I think that’s unnecessary waffling. Of course there are exceptions, but the prejudiced negative views that the old and the young hold of each are generally wrong.
For example, the constantly recurring critique that the music of the young is not about musicality[1] is always wrong. It's as wrong today as it was about Elvis.
I think you are wrong to see this as purely political. Women being portrayed as nude, battered, covered in semen, and so on are genuinely horrified. Such images would not be tolerated if they were sourced from a political ally.
Furthermore, I don't think that fake nudes of the US President are morally equivalent to fake nudes of minor public figures who are 99% women, even if the law treats them the same. We need to take into account the completely different lives that men and women online experience, where women are constantly subjected to sexualization and abuse.
This is one of those topics that discussion on HN is hopeless because women are so underrepresented.
They aren’t tolerated on X, people get banned for this. That’s why the whole thing is so duplicitous. x is not different from other platforms in this regard. Grok on X was also limited to paying users because of this.
The solution I like best is to "pin" issues that would cause the meeting to run long, with select personnel needing to stay late to address the pinned issue but everybody else leaving on time.
There's no substitute for leadership establishing a culture of meeting discipline. By and large, every org will follow the example leadership sets.
If leadership blesses this cutesy little five-minutes-late maneuver, implicitly accepting that meetings don't end on time, then meetings won't end on time at 5 after the hour either.
Some meetings are more important than others. So losing 5 minutes of a useless meeting is better than not going over 5 minutes for the important meeting.
Everyone wants to think their time is valuable, but this is relative.
Seeing the code that the LLM generates and occasionally asking it to explain has been an effective way to improve my understanding. It's better in some ways than reading documentation or doing tutorials because I'm working on a practical project I'm highly motivated by.
I agree that there is benefit in doing research and reasoning, but in my experience skill acquisition through supervising an LLM has been more efficient because my learning is more focused. The LLM is a weird meld of domain expert/sycophant/scatterbrain but the explanations it gives about the code that it generates are quite educational.
But since there’s grey in my beard, I’ve seen it several times: in every technological move forward there are obnoxious hype merchants, reactionary status quo defenders, and then the rest of us doing our best to muddle through,
Because some opinions are lazy. You can get all the summaries you want by searching "how I use agentic coding / Claude code" on the web or similar queries on YouTube, explaining in lots of details what's good and bad. If someone says "it's just hallucinations", it means they aren't actually interested and just want to complain.
Adding capacity to software engineering through LLMs is like adding lanes to a highway — all the new capacity will be utilized.
By getting the LLM to keep changes minimal I’m able to keep quality high while increasing velocity to the point where productivity is limited by my review bandwidth.
I do not fear competition from junior engineers or non-technical people wielding poorly-guided LLMs for sustained development. Nor for prototyping or one offs, for that matter — I’m confident about knowing what to ask for from the LLM and how to ask.
> With a sufficient number of users of an API,
it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
all observable behaviors of your system
will be depended on by somebody.
An LLM rewriting a codebase from scratch is only as good as the spec. If “all observable behaviors” are fair game, the LLM is not going to know which of those behaviors are important.
Furthermore, Spolsky talks about how to do incremental rewrites of legacy code in his post. I’ve done many of these and I expect LLMs will make the next one much easier.
>An LLM rewriting a codebase from scratch is only as good as the spec. If “all observable behaviors” are fair game, the LLM is not going to know which of those behaviors are important.
I've been using LLMs to write docs and specs and they are very very good at it.
That’s a fair point — I agree that LLMs do a good job predicting the documentation that might accompany some code. I feel relieved when I can rely on the LLM to write docs that I only need to edit and review.
But I’m using LLMs regularly and I feel pretty effectively — including Opus 4.5 — and these “they can rewrite your entire codebase” assertions just seem crazy incongruous with my lived experience guiding LLMs to write even individual features bug-free.
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