This is very true. So you can't just ask people to use AI and expect better output even if AI is all the hype. The bottlenecks are not how many lines of code you can produce in a typical big team/company.
I think this means a lot of big businesses are about to get "disrupted" because small teams can become more efficient because for them sheer generation of somtimes boilerplate low quality code is actually a bottleneck.
I think part of this is that there is no one AI and there is no one point in time.
The other day Claude Code correctly debugged an issue for me, that was seen in production, in a large product. It found a bug a human wrote, a human reviewed, and fixed it. For those interested the bug had to do with chunk decoding, the author incorrectly re-initialized the decoder in the loop for every chunk. So single chunk - works. >1 chunk fails.
I was not familiar with the code base. Developers who worked on the code base spent some time and didn't figure out what was going on. They also were not familiar with the specific code. But once Claude pointed this out that became pretty obvious and Claude rewrote the code correctly.
So when someone tells me "there's not much there" and when the evidence says the opposite I'm going to believe my own lying eyes. And yes, I could have done this myself but Claude did this much faster and correctly.
That said, it does not handle all tasks with the same consistency. Some things it can really mess up. So you need to learn what it does well and what it does less well and how and when to interact with it to get the results you want.
It is automation on steroids with near human (lessay intern) capabilities. It makes mistakes, sometimes stupid ones, but so do humans.
>So when someone tells me "there's not much there" and when the evidence says the opposite I'm going to believe my own lying eyes. And yes, I could have done this myself but Claude did this much faster and correctly.
If the stories were more like this where AI was an aid (AKA a fancy auto complete), devs would probably be much more optimistic. I'd love more debugging tools.
Unfortunately, the lesson an executive here would see is "wow AI is great! fire those engineers who didn't figure it out". Then it creeps to "okay have AI make a better version of this chunk decoder". Which is wrong on multiple levels. Can you imagine if the result for using Intellisense for the first time was to slas your office in half? I'd hate autocomplete too?
I keep getting blown away by AI (specifically Claude Code with the latest models). What it does is literally science fiction. If you told someone 5 years ago that AI can find and fix a bug in some complex code with almost zero human intervention nobody would believe you, but this is the reality today. It can find bugs, it can fix bugs, it can refactor code, it can write code. Yes, not perfect, but with a well organized code base, and with careful prompting, it rivals humans in many tasks (certainly outperforms them in some aspects).
As you're also saying this is the worst it will ever be. There is only one direction, the question is the acceleration/velocity.
Where I'm not sure I agree is with the perception this automatically means we're all going to be out of a job. It's possible there would be more software engineering jobs. It's not clear. Someone still has to catch the bad approaches, the big mistakes, etc. There is going to be a lot more software produced with these tools than ever.
To be fair to management, it is the results that matter.
Management cares about what their management cares about. So this boils down to what the CEO cares about. The CEO cares about what the board cares about. The board cares about share prices going up.
I do believe that e.g. retaining engineers is something that helps the business. It's stupid that someone ramps up for 2 years and then goes to a different job just as they start becoming really effective. It costs companies a ton of money which they could instead just use to get people to stay. But I'm not on Google's board. It's only when Google board decides that fostering the right engineering culture is important enough for the business that something is going to change. And so far- they don't (s/Google/BigTech).
Re: Incentives- Obviously(?) the incentives are not right. So when you say "plenty of incentive" what it really means is incentive to ship sloppy code and get promoted. Or the incentive to go from Google to OpenAI and get a pay increase or whatnot.
> To be fair to management, it is the results that matter.
To be fair to me, I don't recall ever signing a contract through which I am directly responsible for the company's financial and customer-acquisition / retention efforts. I sign up as an individual contributor who helps advance the customer & product mission forward. I am NOT a cofounder.
So that shows, yet again, how myopic and egocentric managers are. Wise ones -- the all 2-3 I have met throughout a 20+ years of experience -- understand that they must enable you to produce the outcomes they care about.
Unsurprisingly, I worked fantastically well with those managers and we achieved near-miracles in some measly 4-5 months.
But all others? "I never gave you time to optimise cloud spend but now I am angry at you for not doing it in your sleep", more or less. Or "I pushed you to the brink of 12-hour workday regularly and started reaching into your weekends and you rushed that feature I pressured you for and it has one small performance regressions? You are fired!". Deal with it.
/rant.
Not directed at you, obviously. Got triggered a little.
We need to disconnect the question of bad managers from the structural issues though. I try to be a good manager but I still have people jump ship for better comp and where we won't match it. I still need to deal with an incentive structure that doesn't match what I am trying to do with my team.
This same structure is also what helps bad managers. Who is going to get promoted to a director role? The person who stands up for their team and argues with the VP or the person who toes the line? The things that you think are near-miracles are not visible and the people that play politics will make their stuff look more valuable to the company.
Yours and my experience are not mutually exclusive, I think we both see it. I dream of managers like you but I never get hired under them for some reason. (Likely regional culture, experience shows.)
I'm at a stage of life and career where I'd happily take a small pay cut for a year just to establish myself in a place and have stability. Then we'll talk about competitive compensation.
My chief issues are with people that are best described with the proverb "give them an inch and they will take a mile".
Yours seems to be that you deal with people that constantly think that they can do better in terms of how much they take home (let's not sugar-coat it, they're spoiled -- I was too).
Heroics being invisible and people who have their coffee with leadership getting the money and the influence is the wrong system. Always was and apparently always will be.
I drink 2-3 cups of coffee a day. Mostly espresso drinks.
There are/were times where I travel or go camping and stopped taking coffee. Other than maybe a very mild headache the first day there weren't any issues.
I enjoy the taste, the rituals, and the temporary boost. But I know I'm addicted ;) There are lots of articles about how it's a good thing but I'm pretty sure it has some impact (not always positive) on my mood.
I’ve gone off coffee for months at a time as a test, but to be honest it’s about the same for me on vs off after the adjustment period.
When I go off, after the headaches, I get good sleep without trying, but so do I on coffee if I have my last one no later than 1pm (where good == 7 hours).
And a proper flat white is so, so good. Therefore I accept my addiction and have two a day!
I quit for a month, 15 years ago and I just hated how it felt like I lost my intellectual curiosity.
I can completely relate with Paul Erdos on quitting stimulants "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person"
Instead of my mind always racing with all these ideas I had this quiet, calm, boring mind.
> Claude basically disregards your instructions (CLAUDE.md) entirely
This feels very strange to me. I use Claude a lot and it follows the instructions very well. What's in your CLAUDE.md file? it's supposed to be fairly concise/brief and not use up too much context.
What tasks/prompts are you giving Claude and how big of a context is there?
I have the same experience as you. For me instructions in CLAUDE.md are followed almost always. On different projects, different CLAUDE.md files, some short, some long. No problem. When a specific instruction is skipped, I ask claude to emphasize it. It uses ALLCAPS, IMPORTANT!, etc., then it works 99% of the time. (Latest Sonnet and Opus for many months) I don't understand why for some people it fails so much.
"No people were intentionally buried inside the Hoover Dam's concrete. While 96 deaths were officially recorded during construction, the belief that bodies were entombed is a myth. The dam was built in interlocking blocks, and workers who died were recovered or accounted for"
I believe that is incorrect. My grand-uncle worked on the Hoover Dam. The safety precautions were limited, to be charitable. Suspending manned Bobcat (equivalent) excavators from ropes, lowered down to the sides of the dam was witnessed. The reason the 96 names are not on the memorial plaque, is because they literally couldn't keep track and aren't exactly sure. IDs and IDing not required at that time. Conveniently, everyone who worked on the Hoover Dam project is now dead.
There were thousands of workers, tens swapped out daily (which is why there are fewer deaths than you would expect). If you weren't a top performer because you were the lowest on the near-manual boring machine with mud/water and stone dumping on you from above, you were replaced. This was built during the Great Depression where there were crowds appearing at the gates everyday looking for the opportunity to work. My great-grandfather, grandfather and granduncle all worked it as Foreman, Carpenter, and Shift Supervisor, respectively. These were at different times in the project.
My extended family all know a different version where there certainly are bodies. I think they are more credible dead, than the official numbers for a highly controversial project back then. Peck wasn't an outlier, but it had the problem of accounting for the people lost. The Hoover project did not.
It's interesting to note that the scandal going on in Israel wrt/ the chief prosecutor of the IDF leaking a prisoner abuse video was uncovered in a polygraph test.
"A routine Shin Bet polygraph test of a senior officer close to Military Advocate General reportedly exposed new clues about video leak, prompting Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara to order a full criminal investigation"
While polygraphs are not perfect they are widely used as part of a broader set of measures. I'm not sure "must not be used" is really the right way to approach this. This person would not have been caught if it wasn't for this polygraphs screening.
>This person would not have been caught if it wasn't for this polygraphs screening.
The organization whose crimes she exposed claims she would not have been caught if its wasn't for the polygraph screening. Corrupt law enforcement types love things like polygraph tests because they give them a ready avenue for parallel construction.
That was my own interpretation... but admittedly maybe too strong of a statement. Maybe she would have be caught. That said, the psychological setup in those periodic interviews with a "maybe lie detecting machine" create opportunity to find real issues.
In terms of the details here, the leak wasn't to expose the crimes, it was to resist political pressure [my speculation anyways]. The crimes were being investigated anyways and the video was available internally fairly broadly (and I think maybe externally as well). There was a political storm as a result of the investigation and the arrests made. Apparently leaking the video is was not illegal (though that's subject to some interpretations) because the role of the chief prosecutor is independent but this became more complicated when it required lying to the supreme court to cover the leak.
But yeah, it's possible the Shin Bet already had an idea but just used the polygraph as an excuse/opportunity. While it's understandable in the political climate why the chief prosecutor would leak the video it's also unethical and poor judgement for someone in her role to do so, and then to cover it up. The role of the Shin Bet is to find people in sensitive roles who are secretly doing things they should not be doing (typically spies but more generally people betraying the trust put in them). For those not following, the plot got thicker because she proceeded to throw her iPhone in the Mediterranean and it was found by a swimmer some days later. She also tried to harm herself. It's pretty crazy stuff. Now there are arguments about who should oversee the investigation with the supreme court set to decide today. It's a pretty small/tight legal community and everyone knows everyone, especially at the top. The legal system has been in a battle with the government for some while with the justice minister refusing to accept the last appointment of the chief justice of the supreme court.
Anyways, the polygraph angle is interesting. That this machine survives as a practice in many places tells us something about its usefulness (or at least people's belief in its usefulness).
About a decade ago, "magic wand" bomb detectors and similar products were pretty big among security services in places like Iraq. [1] Their various supposed methods of operation were transparent BS, in ways that make the EM drive proponents look rigorous.
What always struck me about reporting on them was how there was a great deal of coverage about how fraudulent they were, but seeming puzzlement on why security services would keep buying such obvious BS. What seemed clear to me, was that the BS was the point. Similar to polygraphs and drug-sniffing dogs, the purpose of the tool is to give the investigator a seemingly-objective excuse to follow their intuition (or engage in arbitrary targeting and abuse; take your pick).
I was once in an airport in some third world country and one of those dogs was pointed at my luggage. I was really worried their operator would give them some secret signal to find "drugs" in my luggage. Nothing happened but I can imagine that's a thing.
Those wands were completely fake. Dogs do have a keen sense of smell and can be trained to sniff certain substances.
The polygraph I think is more in the disputed category. It actually measures some physiological signals which in theory could correlate to stress.
That said I don't disagree. These tools can be abused. At the end of the day you need various checks and balances in all these systems (e.g. FBI's internal investigation or whatever body is involved in the security clearances in the US in this example). Applying psychological pressure in various ways is a legitimate tool in these domains.
> A routine Shin Bet polygraph test of a senior officer close to Military Advocate General reportedly exposed new clues about video leak...
It should probably read, "A senior officer exposed clues during a polygraph test..."
The polygraph is a McGuffin. The interviewer applies pressure by psychologically manipulating the suspect. That's all the polygraph is, psychological manipulation.
There is really no evidence that it works, even in that way though.
The fact that the person is being asked to take the test is a pretty good indication that investigators think there's something there. The suspicion caused the interview and the interview caused the admission. There's no way to know what happens in an alternate universe with no polygraph. I worry a lot more about law enforcement that use it as justification for their erroneous suspicion.
It's a fine tool as long as the interviewer doesn't think it actually works. I've seen enough police interviews on TV shows to know that many of them are believers.
Police interviews on scripted TV copoganda dramas, or fly on the wall 'reality' police TV shows?
Either way a great many police are believers in the power of theatre. As they should be, staging power imbalnce, inserting faux sympathy, etc. are all powerful tools with strong potential for misuse which has prompted regulation in a number of countries demanding full recording of interactions with suspects.
Speaking of police interviews on TV shows:
Opening scene to Season 5 of The Wire.
Classic moment where a copy machine is used for a lie detector.
I'm not talking about fiction, I'm talking about interviews with detectives on a show like 20/20.
The way they talk about both people refusing to take the polygraph and whether they pass or fail belies a belif in their credibility. I also know some police personally who speak in the same way but that's a much smaller sample size.
I absolutely believe that some police detectives have real genuine faith in polygraphs being accurate. I strongly suspect a good many do not.
That's orthoganal to how detectives that don't have faith in polygraph results being "real" feel about people that refuse to take them.
Many may feel that people that refuse tests that supposedly tell truth telling from lying can be ranked with people that refuse a search or to unlock their phones ... ie. that's a sign that that they very probably have something to hide.
> I'm talking about interviews with detectives on a show like 20/20.
These are professionals being interviewed who are projecting all manner of things, if they don't actually trust that polygraphs work as scientifically accurate tests that reliably detect lies they are still motivated to not say so and to project belief, that's all part of the theatre of manipulating suspects.
They're detectives from the case. They aren't interviewing the same guy over and over, it's a different guy for every case. And, like I said, I've known a few personally who echo the same thing.
Never once have I seen it presented as an interview technique. They will "clear" people based on polygraph.
This could all be theater, as you're saying, but we're getting into 9/11 size conspiracies to keep all of this coordinated. It's much more likely they are telling the truth. If only there was a machine we could hook them up to to find out...
> Many may feel that people ... that's a sign that that they very probably have something to hide.
Plus, finding "clues" could mean anything, including false leads. If the Shin Bet is resorting to interviews under duress, they really must not have much physical evidence to work with.
That is one of the most surprising aspect of the story for me, that a polygraph worked. (the revelation itself just confirmed what everyone already suspected).
My theory is that the new head of the Shin Bet who is pretty right wing and took a personal interest in the story was involved. They simply used the polygraph results as an excuse to direct the interview in the direction they wanted. The timing is certainly very interesting.
It's a very high profile case so i guess the truth of the matter will eventually emerge.
A polygraph test consists of two components: a bullshit machine, and an interview.
The interview is the part that exposed those clues.
The thing about pseudoscience is that it will sometimes appear to “work.” A dowser will sometimes find water. A horoscope will sometimes predict your day. My birthmark has successfully warded off tiger attacks for 40+ years.
Not sure what's an alternative for Grafana in the open source world in terms of building dashboards for o11y? I'm not aware of one and Grafana is used very extensively in my company...
I mentioned it in another reply, but https://perses.dev/ is probably the most promising alternative.
Besides that, if you're feeling masochistic you could use Prometheus' console templates or VictoriaMetrics' built-in dashboards.
Though these are all obviously nowhere near as feature rich and capable as Grafana and would only be able to display metrics for the single Prom/VM node they're running on. Might enough for some users.
How come I’ve never heard of Perses yet? A really Open Source, standardising Grafana clone to go alongside Prometheus for self-hosted deployments sounds just perfect!
from cursory reading of the article I don’t see that author’s problems are specifically with Grafana in its best use case (metrics), but with other products from Grafana company, for which are a lot of alternatives.
Grafana dashboards itself (paired with VictoriaMetrics and occasionally Clickhouse) is one of the most pleasant web apps IMO. Especially when you don’t try to push the constraints of its display model, which are sometimes annoying but understandable.
I remember that alternative, free/FOSS products existed before Grafana (c2015) but many died, Grafana was everywhere. Now I also cannot find the old-alts. Vague memories of RRD and Nagios...
Munin was what we used for a while, along with a smattering of smokeping.
We're using a combination of Zabbix (alerting) and local Grafana/Prometheus/Loki (observability) at this point, but I've been worried about when Grafana will rug-pull for a while now. Hopefully enough people using their cloud offering sates their appetite and they leave the people running locally alone.
https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch-Dashboards (Kibana fork) is one. But Grafana is still way better if you just stay away from anything that isn't the core product: data visualization and exploration (explorer and traces).
I use Signoz for my private purposes, it's not a 100% match, but you can do Prometheus metrics, logs analysis, dashboards, alerts, OTEL spans so depending on your usecase it can be enough
we're opentelemetry-native and apart from many out of box charts for APM, infra monitoring, and logs, you can also build customized dashboards with lots of visualization option.
I think this means a lot of big businesses are about to get "disrupted" because small teams can become more efficient because for them sheer generation of somtimes boilerplate low quality code is actually a bottleneck.