We’d all wish it’d be so, doctor. Sometimes it’s as clean as biological systems - touch something somewhere, a different seemingly completely unrelated thing elsewhere breaks.
Even in the dawn of the era, where accumulated complexity was a while lot lower, we have tales of 500-mile emails and “magic/more magic” switch ;-)
Inferring things in a legacy codebase old enough to drink can be quite a challenge. And the way I get it, you folks are dealing with a multimillenia-old mess of layering violations - so no surprise first principles are tricky.
Indeed, but then not surprising. Russia haven’t ever had developed a mature democracy, it merely had a very brief chance at taking long road of becoming one, and everything went off the rails in just a decade or so. Kind of a handicap when it comes to keeping bloodthirsty politicians and siloviki in check.
At least that produces tangible value for the rest of us this way.
Current idea of sports is that athletes wreck themselves for mere performance value (and money to the people who set it up, with a bit trickling down to athletes for enabling it all). As far as I understand, nothing they directly do is otherwise reusable to anyone else.
I’d rather watch a live commercial for human enhancement industries. At least that’s something that eventually becomes available to everyone.
Nah, it's simpler. Microsoft just lost sense of UX and touch with the reality to their own internal management vibes.
Look at the Windows start menu. It used to be trivial to switch users. Two clicks, one to open the user list, another to switch - done. Now it's four: user panel, three-dots, switch user, pick user.
Look at the login sequence. They want their Windows Hello and they don't care if it works well or not - no way to get a pin or password prompt instantly, you gotta click three times (one to show a method picker, another to pick PIN entry, and lastly one to focus the goddamn field) despite no reasons to hide this UI.
It's not like they're trying to scam or sell user into something. It looks like some internal decision-makers that don't ever dogfood their decisions losing touch with the common sense.
Apple has that too, and this rot spreads elsewhere. But it's not intently malicious, a lot of things simply don't make sense - just total lack of self-reflection capabilities at the corporate level.
A lengthy preamble and then just… an advice to keep kicking, remain curious, tinker around and see how things are now, adjust to the new situation?
Am I missing something? Because it was always like that, you stop exploring and playing with new stuff and in just a blink you’re no longer relevant. (Which sucks if you’re burnt out or depressed.)
Ultimately he's pointing out the scope of the changes is significantly different. It's nothing like before when you could've kept up by learning new programming languages and frameworks.
Where we're going, programming languages and frameworks are rapidly losing relevance.
Ultimately it's still the same thing - problem solving in specific domains.
Languages and frameworks and libraries and IDEs and agent systems are all - in the end - just some new tooling, they were always the lower-hanging fruit. Cool, fancy, do novel magic, open paths previously unknown or thought impractical or unrealistic, but still - it's just some new ideas and instruments and ways how to use those efficiently - all to write programs that match our needs and fulfill our expectations, making things happen.
Nothing about underlying principles of software engineering had changed - some methods became more feasible, ML got really hot (and very rightfully so), but overall software projects are still software projects. Just recently I've looked at some machine-assisted software development courses and it was just the same good old "use your head, try your best to do things right or bad things happen, and here are the important gotchas of the day that you're best to constantly stay mindful about" material, just with "the machine can very rapidly produce code now, but it's not your code until you comprehend it" flavor, followed with a showcase of capabilities and features of newest tools on the market.
In my understanding, the eternal hustle still stays the same: find a passion, get into something, keep up with others, continuously learn new stuff, try to think something of your own and share, try to produce valuable things that others are willing to pay for, repeat until you can't anymore. Current state of "AI" doesn't disrupt this at all. Although it pushes the tempo up, and the times are stressful even without it.
Claude Code has to be actively steered, because while it knows some nixpkgs it surely doesn’t know it enough. E.g. it was absolutely incapable of fixing lldap settings after system upgrade from 25.05 to 25.11. It just prodded around blindly, producing meaningless configs instead learning how the module works.
NixOS docs work for me, but I tend to just go for the nixpkgs source instead. Manuals document options but not how those are actually plumbed through, nor what remains behind the scenes like all systemd unit settings). Claude can do this too, but it goes quite weird roundabout ways with a lot of weird `find /nix/store` and `nix eval`s to get to it, slow and token-hungry (and not always accurate).
This said, Claude is very helpful at checking logs and providing a picture of what’s going on - saves ton of time this way. Plus it can speed up iterating on changes after it’s fed enough knowledge (but don’t expect it to do things right, that’s still on you). It has breadth of it, but not the depth, and that shows at almost any non-trivial task.
You don't have Claude Code git clone nixpkgs and home-manager for local reference?
I feel you on the nix store + nix eval death loop, though it gleans real info. If I weren't on the Claude Max plan I'd probably feel more of the pain. And context is now 1MM tokens which means you're not running out just as it's starting to piece things together, heh.
I do, but it somehow tends to forget how to do things right now and then - despite having notes in memories system - and starts to do them in its own weird ways.
I’m going to experiment with skills next, or maybe make it build a few helper scripts for itself to quickly get some module source from nixpkgs matching flake.lock without having to think of it all. I’m positive about Claude for nix management, merely saying it’s not something that “just works” for now and reading nix code is still on the human part of the tandem.
This said, to be fair - when it gets the approach right, it excels. I was setting up Ente for photos backup and sharing, and it produced a nice overlay with custom patches for my needs from just “figure out why /shared-albums/ redirects wrong and fix”. Found the module, the package, pulled source, analyzed it, proposed a patch (settings weren’t enough), did it - I only had to test, and only because I haven’t provided it with a browser. Felt amazing.
We’d all wish it’d be so, doctor. Sometimes it’s as clean as biological systems - touch something somewhere, a different seemingly completely unrelated thing elsewhere breaks.
Even in the dawn of the era, where accumulated complexity was a while lot lower, we have tales of 500-mile emails and “magic/more magic” switch ;-)
Inferring things in a legacy codebase old enough to drink can be quite a challenge. And the way I get it, you folks are dealing with a multimillenia-old mess of layering violations - so no surprise first principles are tricky.
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