genAI spool up? Perhaps. Perhaps the newbies now that seem like novices because they don't know the details of the underlying libraries and APIs like the back of their hand are just the new users of the new "compilers" and at some point in the future they're all going to look back and say "remember when we used to have to write actual code and memorize APIs and read through piles of documentation....OMG things were so painful back then".
That's what I'm hoping is happening now. I suspect it's more of that than what some are claiming that "software is doomed" and "we're going to lose all experienced coders". Nah...I suspect we're just changing the type of coder that's going to be considered "experienced" and the domain we're going to consider them experienced in.
180714280
comment
bytwdorris
2026 @06:21AM
(#65962240)
Attached to: AI Use at Work Has Increased, Gallup Poll Finds
You're right, but....
I mean, yes, you're right in that a novice using AI will very likely never advance much beyond being a novice. Which sucks and I don't have any answers for that yet. It's a HUGE looming issue and even my younger son is caught up in this mess trying to find a job when companies have absolutely put the brakes on hiring "novices" out of school (not even sure I'd call him a novice as he's quite competent but apparently "right out of school" immediately removes you from consideration at most places as far as I can tell).
But here's the tricky part...the part that's making this whole problem worse by acting as a feedback loop of sorts. When these tools are used by experienced system architects, coders, technical writers, etc., (all of which I, perhaps egotistically, consider myself as) they can be made to do incredible things very quickly and very completely in a way that a human isn't going to be able to slog through in days much less the minutes it takes these tools to crank it out.
And interns? I've been offered "another intern" just about every year for the last 10 years. But in the last 2 years, I've turned them down. I just do not need them anymore. But more than that, I enjoy getting that work done myself now because it's an opportunity to experiment with all these new tools.
And that's the spiraling feedback loop of destruction, unfortunately. It's not just that we don't "need" junior coders. That's true, but if the process of coming up to speed on all this new tech wasn't so interesting to all the gray beards like me, we'd be more than happy to being on junior coders and spool them up on this instead. But that's not the case... I haven't seen interesting new tech that actually got me truly excited about software and hardware in *decades*. Literally...*decades* of mediocre or (for sure) declining quality and the flattening of designs and architectures had left me 100% ready to walk away and just go start farming or something.
But then THIS shows up!? Are you kidding me! And you want me to let all the newbies play around with it and leave me behind? I mean, yeah, we probably *should* let that happen but I can't. Coding is just too much fun again and that's what got us all into this decades ago.
180579526
comment
bytwdorris
4, 2026 @09:15AM
(#65923576)
Attached to: NASA, Department of Energy To Develop Lunar Surface Reactor By 2030
We have prety much free rane on anything we want to do.
"prety" I can ignore. "rane" I cannot. ;)
Joking aside, my assumption is that Trump's position on Greenland is exactly that same statement as you made. We do pretty much have free reign but so does everyone else and that's the sticking point...I think. I usually try to find some hidden agenda because every slimy political move is slimy, but this one, at least to my naive self, seems pretty straightforward. "We" have an interest in limiting how closely we let "enemies" get to our borders with established bases and working condition and access to resources.
180491865
comment
bytwdorris
31, 2025 @09:29AM
(#65892585)
Attached to: NYC Inauguration Bans Raspberry Pi, Flipper Zero Devices
Police "discretion" already does that. Everywhere. All the time. At every level.
180184105
comment
bytwdorris
2025 @05:33AM
(#65813211)
Attached to: PHP 8.5 Brings Long-Awaited Pipe Operator, Adds New URI Tools
TFS doesn't even mention Java in its "anyone familiar with" list, but Java streams have been around since 2014 and are much a more disciplined and formal implementation of a very similar concept of chaining operations together like this. I'd call this Python pipe operator nothing more than syntactic sugar. Seriously, honest question...does it actually do anything functional other than change the *syntax* of how you chain calls together?
180106135
comment
bytwdorris
2025 @07:43AM
(#65799991)
Attached to: Rust in Android: More Memory Safety, Fewer Revisions, Fewer Rollbacks, Shorter Reviews
Feels a little bit like moving away from legacy environments and starting fresh with [ insert more modern, secure, pattern-focused paradigm/language ] is a somehow more accurate summary to me.
180082799
comment
bytwdorris
5, 2025 @08:16AM
(#65797257)
Attached to: She Used ChatGPT To Win the Virginia Lottery, Then Donated Every Dollar
There's also, you know, sarcasm...
Phew....I was starting to wonder if I was the one that had misread it cause everyone seemed to be taking it seriously.
Also...1343!? Holy shit!
180008026
comment
bytwdorris
8, 2025 @10:03AM
(#65782326)
Attached to: 'Vibe Coding' Named Word of the Year By Collins Dictionary
I can't be bothered, so hopefully one or more of y'all will take it upon yourselves.
179849752
comment
bytwdorris
2, 2025 @07:45AM
(#65742572)
Attached to: Fake Homebrew Google Ads Push Malware Onto macOS
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at because the weakest link across every OS is the meatbag running the keyboard. This article talks specifically about the delivery mechanism for this involving a dumbass user copy a base64 encoded curl command or some similarly stupid crap and running it. If you give me root because you believe this "security check" is necessary and blindly click OK, then I'm not sure which OS is going to be able to help you out there.
179552170
comment
bytwdorris
27, 2025 @12:25AM
(#65686516)
Attached to: Apple Mac Adoption Is Accelerating Across US Enterprises
Came here to say the same; graybeard and all...except 35 years as a professional developer (software, hardware, firmware, whatever); e3 user initially with IBM in early 90s, then vi from about 92 to present.
Used to use Apple exclusively in the 80s until they absolutely lost their #$!@% minds. That period without Jobs (pretty much all of the 90s) was insufferable trash.
Eventually they sorted it all out but it took me a solid 15 years after their release of OS X to finally be willing to give them another try; and honestly it was all the Windows 10 horseshit that drove me to it.
Bought my first MacBook Pro (Intel) in, I think, 2016...never...looked..back. Ever. Not once.
Fancy with all kinds of pretty little bells and whistles? No. Intuitive, powerful Window management? No, for sure.
But it f'king worked. I have NEVER had a single crash of any sort on any MacBooks I've owned or running any version of macOS I've tried. I'm sure it happens, but holy hell what a difference the entire experience was from Window's upgrade/BSOD/reboot hell and Linux's atrocious desktop/support/management consistency hell.
And then Apple goes all in on ARM!? I'm here to stay I guess. At least for a while; almost certainly until I retire and beyond a bit...I could get by on what they currently have for that time period. So even if torched every good idea they ever had tomorrow, I guess I'm finishing up this career with Apple...where it all started for me.
179283438
comment
bytwdorris
6, 2025 @04:59AM
(#65662748)
Attached to: Vibe Coding Has Turned Senior Devs Into 'AI Babysitters'
I've found that, counter to what the talking heads would have you believe, the only people that can effectively use AI for coding tasks are the same people that can code effectively to begin with.
179004522
comment
bytwdorris
04, 2025 @06:20AM
(#65638302)
Attached to: Supermarket Giant Tesco Sues VMware, Warns Lack of Support Could Disrupt Food Supply
I see what they did there.
178917814
comment
bytwdorris
2025 @12:19PM
(#65621962)
Attached to: Apple Warns UK Against Introducing Tougher Tech Regulation
Maker of product receiving increased regulation claims increased regulation is bad. More news at 11?
178590202
comment
bytwdorris
2025 @06:09AM
(#65569554)
Attached to: RIP To the Macintosh HD Hard Drive Icon, 2000-2025
Perspective is wrong
Seriously...WHY would you do this, Apple? Everyone, everywhere along the review chain MUST have pointed this out. This has to be the result of someone at the design phase having some sort of misguided vision of the future of UI design or something along those lines. Someone had to PUSH for this to happen but I cannot possibly imagine why.
177194557
comment
bytwdorris
25 @11:20AM
(#65337165)
Attached to: AI Helps Unravel a Cause of Alzheimer's Disease and Identify a Therapeutic Candidate
Proteins are so a complex that machine learning model is the best approach
Definitely...since so many projects have done exactly that already. AlphaFold, ESMFold, Metagenomic Atlas, RoseTTAFold, etc. I'm pretty sure the technique is at the point these days that just about any protein structure of any interest can just be handed over to "AI" and it's as good as modeled.
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