Notices by Jason Gorman (jasongorman@mastodon.cloud)

"Universal Basic Income would remove the incentive to work", say people with enough money to never have to work again but who mysteriously carry on.

Ask yourself this: will fares in self-driving cabs be cheaper? Will subscriptions to vibe-coded SaaS cost less? Will tickets to see model-generated movies be a fraction of the current price?

Or do all these technologies just solve the problem of having to pay people, with no benefit to anyone else except shareholders?

And then ask yourself this: if nobody's getting paid, who's hailing the taxis, using the SaaS and watching the movies?

Dumb Luck: "Here's a trillion dollars. Solve any problem in the world."

Big Tech: "Er... OK... Give us a minute. Okay, got it! Chatbot? Erm. Unreliable chatbot? How about an unreliable chatbot that consumes the resources of entire cities? You've put us on the spot here. Hey, can anyone think of any problems in the world?"

"If your development process is full of blocking practices like after-the-fact testing or Pull Request code reviews, then faster code generation will just make the bottlenecks worse and the lead times even longer."

https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/03/27/its-the-bottlenecks-stupid/

I've been saying it as a joke, but I'm now seeing what appear to be genuine sentiments that the "trick" to using "AI" coding assistants is to precisely describe the program you want.

Instant water. Just add water.

A code generation tool that gets you 80-90% of the way there is like a boat that gets you 80-90% of the way.

You'll need to be a strong swimmer.

"Can you give me an example?" is one of the most powerful sentences in the English language. Second only to "Can you show me what you mean?"

Elmo tweeted 220 times in a single day. If I was an employer looking for workers who appear to have a lot of time on their hands...

Code generation tools fix the problem of software development being slow and expensive in much the same way that faster cars fix traffic congestion.

I've been trawling through all my old drives for a presentation I gave in, gosh, 1997 (?) that I recall was titled "Getting Shit Done?"

It was about stuff I'd learned through hard knocks about not being seduced by the *feeling* of being more productive.

Can't find the damn thing anywhere. I suspect I never backed it up. QED.

In a nutshell

In 2005, devs might have worried about things in our careers like "Am I specialising too much?", "Do I really want to move into management?" or "Is this technology going to be in demand in the future?"

In 2025, "Am I working for fascists?" is a real thing.

"gensplaining": the act of trying to persuade a customer that the code the model generated is what they actually needed.

US corporations frantically backpedalling on diversity are doing so entirely voluntarily.

NASA employees have been told to "drop everything" and spend their time scrubbing their website for mentions of women in leadership positions, diversity, etc.

That NASA workers actually did this is the most terrifying thing.

"A.I. is going to transform the way we develop software"

In what ways?

"Well, you need to be precise about your requirements, work in short feedback loops, be always cleaning up the mess it makes, and continuously test everything"

I see. Radical changes.

It's really starting to look like a coup's underway in the US.

The UK government seems to be discovering what so many other businesses have discovered: there's very few viable use cases for the technology

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/27/ai-prototypes-uk-welfare-system-dropped

I get a feeling I might not be alone in thinking this way

I can't help feeling that a "game-changing" technology that's going to "fundamentally transform" the way we work wouldn't need to be sneaked into products and price plans without the user's consent.

All I see is posts asking "How do I switch this f**king thing off?"

Copilot's the U2 album nobody asked for, except it's not free.