As a kid I played Ken's Labyrinth, a raycaster FPS from around the same time as Wolf3D. Only years later I found out that this was actually the same Ken Silverman that went on to create the Build engine for Duke Nukem 3D etc. Kind of funny considering the vast difference in tone between these two games.
Good luck with that. I used to be an OCD freak about code before LLMs, but AI coding has largely freed me of that limitation. I've become very comfortable giving AI a long leash, but only after being meticulous about curating the context.
These days I spend most of the day in discussions and planning, producing documentation, agonizing over architectural decisions, edge cases, and naming conventions. Once that's all settled I'll hand off implementation work to run overnight. In the morning, I'll review and fix, but I'm usually pleasantly surprised with the results.
One pitfall is long leash without a curated context, which is more like "slot machine" coding. Usually not effective, and may have addictive effects since it does occasionally work.
To spice things up lately, I've been encouraging the model to produce its own "capstone" -- a feature it decides to build on its own, however it wishes, with the tools at its disposal. So far it's been conservative, creating useful tools for development rather than customer facing features, but I'm curious to dial up the temperature to see what it might come up with.
I haven’t used Effect but the problem I see with using it is that it seems to want to completely swallow the whole app architecture. At that point, why not just use a functional language?
Which functional language has a similarly huge ecosystem, works across the frontend/backend, has first class support of different runtimes, provides similar ergonomics, has meetups and conferences in so many countries and is easy to hire for (all you need is solid TypeScript)?
There's a reason effect-ts keeps spreading despite its syntax and learning curve, and I say it as somebody that used Haskell, functional Scala, Purescript, Elm, Racket, Elixir and tested another half a dozen.
Give me an Elixir with properly powerful types (not gleam) and I'm in.
I'd gladly throw effect and typescript especially out of my work day, but I see no sane replacement at complexity scaling.
I wouldn't personally recommend effect without a solid champion in the team and without having the complexity needs for it (I'm talking recurring durable worklows, complex encodings, suspension, retries, etc) and even if you have them the price is steep without a champion, but that's my 2 cents.
You use it for an agentic cli (opencode uses it e.g.) not a simple crud (which is 90% of web dev industry).
I can’t think of a single functional language that offers what effect gives you, though. A fully typed and declarative error channel, managed dependency layer with compile time safety, excellent resource management, the best parsing/validating/serializing library I’ve used in TypeScript, concurrency, streams, cache, otel primitives baked in…
In all fairness it does require buy-in and gradual adoption isn’t perfectly seamless or frictionless, but I think it’s worth it. They’ve done an outstanding job with it.
Railroads had enormous subsidies, too. This is how infrastructure is built, even in "capitalist" economies because it operates at the level of national security. Even to this day, passenger rail is not profitable, although freight is very profitable. So it wouldn't be surprising if "passenger" AI remains unprofitable, while "freight" AI becomes very profitable.
Pretty bold statement to say it's useless for most people outside of tech. Almost every "normal" person I know including my in-laws are using it regularly. It's becoming the go-to for asking questions rather than Google, Bing, etc.
And the privacy battle was lost 25 years ago. People don't really care if corporations know about their search history (Google), or their private lives (Facebook). You're beating a dead horse there.
I like your analogy on railroads because it leads us to the point that these tech companies should honestly be nationalized at this point as they are a danger to the country writ large.
It would / should / can, but there's big efforts in reducing token consumption now, so AI will likely try to skim and pick documentation just like real humans.
Also had a severe issue with Bunny, serving videos. They had a cache poisoning issue where they served a few frames from pornographic videos right in the middle of our educational videos. They did not have the multi-tenancy thing fully figured out, and it became a nightmare scenario. After that, we moved to a provider that explicitly did not allow porn.
I really dislike how apps add themselves to the menubar. And I hate if there's no option to remove it from the menubar. Icons with indicators like WiFi, Battery, etc. make sense. But if an app does not need an indicator like that, just add the capabilities to the Dock icon!
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