The Truth About Software Development with Carl Brown

In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Carl Brown, a veteran software developer and host of The Internet of Bugs, to talk about the realities of software development, what coding LLMs can actually do, and how the media gets it wrong about software engineering at large. https://www.youtube.com/@InternetOfBugs New GitHub Copilot Research Finds 'Downward Pressure on Code Quality' - https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2024/01/25/copilot-research.aspx Report: AI coding assistants aren’t a panacea - https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/21/report-ai-coding-assistants-arent-a-panacea/ Internet of Bugs Videos to watch: Debunking Devin: "First AI Software Engineer" Upwork lie exposed! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNmgmwEtoWE&t=3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNmgmwEtoWE&t=3s AI Has Us Between a Rock and a Hard Place https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJGNqnq-aCA Software Engineers REAL problem with "AI" and Jobs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQmN6xSorus&list=PLv0sYKRNTN6QhoxJdyTZTV6NauoZlDp99 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQmN6xSorus&list=PLv0sYKRNTN6QhoxJdyTZTV6NauoZlDp99 AGILE & Scrum Failures stuck us with "AI" hype like Devin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C1Rxa9DMfI&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C1Rxa9DMfI&t=1s YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 2:12Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zetron.

• 2:27Ed Zitron?

  Today I'm joined by Carl Brown, a veteran software engineer and host of the excellent YouTube channel Internet of Bugs. Carl, thank you for joining me.

• 2:34Speaker 07

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:36Ed Zitron?

  So I'm going to start with an easy one. What is a software developer? Like, what actually is that?

• 2:41Speaker 07

  So basically, what we do is we take ideas about problems that people want to solve generally. And we write software, we write code that tells computers instructions how to make the computer do the thing that needs to do to solve the problem the person asked us to solve.

• 3:05Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 3:07Speaker 07

  Gaming programming is a little bit different, but that's most software development is basically that.

• 3:13Ed Zitron?

  And this is another quite silly question, but necessary. How much of that is actually writing code?

• 3:19Speaker 07

  Uh, it depends on how good you, the people that are asking for stuff is. As a general rule, I would say maybe between 10% and 25%.

• 3:31Ed Zitron?

  Okay, just really want to be 10 to 20, even if we say 30% of the job, which is more than you said. That means the majority of this job is not actually writing code.

• 3:41Speaker 07

  Right. Now, that's largely for folks that are farther up the chain, right? So if you're fresh out of school and you don't really, you're not in the job, you don't understand how to manage requirements or any of that kind of stuff yet, someone's going to basically hand you a thing to do. And in that kind of case, you're going to be spending a lot more time writing code than that. But for me, it's, you know, it's far, far more talking to people and stuff than actually writing code.

• 4:07Ed Zitron?

  Right. And the reason I ask that and the reason we're doing this as well is that there have been a lot of stories around like LLMs replacing coders, LLMs replacing engineers, claiming that junior software engineers will be a thing of the past due to LLMs. How much validity is there in that?

• 4:24Speaker 07

  Well, when it comes to the really, really, really fresh out of school kids, right? That you have to basically break everything down and hand them little, little chunks of work. An LLM can kind of do that, although the kid will get better over time and the LLM is pretty much fixed.

• 4:40Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 4:40Speaker 07

  Right. But past that, it doesn't do a good job of being able to do any kind of long-term thinking. And that's largely the job, right? I mean, this, this is not a set of, you know, I, I come in today, I do a thing today. I come in tomorrow having no understanding of what happened yesterday and do another self-contained thing and so on and so forth. Right. That's not the job. The job is a long sequence of building up on things day after day, after day, after day, until we get to the point where the whole thing together works. And that's what it's supposed to do.

• 5:16Ed Zitron?

  So I think that, I think that I've known, and one of the reasons I had you on as well, is that there really, there are so many of these stories. They're claiming that like the software engineer's job is gone, that these companies will be writing all of their code with AI. And it doesn't even seem like that is possible. One of your videos, you did a really good thing around like the 20 to 30% are linked to this in the notes. 20 to 30% of code that behind Meta, and I think Google it was, is written by AI now. Again, how much validity is there to that?

• 5:45Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, so if, if one of the quotes was something to the effect of 30% of the code is suggestions that were given by autocomplete that a human accepted. Right?

• 5:55Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 5:56Speaker 07

  Which could be as much as, you know, the, the, the thing said, oh wait, you spelled this wrong. Let me give you a suggestion about how to spell it correctly. Right. I mean, how, how much of the, the actual text that you write is, if you don't, is corrected by a spell checker. Right. If all that counts as AI, then what percentage of your stuff is written by AI? Right.

• 6:15Ed Zitron?

  Well, in my, in my case, stuff, absolutely nothing, but that's just a free, I'm a just a complete free. But no, I get your point. And it's without being a code of myself, it's something I've really noticed across these stories where people just kind of blindly push them out. And they say, oh yes, 20 to 30% of the code is written by, but there's no verifying this. And also it feels like it might create a bigger problem, which is say, we accept this idea, even though I don't. And it sounds like a pretty spurious one, kind of silly to do so. At some point, isn't code not just?

• 6:50Ed Zitron?

  The series of things that you write to make a program work, it's connected to a bazillion other things, which if you don't know why that was written, because you had something generate it, is that not a huge problem?

• 7:01Speaker 07

  Yes, but worse, what we've, what we're finding when code gets generated is that basically you end up doing the same thing in a bunch of different places, but in each one of those different places, you do it a different way.

• 7:15Ed Zitron?

  Can you give me an example?

• 7:16Speaker 07

  Um, so for example, um, when you need to go fetch a thing from a server, right? We over here in this code, you fetch a thing from a server. Over here in the code, you fetch a different thing from the server. Um, normally you'd be able to use the same block of code to do that. So if there's a mistake in it, you can change it once and it's fixed everywhere, right?

• 7:32Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 7:33Speaker 07

  But the way the L L M's work is you say, hey, I want to fetch a thing from the server. And it says, cool. And it writes a whole thing for you that may or may not work the same way as the previous one. Right? And so now you, you find, okay, under some circumstances, we're having a problem fetching things from the server. I don't know which one of these 12 implementations that go fetch from the server is the one that's actually causing the problem.

• 7:51Ed Zitron?

  Right. Also, isn't there, isn't there a security issue of having large language models? Like, like, wouldn't all the code be quite similar? Or at least more similar, depending on if everyone's using Claude or everyone's using, well, GitHub Copilot, I guess is Claude now.

• 8:06Speaker 07

  No, not really. Um, it basically kind of picks a random number at the beginning and goes, okay, so that's the, I think of it kind of like you deal a deck of cards, right? Whichever deck of card gets turned over first, that's the beginning of the autocomplete that it starts. And so depending on which example it's, I don't want to say thinking of, but depending on which example represents that, I'm drastically oversimplifying, but depending on which example is represented by that card, it's going to go down one path or another.

• 8:30Ed Zitron?

  Right. And so what are they actually, what are these large language model coding tools actually good for? Cause I get a lot of people who, who respond by saying, this is proof that AI is a big deal. And I'm just kind of like, I'm not even looking for a particular answer, just truly what's useful about them.

• 8:47Speaker 07

  So they are decent at, when you know what you want and what you want is a fairly simple self-contained thing. And you know how to tell whether or not the self-contained thing does what you want, it can type it faster than you can.

• 9:03Ed Zitron?

  Like autocorrect.

• 9:04Speaker 07

  Basically, yes. It's like autocomplete. If you know exactly what you want. Yeah. I mean, so I use it a lot because I program in a bunch of different programming languages a lot, right? On different projects at the same time, or on the same day or the same week. And it's really easy for me to go, okay, wait, which language am I in right now? Okay, how do I do this in this language? Right? So it's kind of

• 9:25Ed Zitron?

  You can actually understand the generation, though, when it comes down.

• 9:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's like, I know what kind of loop I want, but I don't remember the syntax for this particular language where I don't want to. So it's, I use it kind of like a Google Translate kind of thing to go from one programming language to another sometimes.

• 9:38Ed Zitron?

  But you wouldn't trust it to build a full software package?

• 9:42Speaker 07

  Oh, not at all.

• 9:44Ed Zitron?

  Why not?

• 9:44Speaker 07

  Uh, well, it wouldn't work to start with.

• 9:47Ed Zitron?

  Why wouldn't it work?

• 9:48Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, so I've done some experimentation on that where I've taken fairly complicated

• 9:56Speaker 07

  challenges, challenges that were intended for programmers to basically get better at their craft and that kind of thing. And I've run AI, you know, told it step by step, okay, the, the, the challenge says, this is your next step, do this. The challenge says, this is your next step, do this. On really simple challenges in programming languages like Python, that it's got a lot and a lot of examples for, it does okay. Past the point where you're in the really simple kind of language things, they just, they sometimes get to the point where they can't even create anything that builds at all.

• 10:26Ed Zitron?

  Huh. Why is there, why do so many engineers swear by it then?

• 10:32Speaker 07

  Um, honestly, I'm not sure to what extent the engineers are swearing by it. I've talked to a lot of folks who are like, you know, my group, you know, this big bank, you know, friend of mine, my group is getting co-pilot jammed on our throats whether we want it or not. And the executives are all really excited about it and none of us are.

• 10:52Ed Zitron?

  Interesting. So it's executive, I've, I've personally had this theory that it's like executive pushed, and that it's all about, it's all about what the bosses want to see rather than even do.

• 11:05Speaker 07

  Sorry, now going to move my cat out the way. There's, there's a lot of wish fulfillment. There's a lot of like, we want to not have to deal with these programmers anymore. So we would rather deal with the AI thing. And we're just going to hope that the AI thing is going to be, you know, just as good as the programmers are close to is just as good as the programmers and not nearly as annoying.

• 11:23Ed Zitron?

  Seems like a Definitional, well, maybe that's not the right word. Seems like the difference between a software engineer and a software developer almost because it's not just about flopping code out, it's about making sure the code does stuff.

• 11:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, those those terms get mashed together. Yeah, I mean, so part of the problem is that in like, I live in Texas and in Texas, you're not allowed to call yourself an engineer unless you pass the engineering exam.

• 11:46Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 11:47Speaker 07

  Um, right. So I can't literally, I literally can't call myself a software engineer legally in Texas, as I understand it. I'm not a lawyer, but that's my understanding. So it's like the terms get all confused.

• 11:57Ed Zitron?

  Right. So somewhat related. What is it that people misunderstand about the job then?

• 12:03Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, so one of it is what you said earlier, which is that a very small percentage of the the job is actually slinging code. A lot of it is basically trying to figure out what it is the code should do based on what you've been told that the problem, you know, that the solution to the problem that you're trying to solve. Um, another thing is that, um, a lot of the the the problem with the job is that every little decision builds up over time. And at some point, a bug is going to happen, they're inevitable. And when that happens, basically, there's this process where what you need to do if you're being competent is roll back through that series of decisions, figure out what

• 12:45Speaker 07

  caused that bug, and then figure out what other bugs are likely to have been caused by that same set of decisions and then fix not just the bug you're working on, but the bugs that, you know, not just the bug that's been reported, but the bugs that might have also been caused by the same problem. Right?

• 13:01Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 13:01Speaker 07

  And that kind of long term thinking is not a thing I've ever seen an LLM exhibit at all. Um, I I talk about it like LLMs or, you know, generative AI is good at solving riddles, but actual software development is more like solving a murder.

• 13:14Ed Zitron?

  Yes, you said that in that wonderful video. Yeah. I and it almost feels as if we are building towards an actual calamity of sorts. Maybe not an immediate one, maybe it will be kind of sectioned off into areas because you've got a new generation of young people coming into software engineering or what have you, learning to use AI tools rather than, your videos definitely talk about this as well, actually how to develop software and make sure it works and make sure that it has the infrastructural side in line and also that you're building it with the long-term thinking of someone else might need to understand how this works and they're not learning that. So you've just got a generation of kind of pumping the internet and organizations with sloppier code.

• 13:58Speaker 07

  Yes, although, I mean, one of the problems we're having at the moment is that the hiring process for really junior engineers is actually pretty broken at the moment. And a lot of people are not hiring people that are fresh out of school because they're expecting that the AI will be able to do, basically, a senior or a mid-level developer with the benefit of AI, with the benefit of AI, that's in air quotes, will be able to do the work of that person plus a couple of fresh outs that they normally would have hired, but they're not hiring at the moment. There's some statistics about how the people that are fresh out of school these days are historically underemployed relative to the general population, at least in the US where I live.

• 14:43Ed Zitron?

  It also feels like there's no intention behind the code. Like, it's just if you're just generating it, you don't really know why you made any particular, you could say I chose these lines, but is that at some point, if you have large amounts of software developers using it, however large, but the young people in an organization using it to generate their code, they're neither learning to write better code, nor are they learning how to, they're just learning how to fill in blocks, they'll never grow within their job?

• 15:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, the trick is that those of us that have spent a whole lot of time debugging software, right, and like finding the problems and digging into them and trying to figure out what's going on, that kind of stuff, it's going to be really hard for younger folks to get. Hired into those jobs so that they have time to to build the experience to be able to do that. And I'm afraid we're going to end up with basically an older generation or generations retiring and a newer generation that hasn't had the experience of doing that kind of debugging. And then it's going to be a real mess, especially since from what I can tell, the code that the AIs

• 15:51Speaker 07

  generated are a lot buggier and buggier in weirder like randomish kind of ways. Stuff just kind of comes out of nowhere in a way that I don't, I mean, I've debugged code from people that don't speak the same languages as I do, you know, that kind of stuff. AI code is different. It's just like, okay, why would anyone want to put that block there? That doesn't have anything to do with what we're trying to do at the moment.

• 16:13Ed Zitron?

  And why, why is that? Is it just because it's probabilistic?

• 16:17Speaker 07

  I guess so. I mean, it's, it's hard to say why. I mean, the, the, the idea of why an LLM does what it does is kind of a, you know, anybody's guess.

• 16:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's just, I keep thinking of the word calamity because you sent me these studies as well about how they found like a downward pressure on the quality of code on GitHub. Would you mind walking me through what that means?

• 16:42Speaker 07

  Yeah. So basically what that study found, there were, there have been a couple of them, but what that particular study found is that there is a, what they call code churn has gone up. And code churn is basically when you push something, you like add a line of code, you push it into to test or to production. And then in a short period of time, like, I don't remember exactly what the, the definition was like in a month or two months, that line of code changes. Right? So basically what that means is that the line of code that got created, somebody decided after it got put in, oh, wait, no, that doesn't work right. We don't, we're not happy with that. We're going to change it to be something else. Right?

• 17:18Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 17:18Speaker 07

  And the percentage of lines or the number of lines that, that get changed fairly quickly after they get submitted has gone way up since the, since the implementation of GitHub Copilot. So this is across like most of the, the giant, you know, millions of lines of codes on GitHub.

• 17:40Ed Zitron?

  And for a simpleton, me, why does it being change, why is changing it so often bad?

• 17:46Speaker 07

  Like, well, I mean, so. I mean, if you do it right the first time, you can move on to the next thing.

• 17:51Ed Zitron?

  Ah.

• 17:52Speaker 07

  Right? If it's like, you know, if you're writing a document and you put, put the document in there and then you like, you're in, you're in, um, in Google Docs and you're like tracking changes. And it's like, okay, this sentence has changed 17 times. Obviously, the person isn't happy with the way that sentence is, right?

• 18:07Ed Zitron?

  So the generative code isn't good.

• 18:09Speaker 07

  Right.

• 18:10Ed Zitron?

  And so people see need to change it.

• 18:11Speaker 07

  That's the presumption, yes.

• 18:13Ed Zitron?

  And so I, it also said, the code quality itself, is that the only way they, is that the only way they measured it? Or is it, there were other things as well?

• 18:23Speaker 07

  Um, so they measured that, um, they measured, um, uh, like,

• 18:31Ed Zitron?

  Moved code?

• 18:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, the, the,

• 18:33Ed Zitron?

  Less moved code.

• 18:34Speaker 07

  The, the thing I was talking about earlier, where, um, the, uh, you've got a bunch of different places in the code that all do the same, you try to do the same function, but they do it in different ways. Normally, what would happen is you'd have your, you do, you do a thing here, right? And then at some point in the future, you need to do that thing again in a different place. And so what you do is you would move that original block that does the thing someplace else. And then you would call that block from both places.

• 19:02Ed Zitron?

  Right, because it already works.

• 19:03Speaker 07

  Right. And then that way, you've got, you know, however you go fetch stuff from the server, you're fetching it the same way. Um, but with this thing, basically, instead of doing that, you've got copy paste, okay, let me put another one here, let me put another one here, let me put another one here. And it's, it's a maintenance nightmare.

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• 21:28Ed Zitron?

  So for the, for the audience as well, how does a software developer actually use GitHub? Like really simple stuff, I realize, but I think it's important for people to, it just occurred to me that this may be something that most listeners don't know, which is good to, I think it's good.

• 21:41Speaker 07

  Yeah. So, so what we do is we basically make changes to code. We get to the point where we, the developer, are happy with the way it's set up on our machine. And then we do what's called a push and we basically send all that code, submit all that code up to GitHub. And then theoretically, you know, there can be automatic processes that kick in that like check that code for particular things and run tests on it and that kind of stuff. And then at some point, we have a thing called a pull request, which is basically a thing that says, okay, I would like this to go into production now, or more or less. I would like this to get promoted into the next phase now. And then someone theoretically will look at it and go, okay, that's fine. And then click the yes button or say, hey, you forgot about this, go look at this or that kind of thing, right?

• 22:23Speaker 07

  And the pull request is kind of the unit of work, kind of.

• 22:27Ed Zitron?

  Right. So with GitHub, you almost use it like an organizational code dump.

• 22:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, basically.

• 22:33Ed Zitron?

  Where you centralize all the code, code, sorry, just for the

• 22:36Speaker 07

  No, yeah.

• 22:36Ed Zitron?

  For me and non-coding as well. And I think it's, I think that the LLM industry has done a really good job of dancing around these terms and selling them to people like me. Well, they weren't selling, they didn't work on me, I am too stupid. But it's where they've just like been like, okay, yeah, well, lots of people use Copilot. That's good. And this is good because co-software is coding. But it kind of feels like, I don't know, all of this is taking the one thing, like one major part out of software development and ruining it. And I don't even mean coding. I mean, it's the intentionality behind software design and infrastructure and maintain like there's, it seems like they're removing intention in multiple parts.

• 23:22Speaker 07

  Um, I, so the way I would say it is when they talk about the AI being able to do the work of a programmer, what they're doing is they're devaluing all of the stuff that's not just hacking code.

• 23:35Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 23:36Speaker 07

  Um, and so what they're saying is that basically the job of a developer is basically just, you know, typing, basically.

• 23:43Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 23:44Speaker 07

  And that all of the work that we do to understand what the problem actually is and how it needs to work. And, you know, what other problems are likely to show up when we try to do that? And how to avoid those things as we go and that kind of thing? All that work is basically not important.

• 23:59Ed Zitron?

  Hmm. And I mean, I'm gonna say two words which will probably annoy you. This is, I feel like vibe coding is the other part of this. So if I'm correct, correct me if I'm wrong, vibe coding is just typing stuff into an LLM and software comes out and hopefully it works?

• 24:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, vibe coding is basically when you.

• 24:22Speaker 07

  Intentionally try, well, I don't know about intentionally, but basically you you make a point of not digging into the code and looking at what the LLM is doing. And you basically say, okay, I would like something that does X, right? I would like a game where I fly airplanes around a city or something, right? And then you get what it spits out and then you say, you know, okay, let me try it. Okay, well, can we have more airplanes? And okay, can we have some balloons with, you know, signs on them now? And can we do this kind of thing? And then you don't think about what the side effects are. You don't think about what things could go wrong. You don't think about air conditions, that kind of stuff. And you just hope that this, whatever you look at and has the right vibe and that, you know, if it, if it, if it looks like kind of what you wanted, that probably it's going to be fine or hopefully it's going to be fine.

• 25:08Ed Zitron?

  How do you feel about vibe coding?

• 25:10Speaker 07

  Um, so I do it sometimes. Vibe coding is great for a thing that you're going to do once and then throw away.

• 25:16Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 07

  Right? So if it's like, you know, okay, I want to, I want to do a thing. I want to translate this thing to, you know, I want to make this table go into this format over here or that kind of thing. You do it, you get the output you want, you throw the code away, no big deal, right?

• 25:28Ed Zitron?

  Like a prototype almost.

• 25:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, basically. Um, and so, you know, we, we call them spikes or tracer bullets sometimes. It's like a, you know, let me get a thing that that works at all, right? And then let me see what I can learn from that to, to move into my big maintainable project. But for anything that's like, you know, this thing needs to run for a while, this thing needs to not get hacked, this thing needs to, you know, not crash, it's a really bad idea.

• 25:55Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and at some point I feel like someone building a product that they don't really understand the workings of, it's kind of almost identical to generating a story with ChatGPT, except kind of more complex and more prone to errors.

• 26:10Speaker 07

  Yeah. Um, and the other thing is that there's an adversarial component, right? So. People will intentionally try to go hack that thing that's sitting on the internet.

• 26:21Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 26:21Speaker 07

  Right?

• 26:21Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 07

  In a way that they don't intentionally try to go mess with the story that you wrote.

• 26:26Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 26:26Speaker 07

  Right. And so even if it works all by itself, that doesn't mean it's going to work when somebody starts pounding on it intentionally trying to break it. And if they can break it, then that's a whole other set of problems that you now have.

• 26:38Ed Zitron?

  It feels like quality assurance is just never part. Oh, no, that are they claiming they're going to do quality assurance with large language models? Yeah, they must.

• 26:45Speaker 07

  That some people are. Yeah. I mean, to be honest, a lot of companies have just been getting rid of quality assurance over the years. Right?

• 26:55Ed Zitron?

  Oh, really?

• 26:55Speaker 07

  And when I worked at IBM, we didn't have quality assurance at all. They would, no, seriously, they would do this. I was in IBM's cloud group and they would do these, these, um, what do they call them?

• 27:06Speaker 07

  Hackathon kind of things that they didn't call that. I don't remember what they called it, but basically everybody in all the other development groups would get together and basically bang on the code that was about to get released from some other group to try to see if they could break it.

• 27:18Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 27:18Speaker 07

  But they didn't have dedicated testers anymore because they decided, I guess, that they didn't think they were worth the money. I don't know, but we had some issues because of that.

• 27:27Ed Zitron?

  When did that movement happen?

• 27:30Speaker 07

  Um, I was in, I don't know. So I was at IBM in like 2017, 2018.

• 27:36Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 27:36Speaker 07

  So it would have been sometime prior to that. When I got there, they didn't have any QA folks.

• 27:40Ed Zitron?

  Really just feels like the it's the management problem as well. It's the management kind of people.

• 27:45Speaker 07

  I would think so.

• 27:47Ed Zitron?

  It's a real shame as well. And I forgive me if I'm forgetting exactly where you've mentioned as well that there is like compound scar tissue from AI generated code, a larger problem of lots of this code being generated with AI.

• 28:02Speaker 07

  Well, that's, that's my expectation, right?

• 28:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, just a potential worry.

• 28:08Speaker 07

  Right, right. So that the more of this we get and the more issues that we have, the more stuff we're going to have to dig out of, right? And what I'm honestly envisioning at some point in the, I don't know how long this will take, the crypto bubble took way longer to pop than I expected. So I don't know how long it's going to be before this one does. But I'm expecting that there's going to be this big push to try to clean up a bunch of this crap here in a few years. Once people realize that a lot of the code that's being written and generated right now is, has all of these vulnerabilities that nobody's bothering to check for at the moment.

• 28:40Ed Zitron?

  Right. And those vulnerabilities, again, non-technical way, I read that it was like they call upon things on GitHub that don't exist. So bad actors create something that resembles what it's pulling from.

• 28:51Speaker 07

  That's so that's that's a more specific kind of one. I mean, there are a lot of things. I mean, so there have been computer viruses since the eighties, right? Um, you know, the the Morris worm and that kind of stuff. And basically, there are known ways that code, if you you have to write it in a particular way in order for it to be secure, right?

• 29:12Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 29:12Speaker 07

  And even then, sometimes people come up with novel ways of making something not secure.

• 29:16Ed Zitron?

  And how how do you have to write it to make it secure if if it's possible to explain?

• 29:20Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, there's a big, long list of rules, right? I mean, one thing you can do is you can use languages that are what they call safer.

• 29:27Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 29:27Speaker 07

  But still, you have to make sure that any input that you get from the network, you're really, really careful to make sure that it doesn't get to overwrite parts of your program that actually execute things.

• 29:37Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 29:38Speaker 07

  Um, you have to make sure that it doesn't have the opportunity to be able to write to pieces places on your disk that it shouldn't be able to write to. Um, you have to be able to make sure that it doesn't have access to to read data that it shouldn't be able to read, you know, all that kind of stuff. And when those things don't happen, you end up with, you know, so and so got hacked, you know, turns out that somebody we think maybe China is reading the email of the, you know, people in Congress. Um, you get another letter in the mail that says your social security number has been, you know, leaked by, you know, some credit checking firm or something like that.

• 30:15Ed Zitron?

  Even even like, I think it was what the big hot target data breach from a while back was through the HVAC system. Like, it was, it was, it's just, except now we've got, and that was with humans writing the code.

• 30:29Speaker 07

  Right.

• 30:29Ed Zitron?

  Imagine if we didn't know, oh, God, it really does feel like the the young people are like the, actually, now I take it back. You were talking about Agile the other day. I'm going to ask you to explain that in a second.

• 30:41Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 30:41Ed Zitron?

  But it's like, it sounds like for almost decades, they've been gnawing away at management's been gnawing away at the sides of building good software and building good software culture.

• 30:53Speaker 07

  Yes, I mean, there's an argument that says that we never got it right in the first place. But I mean, if you think about it, software has been a thing for what 50 years, 60 years, 70 years, right? I mean, compare that to like, construction engineering, or bridge building, or that kind of stuff, right? We're still, relatively speaking, in our infancy as an industry. You know, it's been a constant evolution, and a lot of times, the things that were, the things that we did to solve a problem that we had, ended up causing other problems, right? So going back to Agile, in the long, long ago, right, we used to manage software projects the same way we manage like, build, you know, bridge building,

• 31:35Speaker 07

  and building, building progress, you know, construction projects. And it turns out that when you're going to build a bridge, you know beforehand what you need to build the bridge to do. When you're building software, a lot of times, people are changing their minds as you go, right? And you build a thing, and you show it to them, and they're like, "Oh, why don't we put this over here, and why don't we change this?" And that kind of thing, right? Because you don't have the same kind of constraints, physical constraints, that you do when you're trying to build a bridge. And so, we got in this problem where you would create these project plans about how you were going to build this thing, and you would never be anywhere close to on time, because things would change the whole time. Right. And so, they created this thing called the Agile methodology. I'm drastically simplifying, there were steps in the middle, but basically, so this Agile thing is where we, instead

• 32:18Speaker 07

  of saying, "Okay, so this is what the whole project's going to look like, we're going to be doing, we're going to be done in six months, and then things changing along the way," we basically block off a thing called a sprint. It's a week or two, or a month, maybe, it depends. And then, you know, everybody picks their own sprint length. And then you go, "Okay, I'm only going to talk about what's going to happen in the next sprint or two." Right? And then you get to the end of that two weeks, and you go, "Okay, cool. This is what we got done. What do we want to do next?" And then, "Okay, that's what we got going, what do we want to do next?" And that kind of thing. And that way, as you go, you have the opportunity to change things, you have an opportunity to roll changes into the process, that kind of thing, right? The problem with that is, kind of the same way that dates always ran out in waterfall land, projects can go way, way longer than they

• 33:02Speaker 07

  were expected to at the beginning, because everybody's focused on just two weeks at a time, and you never kind of take a big step back, like you ought to, and go, "Okay, wait, you know, we were supposed to be done, you know, two months ago. When are we going to wrap this up?"

• 33:16Ed Zitron?

  Right. And how has that led to things getting worse? Is it that just software culture, software development culture has been focused on short term perpetually?

• 33:26Speaker 07

  The short term is part of it. Um, part of it is there are, you know, unscrupulous developers out there that basically want to extend the, the length of the project so they can get more money out of it.

• 33:38Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 33:39Speaker 07

  Right. That's, that's always the case. But the other thing is that you end up with a, a real, um,

• 33:47Speaker 07

  a lot of times you end up with a real lack of like long-term planning and long-term understanding.

• 33:51Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 33:52Speaker 07

  Right. Cause everybody's, you know, same kind of thing, you know, companies are only worried about what happens next quarter. Right. If you're only worried about what's going to happen the next week or the next four weeks, um, the, the things that you look on, look at, you know, tend not to have the longer term implications that sometimes you need. Right. And there are times you get close to the end and you're like, oh, you know, we didn't think about this.

• 34:15Ed Zitron?

  What do we build?

• 34:15Speaker 07

  Problem. Yeah.

• 34:17Ed Zitron?

  And also, if you're in a two or three week thing, you're probably not thinking even what you did last sprint. Like it.

• 34:25Speaker 07

  Maybe last one, but not like two or three, two or three ones ago.

• 34:29Ed Zitron?

  Is this a problem throughout organizations of all sizes? Is this a consultancy problem? Is, is it everywhere?

• 34:35Speaker 07

  Um, it's most places.

• 34:38Ed Zitron?

  Huh.

• 34:38Speaker 07

  Um, there, there are, there are some places that are, um, usually in startups, um, we're a lot more, um, ad hoc and we're a lot more, you know, focused on trying to get things done. Um, the, basically the, the, the idea is the larger you get as an organization, um, and the more money you're throwing at it and the more management control you want, um, the more of this overhead you put in place and the more complicated things get as just as a, as a management structure kind of thing.

• 35:12Ed Zitron?

  And this in the bigger, so this is something you'd seen like a Google and an Amazon as well.

• 35:16Speaker 07

  Oh, absolutely.

• 35:18Ed Zitron?

  So do you, do you think it has the same organizational effects or?

• 35:22Speaker 07

  Um, largely, yes. Um, the, so those organizations tend to be, well,

• 35:32Speaker 07

  Those organizations historically have tended to be before the recent like insidification wave. Those, I'm assuming I can swear on this.

• 35:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:44Speaker 07

  The, um, the, those organizations have historically been fairly more engineering driven, which means that you typically have people higher in the organization that are technical and have been programmers and who understand some of the implications. And so they tend to try, at least we try, to run interference with management and to try to, you know, make sure everybody's on the same page and that kind of stuff. A lot of, a lot, not all, but a lot of problems can get, get lessened if you have people in the organization that are at a higher level, whose job is not to manage people, but whose job is basically to keep track and coordinate between different groups that are doing different technical things.

• 36:27Ed Zitron?

  Right. To make sure people aren't building the same thing, I'm guessing, or are building the right thing in the right way.

• 36:32Speaker 07

  Yeah. And that, and that how, what this group is building is going to impact what this group is building at some point in the future. And making sure that when you get to the point where those two things need to talk to each other, they're both aware enough of what the other one is doing, that the two things hook together correctly.

• 36:47Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. So based on my analyses of these companies, that's definitely gone out the window. I mean, even with LLM integration. So there was a Johnson and Johnson story that went out in Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago, where it was like, they had 890 LLM project, or generative AI projects, of which take like the Pareto principle wins again, 10, 15% of them were actually useful. And the thing that stunned me about that, other than the fact it confirmed my biases, which I love, was the fact that there were 890 of the fucking things. And no one was like, should we have this many? That there was no like software engineering culture that was like, hey, are we all chasing our tails? Is this useless? But it sounds like they were all focused on their little boxes.

• 37:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, so the other thing, so I understand that, again, greatly oversimplifying. A lot of the new stuff that's happened with large language machines, large language models and generative AI, people didn't expect, right? It was kind of a surprise when you throw a whole bunch more data at a large language model and it started spitting out text in a way that nobody really, there was no like mathematical reason to expect it to be able to be as good at generating autocomplete stuff as it was, right? And so there's this belief that if we did the thing and we unexpectedly got more than we asked for, if we do more of the thing, maybe we'll unexpectedly get more of what we wanted, right?

• 38:16Speaker 07

  That hasn't seemed to really pan out the last couple of years from what I can see, but that, that we don't really understand enough about this to know whether it's going to work, so we might as well throw spaghetti at the wall and see if it sticks, because it might. Kind of mentality is kind of pervasive at the moment. And everybody's, there's a lot of FOMO, there's a lot of like, you know, well, our competitors are probably doing this and so we don't want to get left behind. It's kind of reminds me of the rumors that they talked about back in the 80s when the CIA was doing all this psychic research, because supposedly the Russians were doing psychic research and it was all complete crap, but both sides were convinced that the other side was making some progress and so everybody was dumping a ton of money into it.

• 38:59Ed Zitron?

  LLMK Ultra.

• 39:02Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 39:02Ed Zitron?

  Yes. Title of the episode.

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• 41:17Ed Zitron?

  So, okay, ultra aside, is this something you're seeing in software development, though? Because I know I've seen it in management where it's just kind of like, shut the shit in there. This seems like it's an important thing, right? Or is this, are you seeing it within software development?

• 41:32Speaker 07

  So I am seeing it within software planning, right? So when managers are sitting down and saying, okay, we need to build this new thing. We need to create a new group. We need to split this group apart. We need to decide what our headcount's going to be for next year. There's a lot of, okay, and what do we think the AI is going to do next year? And how many headcount do we think that's going to save us? And that kind of thing, right? There are some companies, Duolingo is one, Klarna is one.

• 41:57Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 41:58Speaker 07

  Um, OP, uh, sorry, BP, the former British Petroleum, uh, what last year had a thing where they said they were cutting seventy percent of their contract software developers.

• 42:08Ed Zitron?

  And in most of these, they've kind of pulled, rolled them back as well.

• 42:11Speaker 07

  Um, I don't think Duolingo has yet, but.

• 42:13Ed Zitron?

  They, they, no, this, this is just being unfair to you. They like a day ago.

• 42:17Speaker 07

  Really?

• 42:17Ed Zitron?

  Just like, ah, we're kinda, it's so fun. It's so funny. It's so funny that this just keeps happening in exactly the same way. It's like, oh, what a surprise, human beings to do stuff.

• 42:26Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 42:27Ed Zitron?

  But it kind of gets back to, I think, what you've said about everything with L L Ms. It's like, you can teach something to say, yeah, I think the right, the thing you're looking for is this, but you can't teach it context. And that's been a point you've made again and again.

• 42:38Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 42:39Ed Zitron?

  Like, the, it seems the job of a software engineer is highly contextual, unless you're like in the earlier days.

• 42:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, and, and I, I liken it sometimes to the, the memento guy from the memento movie, right? Where like can't form long-term memories.

• 42:51Ed Zitron?

  Hmm.

• 42:51Speaker 07

  Um, then do you, do you really want the memento guy to be the person that's building the, the software that makes the seven thirty-seven Macs, um, be able to compensate for its control input?

• 43:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Well, the, the thing is though, with that argument, they would argue, and I, I know that there is a better argument here. They would argue, well, what if we just give it everything that's ever happened? What if we just show every single thing we've ever done on GitHub? Surely then it would understand.

• 43:19Speaker 07

  So what the, what I have seen from the papers that I have read is that L L Ms have a basically squishy middle context problem, kind of the way that you do, right?

• 43:31Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 43:32Speaker 07

  So if somebody gives you a big document to read or a big long documentary to watch or something, and then they ask you questions, what they're gonna find is that you remember a lot more from the beginning of that and the end of that than you do from the middle of that, right?

• 43:43Ed Zitron?

  Hmm.

• 43:44Speaker 07

  Um, and L L Ms have the same kind of problem, right? And the other problem that the L L Ms seem to have is that when you give them a whole bunch of instructions, just instructions, pile on instructions, pile on instructions, um, they can either get confused and, and forget some of the instructions, or they deadlock, or they just start going, okay, I can't satisfy all of these, so I'm not even gonna bother to satisfy any of them. Or they'll pick one or two. Um, the, the fact that you can take a million tokens and you can stick that in the memory block that the, the, the. The GPU is going to process doesn't necessarily believe doesn't necessarily mean that all of the tokens in that memory block are actually going to be treated equally and

• 44:29Speaker 07

  going to be understood, right?

• 44:32Speaker 07

  In theory, maybe if you could

• 44:39Speaker 07

  train your if you could like custom train an LLM and modify all of its weights based on exactly what your stuff was and do that like day after day after day after day as things changed, you would theoretically get better. I still don't think it would be, you know, I still don't think it would understand the context as well, but that would be ridiculously expensive.

• 45:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And at that point, you could train a person.

• 45:08Speaker 07

  Yes, I mean, the person would probably be more annoying. I mean, the point, I mean, a lot of this is seems to be really, you know, we don't like dealing with the prima donna programmer kind of thing, right? The there's this, you know, I mean, not just programmers, right? We don't also don't want to deal with the the prima donna reporters or the prima donna illustrators.

• 45:31Ed Zitron?

  We just want to get rid of these people.

• 45:33Speaker 07

  Right.

• 45:33Ed Zitron?

  These annoying, they ask for stuff, they want money.

• 45:36Speaker 07

  Yeah. And days off and sick leave and, you know, healthcare and.

• 45:41Ed Zitron?

  This is disgusting. How dare they? It's so it's frustrating as well because it across software development and everything, but especially with software developers feels just very insulting because it doesn't seem like this stuff. Actually, here's a better question. Have you seen much of an improvement with like oh, one oh three, like these reasoning? Do you think the reasoning models change things for the better? And if so, how?

• 46:07Speaker 07

  Um, so.

• 46:11Speaker 07

  A little, um, they don't make as many stupid mistakes. It is basically what it boils down to. Going back to your first thing, though, right? I mean, so there was a piece, actually a couple of pieces recently. One of them was about, you know, tech workers are just like the rest of us. They're miserable. There was, I'll give you links to these. The other one was a Cory Doctorow piece that was like,

• 46:35Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:35Speaker 07

  The the future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers or vice versa. There's, there's a lot of, there has been a lot of deference given to software developers over time because, you know, we have been kind of the engine that's made a lot of the the last 20, 30 years work. And there's a desire to make that not so anymore, right? And to make us just as interchangeable as everybody else. I guess, you know, from a, from a economic standpoint, I kind of don't blame them. I understand why they're trying to do what they're doing. I don't, I mean, I don't think that the warehouse workers should be treated the way

• 47:17Speaker 07

  the warehouse workers are treated, you know, much less everybody else gets treated that way. And it's been a lot worse since the giant layoffs at Twitter, now X. When that happened and the thing didn't crash and completely burn like everybody was, or not everybody, but a lot of people were expecting it to. The, the sentiment became, well, maybe all this, all these software developers aren't as important as they, you know, we've always thought they were. And, you know, we will see over time what the end result of that is. My guess is it's going to be end up being a mess. But, you know,

• 47:59Ed Zitron?

  They had a server gone.

• 48:00Speaker 07

  I'm a software developer, right? I'm gonna, it behooves me for it to be a mess, right? So it might just be my bias that's getting in the way.

• 48:08Ed Zitron?

  I actually, I think that you're right, though, because I remember back in 2021 and onward, the kind of post remote work, the remote works, there was the whole anti remote work push, but there was this, the whole Quiet quitting and things like that. That's 2022. Whereas like software engineering, they're just there. They expect to be treated so well because 2021 saw the insane hiring.

• 48:29Speaker 07

  Right.

• 48:30Ed Zitron?

  You saw tech companies like parking software workers. I think that played into it as well, where all of these companies who chose to pay these software engineers, they, they were the ones that made the offers, got pissed off that they'd done so and thought, we should cut all labor down to size. And then along comes coding. Almost makes me wonder if most of these venture capitalists talking about this don't know how to code themselves. You gotta wonder.

• 48:54Speaker 07

  I don't, I don't know many that do.

• 48:57Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 48:57Speaker 07

  I, I know some that have at some point, but, um.

• 49:03Ed Zitron?

  But yeah, it's at some point. It's like, they're not part of modern software development culture, which I know sounds kind of wanky, but I mean, just how an organization builds software feels like something they should know. But then again, they don't know how to build a real organization either. So who the fuck.

• 49:19Speaker 07

  Yeah. Well, I mean, honestly, a lot of it. I, I've been in organizations that VCs basically killed.

• 49:27Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 49:27Speaker 07

  Because, you know, we built a thing, that thing was, you know, a, a reasonable business. But VCs don't want a reasonable business. They want either a hundred X return or they want a tax write off and they don't want anything in between. Right?

• 49:41Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 49:42Speaker 07

  So, I mean, what, what they're looking for is really, I mean, they're, they're not trying to run a regular business, right? They're not trying to do the normal process. They're trying to, to either, you know, hit one out of the park or throw it away and move on. Um, and so they're, they're, the rules for them are different because what they're trying to accomplish is not what the rest of us are trying to accomplish as a general rule.

• 50:03Ed Zitron?

  Constant theme of the fucking show. It's just like, it's just like you have these people that don't code saying how coders should code like. Dario Amade the other day saying that this year, we're going to have the first one person software company with a billion dollars revenue or something like that. And it's just, I feel like there are some people who should not be allowed to speak as much sometimes. But it's just frustrating and insulting and it's, but now that you've got me thinking about it, it does feel like this is an attempt to reset the labor market finally coming for software developers. And I don't mean finally in a good way.

• 50:36Speaker 07

  Right. It, I mean, it, it feels like that being in the, being in that, um, being in that industry at the moment, it, it really feels like that.

• 50:44Ed Zitron?

  Is it scary right now?

• 50:46Speaker 07

  Is it scary right now? Um, not for me, um, cause I'm old enough to be semi-retired, right? Right. But I, I mean, I've been talking to a lot of folks, um, I've been having a, interviewing a bunch of folks that are, that are listeners to my channel and kind of trying to get a feel for what's going on. Um, and I've talked to folks that are, you know, like I said, that I talked to some folks that were like, you know, I work for a big bank, they're cramming co-pilot down our throat whether we want it or not. Um, I've talked to some folks that are like, every time I sit down with my boss, I'm thinking that, you know, this is going to be the day that I'm going to find out that my, my group is getting cut the way the other three groups in, in the company is getting cut.

• 51:25Speaker 07

  There's a lot of, um, uh, artificial productivity, uh, requirement increases kind of thing, which is. Like, like what? Um, just, you know, we, you know, we expect more tickets closed per, you know, two week period than, you know, we've had before because we've, we're giving you this AI now, so you ought to be more productive, that kind of thing. Um, would a ticket necessarily be something that you just write code for? Or was it more than just that? Well, so generally it's more than just that, but, but generally the, the, the ticket, that's kind of the, the way that we track the work that we do. Right. In, in a lot of organizations, right? And some tickets are like, I'm building a new thing and those are kind of easier to predict.

• 52:07Speaker 07

  And some tickets are, this thing isn't behaving right, go figure out where the bug is, and those are a lot harder to predict. But they, they, they have these things, Agile has this, this thing called a velocity graph where basically you see how many tickets per person get closed over time. And people want to see the slope of that, that line change because they're giving you AI. Wow. And I'm guessing the people telling you to change that don't know what they're talking about. That seems to be the case. Great.

• 52:35Speaker 07

  I, so, I mean, the, the, the good news in theory, right? I don't know to what extent this is going to happen, but in theory, um, if you, if they keep telling people, you know, that, that slope of that line should be changing because you have AI now. Over time, if we see the slope of that line not changing. Uh, though. Right, then theoretically it will be proof that the. The AI is not providing the return that people expected.

• 52:59Ed Zitron?

  Or you're not using it right.

• 53:01Speaker 07

  Well, yes, there's always the you're not prompting it, right?

• 53:03Ed Zitron?

  That is, that is basically what I am, people, the one of the many reasons why you want is like, I want to have people that actually code on to talk about this stuff because it's really easy as a layman myself and for others to just be like, oh, but this does replace coding, right? And it does, it sounds like it really doesn't, like it can help, it can be like a a force multiplier to an extent, but even past the initial steps, it just isn't there.

• 53:31Speaker 07

  I mean, so the best analogy I've always found to writing code is actually just writing. Right? I mean, you can get chat GPT to spit out a few paragraphs for you. Right? But, you know, you end up with, you know, the legal briefs that have the story that's made up or the, you know, just things that aren't connected to reality or stuff that, you know, when people read them, they're like, I mean, you've, you, you can tell the difference between AI slop generated, you know, like the, the stupid, um, the, the insert from the Chicago Sun-Times.

• 54:03Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 54:04Speaker 07

  The Philadelphia Inquirer, you know, about all the, all the things you can do this summer, right? That like made up books and all that kind of, I mean, like, but even, even the articles that weren't the ones that were making up stuff, you read the, you know, this is what's going to be happening this summer. This is what the weather is going to be like or whatever. And you're reading and you're like this, this, there's no like insight here, there's no thought here, there's no, you know, there, there's nothing in here that I, I get to the end of this. I've read the whole thing. I understand the whole thing, but I don't have anything I can walk away with.

• 54:34Ed Zitron?

  Right. And AI agents aren't coming along to replace software, but you're not scared of Devon?

• 54:41Speaker 07

  I am not scared of Devon. Um, so I, well, actually I kind of am. I am scared that Devon is going to make a mess of things and then more things are going to get hacked. And that's going to end up being worse for everybody on the internet, right?

• 54:53Ed Zitron?

  How would it do that?

• 54:54Speaker 07

  By like we were talking about before, right? So when you write code that isn't secure, right? And you write code that, you know, uses a library that's got an old version of a thing that they that there's a known bug in it, but you don't bother to check to see if there's a fix for that bug, or you don't use best practices when it comes to writing code and that kind of thing. Or you don't think about the the kinds of maintainability issues that you're going to have. And you do things like you ship out code in a in a Internet of Things thing, a light bulb, right? Or a Internet Wi-Fi router that cannot be patched over the Internet that has a bug in it. Right? And now it's like that thing is going to have a bug in it forever.

• 55:38Speaker 07

  And you're going to have to find all the ones on the on the earth and turn them off before someone's not going to be able to take them and be able to hack them and use them to attack somebody else from there.

• 55:48Ed Zitron?

  I mean, IoT is a huge problem.

• 55:50Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:50Ed Zitron?

  But the cheaper ones have like the spy web stuff and

• 55:54Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 55:54Ed Zitron?

  crypto mining.

• 55:55Speaker 07

  It just But yeah, the ones the ones that have that have like really nasty vulnerabilities and they have no way of being updated once they leave the factory. Right? And it's just as long as they're out there, they're going to be a problem literally for everybody on the Internet.

• 56:09Ed Zitron?

  Jesus. Well, what can, to wrap us up, what can a a new engineer, someone new to software development, what can they learn right now? You've kind of done a video on this, but I think it's a good place to wrap us up. What can they start learning to actually get ahead, to actually prepare for all of this?

• 56:27Speaker 07

  That's a really good question. So you can't, these days, you can't really be able to be an engineer, you can't get hired as an engineer without some ability to talk about being able to do prompts and use, you know, some kind of AI code editor or that kind of thing. It's just an expectation of the job now. Whether it should be or not is a different thing. The, I mean, like I said before,

• 56:54Speaker 07

  There are situations where you tell it what you want and it will type faster than you possibly can. So, you know, that's not necessarily bad. You need to understand that. You need to figure out, well, okay, I'll get back to something else. You need to figure out basically how to test the thing, right? So how do you make sure that the code that it spits out does what you meant it to do? And what I'm expecting is that we're going to spend more time thinking about testing and thinking more about, you know, trying to find exceptions and that kind of thing than we have in the past. Because the code that's actually being generated is going to be less likely to be quality than it was in the past.

• 57:29Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 57:29Speaker 07

  Um, the, the problem is it has become the case in the, in the programming industry that the things you need to do to get through the interview to get hired have very little resemblance to the things that you actually do on the job that you need to actually do a good job.

• 57:44Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 57:44Speaker 07

  And so that's a, that's a whole different, we could probably have a whole other podcast episode just about the interviewing problem. But the, the main thing right now, it's so, right now, the whole hiring thing, and this isn't, I don't think, true for just programmers, but it's especially true for programmers, is all, you know, bots that customize your resume and write a custom cover letter and then send them over to the, the, the, submit the, the thing to the bot that's screening the resume and screening the cover letter, right? And that, getting it to the point where you can actually talk to a human is a nightmare right now. So the whole hiring system is kind of broken. So that the actually getting to the point where you can get hired is a, is a nightmare at the moment.

• 58:28Speaker 07

  But the, the thing that you can do is figure out what kinds of things that AI are good at, is good at. And one of the things that AI is pretty good at is things that don't matter as much, right? So like, you know, AI can pick the layout of a site potentially, right? And you could have it pick two or three of them and you can basically do what's called an A/B test. And you can randomly assign people to it. You could figure out which one of them performs better and you can throw the rest of them away.

• 58:54Ed Zitron?

  And even then, at some point, you will probably want the design customized.

• 58:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, but, but.

• 59:01Speaker 07

  I think there will be a lot of things where people can kind of get something that's kind of good enough to get started.

• 59:11Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 59:11Speaker 07

  Right? And I think that to some extent, this is going to be kind of a boon for the industry in the longer term, where somebody who can't program right now, but who has some idea of kind of what they want, can do like a vibe coding thing. They can validate that the market that they want to try to attack exists, right? And that people want to use the kind of thing that they built, and then they can bring in somebody to actually build it right. You know what I mean?

• 59:37Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 59:37Speaker 07

  And those kinds of things wouldn't necessarily have been able to happen in the complete absence of AI. So it's not, I don't think, completely useless. And there are times when, as a developer, there are things that we're not good at, like, you know, writing marketing copy and that kind of stuff, that if we're trying to do a project for ourselves, you know, a lot of that stuff, we can just outsource to the AI, because it's not the thing that keeps the project from actually breaking and getting hacked and that kind of thing, right? So it's kind of like, there's this concept where you need to keep the things that are part of your competitive advantage in-house, and everything else you can kind of outsource to somebody else. The kinds of things you can outsource to somebody else are the kinds of things that you potentially you could throw an AI at, because they're not core to you.

• 1:00:18Ed Zitron?

  But even then, it's like, it doesn't seem like that's a ton of things right now, or will be.

• 1:00:24Speaker 07

  Um, again, it's, it's the, so it's basically two things. It's things that were, the quality of the thing doesn't matter, really. Right? Which, every business has those kinds of things, right? And they're the kinds of things where you can define a metric that you can test the AI against, and let it try over and over and over and over and over again, until it gets to the point where it's good enough.

• 1:00:47Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:47Speaker 07

  So if your metric is more people click on this button than The button before, right? Then you can have the AI create a whole bunch of different ways to skin that button, right? And then you can say, okay, so the one that tested best is the one we're going to keep. That's the thing you can throw an AI at, right? Because you've got a well-defined way of checking in, no telling how long it's going to take, but you have a well-defined way of checking to see if it's working right or not.

• 1:01:13Ed Zitron?

  So, yeah, I mean, for years, I've had the theory that this industry was a 20 to 25 billion dollar total addressable market, pretending to be a trillion dollar one. And everything you're saying really suggests that it's like you're describing things like platform as a service, like, like, things that you use in tandem with very real people and intentional ideas.

• 1:01:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, this is, I don't see a world in which this is a, we replace all the humans, you know, the, the, the whole like, you know, this is going to displace 80% of the white collar workers in the world. I, I just, you know, the, the, the only, the only people that are really going to be replaced anytime soon are people that either weren't doing a great job to start with, or people whose bosses don't understand what they were doing to the point that the boss thought that what they were doing mattered. And my guess is that there's going to be regret at that point, and that at some point, they're going to have to bring those people back.

• 1:02:12Ed Zitron?

  Well, Cole, this has been such a wonderful conversation. Where can people find you?

• 1:02:17Speaker 07

  I am internetofbugs at YouTube is probably the easiest place to find me. And then there are links on that, that channel to point to other things.

• 1:02:25Ed Zitron?

  And you've been listening to me, Ed Zitron. You've been listening to Better Offline. Thank you, everyone, for listening. And yeah, we'll catch you next week.

• 1:02:39Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com, M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot app to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 1:03:11Speaker 05

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