Apr 10, 2026, 5:01 PMI will never understand why we looked at modern programming, saw that there is a good bit, which is programming, and a bad bit, which is code review… and decided to automate the good bit at the expense of having to do a lot more of the bad bit.
Apr 10, 2026, 5:09 PM(I posted this on a private chat and someone asked me to make it public, so if you’ve read it before, hi!)
Apr 11, 2026, 10:31 AMThose of you who like code review: I recommend shifting left, pairing with your colleagues (especially non-programmers such as product designers or testers), and writing lots more test cases. I think you’ll enjoy it a lot.
Apr 11, 2026, 8:43 PMA couple of people wrote to me to say that they are annoyed that we built robots to make “art” (scare quotes) when we should be making robots to do laundry.
And aside from the fact that unless you do take your laundry to the river to wash it, you already have a robot that does 90% of the work (and I can respect wanting automation for the other 10%)…
We don’t have robots (chatbots) that make art or write code either! They do an average job of some things, poor at others, and you can’t rely on them at all. If this is “AI”, I want it nowhere near my laundry.
Our 2020s tech industry loves to automate the easy part and hand-wave away the part that matters. The chatbots can’t do anything; they can only do the pointless parts, the boilerplate, the busywork. This is not the work. Humans still have to do this and the chatbots make it harder because they have to sift through bullshit to do so.
Keep Sam Altman the fuck away from my chores. He’ll just break all my dishes and dye my t-shirts blue.
Apr 10, 2026, 5:13 PM@samir had the same though, 5 years ago. Sigh. The answer is: capitalism, I guess.
Apr 10, 2026, 5:19 PM@rysiek Turns out you can make a lot of money running companies into the ground.
Apr 10, 2026, 5:19 PM@samir absolutely
@samir Respectfully I think that's ... maybe the inverse?
We automated the bad bit, which is "generating the text", in a way that obviates the important part, of creating a community of comprehension around the problem we're solving.
I think that's more true of emails, status reports, and PowerPoint presentations than of software that must actually do the work of running the company. Far more obviously dangerous in the latter.
In the former, the management and sales spaces were filled with ill-thought-out nonsense already.