The guy has zero imagination, I guess. Even Facebook was a stolen and mostly unoriginal idea, it was just executed well for that era. I can only feel sad for him, all the money in the world yet not a single creative or interesting idea to allocate it on. And the unoriginal things it is allocated on end up being pretty bad most of the time.
We’re supposed to have sympathy for techbros making half a million or more a year because.. they have to have their computer use monitored? Not even getting into the numerous list of unethical behavior of meta..
Yep Kubernetes, more micro services than engineers, some complicated protocol that saves a few bytes of overhead, cloud everything, and tons of classes that could have been simple functions.
Coding agents have been better than the average "enterprise" programmer for a while now and nobody wants to admit it or talk about it. I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this.
People call coding agents bad because they don't know the asinine meaningless conventions at their particular company while they themselves write awful abstractions and brittle tightly coupled systems, but hey, at least they know how to write a for loop how their particular company likes.
> I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this.
And how long does it take a coding agent to output a thousand lines of code versus a human? The worst human at any company was rate limited by themselves. Those 'average enterprise' programmers aren't going away, they're the ones now spending tens of thousands on coding agents and filling your codebase with even more garbage without bothering to review an iota of it.
Which is why one of the big problems for the field right now is that a) most code bases still need someone more skilled than a mere robot driver, and b) many developers are not better than that.
In the past, a team of five mid devs and one good one would be fine, because that good one would ride herd on the mid ones. But now those mid ones are slamming out robot code that they're incapable of meaningfully reviewing (because it's better than they are already), and they're just overwhelming the good dev's capacity.
The solution, of course, is to fire them all -- they're worthless now -- but this is not going to happen quickly, and it's probably for the best that it doesn't.
> And how long does it take a coding agent to output a thousand lines of code versus a human?
Sometimes the human is faster.
I've seen someone duplicate a class file (already filled with duplicate methods) rather than subclassing, and when called out on this it was because properties were private.
This was a team with just me and him in it, it didn't even really benefit from things being private.
That said, the really important lesson I've learned over the years is that terrible code and practices are almost irrelevant: this app won awards and was highly regarded.
> I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this.
I've seen countless vibecoded implementations that look exactly like that. Especially painful is agents adding the same utility functions in each and every file instead of properly reusing or splitting things.
Does taking this example and extending it to the limit answer your question? There is a reason we don’t have a single file called program with a million lines of code in it. Google studies on module size vs code defect rates for more empirical numbers.
The limit you're replying to is files which are each tens of lines long. At that point, the cognitive overhead of switching documents is larger than the benefit of a compact object to reason about.
(Personally my threshold is around 2-5 thousand lines per file depending on what it is; but that's me working solo, obviously I'll follow whatever standards any team I'm in gives me).
I like Kent Beck, but this reads as mostly boomer nonsense. What if that C player is working 3 jobs at once making 3x as much with more job security to boot. What if that C player is simply working less because they’re content working less and having less responsibility?
Corporations love people with Kent Beck’s mindset, ladder climbers willing to jump on command for praise, working twice as hard for a raise or meaningless title that may not justify the stress and hours.
And when corporate needs to lay off 30% they’ll think nothing of it.
If you have Kent Beck’s mindset and you’re not pouring it into something you have equity in, you may as well just call yourself a useful idiot.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
If I hired a full time programmer and found out they had two other jobs I'd probably let them focus on those other two. If they were showing the "C" behaviors in all three jobs, they have no job security, unless they work where they can't be let go.
IME many people are in it for the love of the game. They want to get better, they want to be able to perform the “magic” the Sr people come up with. It’s fun.
It's not uniformity, it's cargo culting and offloading thinking to group norms. Doesn't help engineers are some of the most arrogant people alive and refuse to admit anything is complicated, as they consider it some kind affront to their intelligence.
I would not advise asking the majority of CTOs these questions either. Many got to that position by saying what people want to hear, which is the "average" safe answer. They will parrot whatever is "hot" at that time because it's the least risky response. They are not your friend nor a reliable source.
I think a big part of this whole discussion (and why it's always such a divisive topic) is that there are so many factors to consider that there is no one single golden bullet.
An industry standard just makes this issue go away; also it makes the decision making easier since you're not taking risks going for "VM-with-systemd" or "plain docker" or "bare metal" over $STANDARD.
> I would not advise asking the majority of CTOs these questions either. Many got to that position by saying what people want to hear, which is the "average" safe answer.
Agree; this is the same as asking people why they're not having kids: they either a) don't know or b) don't want to / are not willing to say the truth.
I believe a better phrasing for this is “standards change but your program will always be crappy”. Meaning if you choose all the popular tools and languages of the era because they’re standard and not because they’re the right fit for the project, the standards will eventually evolve and move on like they always do, but your program will sit fossilized and bad.
Crazy mental gymnastics if you think the American oligarchs don’t have the final say on everything in America. They’re just smart enough to do it behind the scenes, well they used to be. They barely bother anymore.
Shaming others when all AI is trained off scraped content and code huh? Many of those sources either breaking ToS or being illegal, such as Anna’s Archive. Bold move. And Chinese models in particular have been accused of distilling off American models.
We’ve detected zero cases of any Chinese models doing this. I’m quite tired of the American propaganda. If only Americans understood China really does not care about them outside of wanting to sell them things. They’re too busy building high speed rails, modern cities, and providing healthcare to their citizens. I am ashamed to be an American these days.
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