I know this sounds sarcastic but I really mean it: For years everyone has been monastically extolling some variation of "the best code is deleted code". Now, we have a machine that spits out infinite code that we can infinitely delete. It's a blessing that we can have shitty code generated that exposes at light speed how shitty our ideas are and have always been.
- A slimmed-down phpBB 2 "remake" in Bun.js/TypeScript
- An experimental SQLite extension for defining incremental materialized views
...And many more that are either too tiny, too idiosyncratic, or too day-job to name here. Some of these are one-off utilities, some are toys I'll never touch again, some are part of much bigger projects that I've been struggling to get any work done on, and so on.
I don't blame you for your cynicism, and I'm not blind to all of the criticism of LLMs and LLM code. I've had many times where I feel upset, skeptical, discouraged, and alienated because of these new developments. But also... it's a lot of fun and I can't stop coming up with ideas.
Unfortunately, the market seems to have produced horrors by way of naturally thinking agents, instead. I wish that, for all these years of prehistoric wretchedness, we would have had AI to blame. Many more years in the muck, it seems.
I resent the idea of an absolute standard of ergonomics or typing technique. I often use my left thumb to key z/x/c/v/b. I often reach with my left index finger to key y/h/b. During certain chords, my hands often cross over the split.
I tried multiple split keyboards over the period of 2 years and never grew out of these habits. I always wished, at the least, that some of the middle keys were duplicated between the two halves.
Eventually I received some permission to accept my personal "kinetic signature" (so to speak). Then the chronic wrist pain that led me to try split keyboards in the first place vanished. So I went back to using a normal tenkeyless. This led me to believe that split keyboards were ideal for some people, but that other people (like myself) are predisposed to a sort of perfectionism that entails physical guarding and chronic pain.
I still wish I had a wireless split keyboard for times when I'm supine and need to type, though.
> Then the chronic wrist pain that led me to try split keyboards in the first place vanished.
The elephant in the room with the 'ergonomics' argument for split keyboards is that you get a marginal improvement using the keyboard this way and ten times the effect by just getting up and going for a five minute walk every hour or so.
The same goes for mousephobia, which overlaps with split layout users. I still use neovim every day, but the quickest cure for the CTS symptoms that 'ergonomic' keyboard purist vim users seem to get much more than their IDE coworkers is just moving your hand to do something other than type in the exact same position for hours on end - something like grabbing a mouse. I strongly suspect that CTS in software engineers will go down in the next coming years as coding agents become more common and SWEs pick their hands up more (or just physically type less).
The same goes for back pain, if you're otherwise ablebodied enough to start resistance training it's infinitely more beneficial than whatever chair you're looking at.
There’s no reason not to try things. I’ve experienced CTS symptoms when using a regular mouse, which got fully resolved for years now by switching to a vertical one. Regardless of whether I should also make lifestyle changes, there’s zero reason to go back to an inferior mouse, just because that’s the design someone came up with in the 1960s.
Thanks for sharing. One of the challenges (always has been probably) with our heavy "influencer" culture is we tend to gloss over that what works for me, might not work for you and vice versa.
I recently switched to a split columnar layout but not for solely for ergonomics sake - I do the same things as you but with my right hand handling b, g, t, and my left hand moving over to accommodate (with "incorrect" fingering for c, and variable fingering for the whole of the left side).
My choice to move to a split was primarily motivated by a need to reset my typing style and a hatred for where the escape key sits on a keyboard (not forgetting the waste of space that is the spacebar.)
It would be neat if someone would make a zmk / qmk keyboard with five thumb keys where the space bar is. Might be the sweet spot for most.
When folks ask about my keyboard preferences, I always state that these things are personal and there is no "one size fits all". Fully realize that my keyboard, layout, hot keys, etc won't work for 99.9% of people.
However, I feel very strongly that if your body is telling you that something hurts or it is in pain, you should take action rather than right through it.
Yeah the handful of times I've tried a split keyboard, I dropped it because of this. Like I use a different hand for the 'y' key if I'm typing my (left index) versus yes (right index).
It's an ergonomic keyboard, not a split keyboard, but I have a Feker Alice 98 (highly recommended!) and it's got two B keys, one on either side of the ergonomic divider. Threw me for a loop when I first saw it. I only use the left one. :)
If you want it stated precisely, the function is human cognitive labor per unit time and cost.
For decades, progress mostly shifted physical constraints or communication bandwidth. Faster chips, better networks, cheaper storage. Those move slopes, not discontinuities. Humans still had to think, reason, design, write, debug. The bottleneck stayed human cognition.
LLMs changed that. Not marginally. Qualitatively.
The input to the function used to be “a human with training.” The output was plans, code, explanations, synthesis. Now the same class of output can be produced on demand, at scale, by a machine, with latency measured in seconds and cost approaching zero. That is a step change in effective cognitive throughput.
This is why “video calling another continent” feels incremental. It reduces friction in moving information between humans. AI reduces or removes the human from parts of the loop entirely.
You can argue about ceilings, reliability, or long term limits. Fine. But the step already happened. Tasks that were categorically human two years ago are now automatable enough to be economically and practically useful.
How is File Pilot for accessibility and for all of the little niceties like native scrolling, clipboard interaction, drag and drop, and so on? My impression is that the creator is has expertly focused on most/all of these details, but I don't have Windows to test.
I insist on good UI as well, and, as a web developer, have spent many hours hand rolling web components that use <canvas>. The most complicated one is a spreadsheet/data grid component that can handle millions of rows, basically a reproduction of Google Sheets tailored to my app's needs. I insist on not bloating the front-end package with a whole graph of dependencies. I enjoy my NIH syndrome. So I know quality when I see it (File Pilot). But I also know how tedious reinventing the wheel is, and there are certain corners that I regularly cut. For example there's no way a blind user could use my spreadsheet-based web app (https://github.com/glideapps/glide-data-grid is better than me in this aspect, but there's no way I'm bringing in a million dependencies just to use someone else's attempt to reinvent the wheel and get stuck with all of their compromises).
The answer to your original question about why these billion dollar companies don't create artisanal software is pretty straightforward and bleak, I imagine. But there are a few actually good reasons not to take the artisanal path.
> CPC controls and owns production, policy, finance and even consumption levers.
These terms are useless for distinguishing anything -- what you said can be said about literally any capitalist state.
> China is one party system
This is also relatively uninteresting. There have been many countries where a single party has nominally remained in power for about as long as the CCP has. That Deng Xiaoping's coup occurred without nominally dismantling the party makes the "one party system" distinction a superficial one.
> These terms are useless for distinguishing anything -- what you said can be said about literally any capitalist state.
CPC mandates and gets seats on highest boards of companies, combines IP research across civil military, is both producer and consumer of products etc. Look at China's civil military fusion policy on the latest iteration of how they are doing this. In china there is no separate 3-4 branches of govt like in most places. CPC controls all legislative, executive, judiciary, military and private company boards and financial capital.
Again, just about everything you said applies to the U.S. state and its relations to private firms. Regardless of all that, profits accrue to private owners, investment decisions are determined by profit, and labor is hired and disciplined via market relations. All of the political relations you listed only marginally modify capitalist relations; the law of value still operates.
One emperor in US state doesn't control legislative, executive, judiciary, military and private company boards and financial capital. The way you have to look at China it is an empire with bit of communism and capitalism. If the mandate of heaven is favorable emperor controls everything, otherwise power diffuses a little among the emperor coterie.
Because they can hire 5 programmers in India for the cost of 1 in America, and American programmers aren't 5x better than Indian ones ? Amazon is an online shop, not a jobs program. I'm sure they would rather eliminate a position altogether even more than sending it to India.
Awful indeed! Turns out most of our jobs have consisted of easy, air-conditioned decision making. We're going to have to find another secret handshake with productive capitalists if we want to ensure our continued allotment of the spoils of global exploitation of the toilers.
Let's assume that you can. For disaster recovery, this is probably acceptable, but it's unacceptable for basically any other purpose. Reverting the whole state of the machine because the AI agent (a single tenant in what is effectively a multi-tenant system) did something thing incorrect is unacceptable. Managing undo/redo in a multiplayer environment is horrific.
