I had a similar journey with F# - the language looked excellent and I really wanted to make it one of my go-to languages, but every time I tried to use it I found bits that would only work on windows (especially around desktop apps). I finally just gave up, though I hear it has gotten better at being truly cross-platform these days.

Same and not to mention reames of weird .Net errors that were never fixed and hard to understand or speculate about

I always figured the "-ium" part was in imitation of element naming, to make it sound scientific

Por qué no los dos? If "-ium" makes nerds think of an element name, and others of a premium product, all the better. I'd bet both of these interpretations were listed in the original internal marketing presentation of the name...

twine at least was reasonably popular among the interactive fiction crowd, you could view it as a bridge between the gamebook and IF genres.

to put it another way, writing resilient software is a domain of its own and software engineers are it's domain experts.

Let the LLM write the software. That’s ephemeral and evolves with time. Humans should govern the entire system to resilience. That is fixed with time. Thou shalt not kill has staying power. Weapons, poison, and other methods of death evolve. More governence deals with them over time.

your LLM prompt is, by definition, underspecified. the code is what describes the actual behaviour of the system, and there are known and understood ways to make that behaviour more robust, correct and resilient, that are independent of the domain the code is modelling, but consistent across different code bases. that's why I say writing code is its own domain.

as an analogy, an art museum couldn't paint their own paintings to hang up (or at least they would not be very good) but neither would monet or picasso have done a particularly good job at designing a space to let millions of people a year view their pictures. both skills are necessary to the overall product.

agreed, the epic games store is crappy enough that i will not use it even for free and/or exclusive games. I might have if it was marketed as a clean, unobtrusive experience, but we all know that will never happen.

I work on compilers, and have bounced several times off trying to write my own full stack crud app for a personal project (tried doing it in rails, phoenix and django at various times). I'm finally getting somewhere with claude's help, but it really is its own set of skills - easy to get started with but hard to do well.

You may be surprised by how much easier it is to dump the framework/stack and just write it from scratch. I say this because I too work on compilers and have a crud app as a personal project. The first versions were a nightmare in various frameworks and since I switched to a C++ backend / vanilla .js frontend it has been incredibly easy to write.

interesting, how did you manage the db interactions in c++? and did you have a single executable for the app and the web server combined?

no database for this project - the data model has a simple text representation so it gets serialized out to a folder/file layout on disk that goes into version control. single self-contained binary: contains the web/websockets server, backend logic, parser/serialization. there is a separate component in python that sits behind an internal network connection to handle an execution sandbox.

my completely uninformed speculation is that they didn't want to just build a clean, simple store that got out of your way, they wanted to throw in some sort of rent extraction or user control at every step.

Right, to apparently every MBA wielding PM they are actually primarily user ID systems which allow you to buy things (including whole games).

And doing this requires including a near complete web browser with piles of added hooks, obviously.

my advice for anyone in this situation - as the next step. work with claude to understand the context surrounding the change, and how it fits into the existing project. do a deeper dive into whether the change causes a performance regression, see if it's stylistically consistent with similar code, probe whether there is code duplication that you could clean up by pulling out a function. claude can absolutely help with all of this! and at the end of all that, read through the generated code with a fresh understanding of it, and see if you agree with how it was done or whether you might prefer anything to be changed.

you will get a proper sense of ownership and of at least having put some work into not delivering slop, though of course there might still be subtle issues that only the people familiar with the codebase would catch.

that's a lovely post, and I missed it when it came out, so thanks for that! but based on the logic in TFA I think an admin would have to make the claim for it to count.

TFA has curator quotes, the users are largely the curators of HN, so it should work! I can't imagine the mods ever saying anything like that. Maybe someone like pg would.

"busyware" is a great term