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I’m not using AI to eliminate thinking but to free me from the rote mundane code writing. AI is perfectly competent at writing code once a prototype is implemented.
I do write initial proof of concept crude prototypes (not commented, hardcoded variables, etc), and AI does the productionizing of them. It has really allowed me to command a team of agents instead of keeping track of a bunch of humans of varying work ethic, skill, and ability to maintain high code quality. And often AI is very good at maintaining patterns used in the code base or even keeping them to industry best practices.
When using AI you will no longer be writing so much in programming languages—English or whatever language you talk to the LLM will be the main language.
"AI is perfectly competent at writing code once a prototype is implemented" ... perfectly? I mean, it's certainly far from perfect - this is where I spend most of my day, in fixing the imperfections of the code generating robot.
Granted I'm not polishing up a prototype, I'm maintaining, evolving and modernizing a non-trivial 8+ year old product.
It's not perfect, but to give you an example, I needed to create a proxy broker to manage proxies for scraping data. GPT built me a broker to manage my fleet/inventory of proxies and buy bandwidth or new proxies as needed as well as maintain the proxy ledger for proxy health, while I was able to work on the core product.
It helped me with developing a scoring system (for example, I gather slot data for restaurants to see how scarce they are) to rank restaurants (higher score being harder to book) to determine signals of busyness. It also helped me build a backlog system to make snapshots of every restaurant's slot availability on 3 different providers (OpenTable, Tock, Resy).
Maybe I misspoke, I’m not saying the code it wrote is perfect. But the code produced by GPT-5.5 frontier model is easily miles better than a junior developer. But it is very competent. Perfectly competent was maybe more hyperbole, but I still drive the point.
I don't care to build a ledger or build an ETL system. I don't care to spend my time debugging IaC terraform systems. GPT allowed me to focus on the core functionality of my code instead of investing hours of my time on ancillary support systems that are well understood. Terraform is notoriously difficult even for the most skilled among us. It helped me manage and tune my Cloud Tasks queue for processing from the microservice scraping data into the main app.
The cool thing is that I was able to let an agent manage this while I did the human task of steering it to work. Some of this work is novel, yet much of this work includes well-understood software patterns, such as scatter-gather and so on.
I absolutely do not enjoy using JavaScript or TypeScript at all. So it was a huge relief when I was able to get AI to help with UI work on Next.js and React Native/Expo.
I've gotten it to help with a cross-cloud cross-region setup on Terraform with shared secrets on AWS and GCP with GHA workflows for sandbox, staging, and prod promotion deployments. And I have no background as a DevOps guy.
Again, it didn't propose the exact shape of my system design. But chatting with it really allowed me to form the shape. It really is a bicycle for your brain. It helped me look at the tradeoffs of different products (PubSub vs Cloud Tasks, or AWS equivalents).
If there's one thing I learned from engineering and confirmed by my years in software development. It's easy to make something that work, but it's way harder to put guaranties on it. That's why copy-paste from Stack Overflow was a real strategy.
Most of the time is spent making plans and prototype outlines for the llm to work with. Otherwise the whole thing will be a horrible mess. You need elaborately crafted prompts, so you have to have proper understanding of the underlying framework and language otherwise the whole thing will be a horrible mess. I don't even know how could people handle multiple agents, when it usually finishes quite fast. And you can't even do anything between runs, because you are in a constant oh one more minute and it finishes state. And when it finishes you have to evaluate the output. So can't even do deep thinking during "work", because the pattern is similar to social media. Constant attention, almost instant gratification. So your attention span is again and again fucked, properly fucked.
And the problem is, that these plans are obliterated in a few hours and then you have to analyze and iterate on the output to weed out the idiocies.
And handling multiple agent outputs... so continous context switches. Well, good luck with that in the long term.
If you let agents run wild and build whatever, the output is almost surely will be a horrible mess. End of story.
I love my La Marzocco Linea Micra. It’s exceptionally well-built and feels like an Apple product in its simplicity. The only downside is the app you have to use to use the programmed automated backflush.
But the user experience is remarkably simple. Turn the knob left to start the flow of water, turn the other way to stop. Move the dial to steam/froth milk. Fantastic default water pressure and even better tasting coffee. It’s a machine that will last a decade if not longer.
>The only downside is the app you have to use to use the programmed automated backflush.
Goddamnit, why the fuck can't we just have a machine that fucking does everything we need it to, on its own? An espresso machine requires a fucking app? Goddamnit.
Yes, I realize nothing about this comment is constructive.
You don’t actually have to use the app to backflush. You can just do it manually. The app is more convenient than flipping the lever a dozen times though.
What data do you think they're "harvesting"? If they're counting how many shots I pull and judging me by my choice of brew temp, I can live with that. The app adds a lot of convenience and saves having to have some sort of UI or manual control on the machine itself.
I mean, my PSP from <20 years ago doesn't support WPA2 or 3 and therefore can't talk to my home wifi unless I made a hole for it.
But as we all know, Italian-made boutique home appliances are different. They have a rich history of having timely manufacturer-supplied technology updates provided as the decades press on.
We know this to be true, just as we know that sarcasm is a myth.
They must have machines that are not app-enabled right?
I sort of understand why their consumer machines would have that crap but I imagine that plenty of commercial places buying a $20k+ machine for a cafe that's supposed to run for 40 years would not accept having an app involved in maintenance.
Go into a service shop and see what they think of the computerised La Marsocco. Great coffee, amazing looking machine. But servicing…
I got awfully close to getting one then went for an e61. I’m very sure the coffee isn’t as good. I’m very sure the machine will have parts for a long time - it’s been 60 years so far.
I wasn't planning on buying one, but I'll add this to the list of app enabled coffee tech I refuse to buy. As someone who's blind I'm getting really tired of app enabled coffee equipment with no open source integrations or protocol documentation. Fellow also doesn't appear to make any effort to make there apps accessible. They have had there Aiden out for over a year and I still don't see any notes about accessibility in there app update. I'm not going to buy one and use the home assistant integration since that could break at any time. Luckily I'm more of a coffee drinker instead of espresso so the Ratio Four works well enough for single cups and half pots.
Just bought a La Micra last year. Big factor was knowing I can get parts and service for life. I had a lesser known brand machine for almost 15 years, but at some point I couldn't get parts or anyone to work on it, so it died when the pump gasket failed.
A decade seems good to you? We’re still just talking about heat and pressure, well-understood problems. There’s no excuse for a machine like this not to outlive the original owner. Anything else is planned obsolescence or a manufacturing defect.
That’s fine, but you don’t have to be a deist to appreciate the title. Moby named one of his songs “God Moving Over the Face of the Water.” The author chose to use a metaphor many of us are familiar with, and even some atheists connote “God” to the mysterious existence of the universe, symbolic to the many collisions of stars that led us here.
The problem with Mac’s sandbox system is that it’s giving me some PTSD of Windows UAC. It’s inventing a solution to a problem that might exist in small doses, but instead gives users permission fatigue.
I personally think the traditional *nix model has served us quite well, and elective sandboxing using containers (à la Docker and so on) is quite good. The Mac sandbox model is probably ok for most normal users, but for power users is infuriating at times. Multiple restarts of Mac and various processes (and when you realize not enough scopes have been granted, another subsequent restart). I think Mac forcing all users into its sandbox system has been one of my least favorite impacts since upgrading macOS, leading to the enshittification of macOS.
The craziest thing is background processes started by Terminal/iTerm (such as tmux) can inherit Terminal or iTerm’s elevated status even when Terminal or iTerm are no longer running, dead, or killed. So you’ll have a bunch of elevated processes without the elevated parent or grandparent process running—it makes me feel the whole permissions scheme is more performative than actually useful.
I don't understand why OSX needs to restart the app to grant it permissions. The most annoying is video chat apps such as Teams and Zoom, having to close everything and reconnect if you want to share the screen or such. Perhaps there's a technical reason but it just feels like a lazy implementation.
But about the unix permissions model, is it really useful? During all my years of using linux on my personal machine, I've always had everything owned by my own user. Setting up specific users for programs would be a pain, and I don't think anybody does that? Servers is a different question, because then you're not actively using the system in the same way, which makes managing user accounts and their permissions on an app-level doable.
For normal users I think what's done on iphones and such works fairly well, and there they actually seem to have implemented it properly so that it doesn't require a restart to grant permissions.
I think the bigger issue is that way too many devs still live in the extremely dated paradigm of “anything has access to everything all the time”, even though this model has repeatedly proven itself unworkable (particularly for anybody using proprietary software, which is notorious for sticking its fingers in places it has no business touching).
The way macOS handles permissions with user prompts might be the wrong UX, but giving every program carte blanche by default is definitely not the answer either.
It’s dangerous, particularly for those of us who are developing and publishing software that’s used by many thousands of people — we’re juicy targets and every time we disable protections in the name of convenience and carelessly run random third party software with unfettered access we’re playing with fire. I find myself consistently stunned by the flippant attitude SWEs take towards securing their systems. Our confidence that we’re too smart to fall victim is entirely misplaced.
Note that this isn't "Mac's sandbox system", it's TCC. That's an important distinction to make, because apps that have opted into the proper App Sandbox can't do this... they don't even have the ability to display a prompt for direct access to Documents/.
With the App Sandbox, sandbox extensions are issues whenever you open a file using the file picker. They only last until the app is restarted.
A caveat is that you can save "Security Scoped bookmarks" (basically a signed base64 blob [1]) and pass that around to preserve access, but that isn't very common.
I feel the opposite with Mac permissions (or Linux or Windows). Hardly anything asks me, and it seems like everything has access to everything. But same conclusion here, if I don't trust something, I want to explicitly sandbox it.
I feel like I can mostly use containers on macOS. Is there a different sense that people are using containers on *nix? Or are you referring to all the macOS specific software footguns?
I would like to be able to run arbitrary code with gradual/granular privilege escalation. (e.g iOS/android with more affordances and escape hatches. macOS is getting there, but it's been a pretty bumpy/potholed road). Right now if I download a random github repo, I'd put it in a docker container and give it ports/volumes/etc.
I was building a lightweight imitation of OpenClaw. Just a Claude.md and iMessage watcher. I had to play around with Privacy a lot to be able to read my iMessages database, and do a lot of iTerm restarting.
I remember it being worse a while ago. But most of the time I can drag a binary into Settings->Privacy & Security->Full Disk Access or other things (Accessibility API). Maybe other issues come up.
I feel like it should still be much easier, but the general sandboxing model seems directionally functional. (My understanding is containerization isn't a silver bullet security-wise, still requires fiddling, and would be a resource hog ram-wise if not CPU?)
I wish I could pick a parent folder/file and get a box to control everything (network/disk/folders/peripherals/accessibility).
BTW - UAC is not a security boundary, so UAC-bypass is not the same as privilege escalation, and there is no bounty for it, etc, etc. It's a common misunderstanding, probably in no small part due to Microsoft's own lack of communication around it.
One of the worst cases happens immediately after logging into a fresh Mac, or after upgrading one. You’re instantly hit with a barrage of requests from all the installed apps and their various permissions. It makes for such a terrible initial user experience, it’s utterly baffling someone at Apple has signed it off. They used to poke fun at Windows in their ads, but UAC has never been that terrible in my experience.
I started learning how to make croissants. I bought a Japanese hand crank sheeter, and tried different butters and convection ovens. Definitely put me through a rabbit hole.
It’s been a long time since I had to touch Windows development. If I had to do it over again, I would use React Native for Windows UI where possible and low-level Win32-React Native module bridges for user space code.
The last time I had to do Windows development was about 15 years ago. I used a library called WTL (I think a couple comments here mention it). I couldn’t use any of the newer stuff that Windows 8-10 were pushing because it needed backward compatibility. It seemed way less bloated than MFC, but not as annoying to use as ATL or rawdogging Win32 APIs.
Ironically, I was developing a Win32 app to build a cloud bridge to a Rails app (talking to Quickbooks COM API which was hell on Earth, with XML and XML definitions) on Mac, using VMware on Mac to talk to Quickbooks Windows. I was so annoyed with Win32 development I used the Chrome Embedded Framework library to build the UI for the Win32 app so I wouldn’t have to wrestle WTL for UI and just have browser-based views to drive UI.
I think it was very tempting to drop C/C++ development for .NET code, but I didn’t want to drop off user adoption by requesting users to download a huge .NET runtime if their computer didn’t already have it.
This was when I was building Levion, a Quickbooks Windows to Cloud Rails app…
You should run away from React Native Desktop screaming. It's built on top of WinUI 3, and inherits all it's problems, while also being dramatically slower. Almost all functionality requires writing C++ code, and communicating between C++ and JS is a huge pain in the ass. Use QT instead.
And if you think using it will let you port your app to other platforms, think again. There's no drop-in compatible equivalent of RNW for Linux, and the version for Mac is even worse than the Windows version.
t. works on a huge app written with React Native Desktop
