LLMs have no concept of "true" or "good." But they are trained to signal high-quality work. Meanwhile, bosses are pressuring workers: go faster, produce more, let the AI cook.

Study after study documents what this does to the human brain: cognitive surrender. We're "in the loop" but the bot calls the shots.

Read more in this week's issue of the Product Picnic newsletter:

#LLM #AI #UXDesign #tech #softwaredevelopment #software

https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/ai-mandates-are-a-demand-for-cognitive-surrender

I really want to know what the c-suite folks in the software and tech industries are planning to do when their engineers have relied on LLMs for so long they can no longer support their systems without out them, and the LLM providers jack up their costs 20x or more to get their ROI on all the datacenters

#ai #tech #softwaredevelopment #programming #llm #webdev #webdevelopment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6alBAr_FfaM

I’ve made this point before about how inane AI hype is now, but a computer beat the best chess player in the world in 1997. No one pretended, after 1997, it wasn’t worthwhile to have humans compete in chess. In fact, the world of chess developed strict protocols around computer use and you can get banned from tournaments if you use a computer program as you play. You are certainly shamed and mocked.

AI and writing needs to be treated the same way. I do think people should be shamed for using AI to help them write creatively. It’s an embarrassment, and a form of cheating.

If you don’t have the resources to write and understand the code yourself, you don’t have the resources to maintain it either.

Any monkey with a keyboard can write code. Writing code has never been hard. People have been churning out crappy code en masse way before generative AI and LLMs. I know because I’ve seen it, I’ve had to work with it, and I no doubt wrote (and continue to write) my share of it.

What’s never been easy, and what remains difficult, is figuring out the right problem to solve, solving it elegantly, and doing so in a way that’s maintainable and sustainable given your means.

Code is not an artefact, code is a machine. Code is either a living thing or it is dead and decaying. You don’t just write code and you’re done. It’s a perpetual first draft that you constantly iterate on, and, depending on what it does and how much of that has to do with meeting the evolving needs of the people it serves, it may never be done. With occasional exceptions (perhaps? maybe?) for well-defined and narrowly-scoped tools, done code is dead code.

So much of what we call “writing” code is actually changing, iterating on, investigating issues with, fixing, and improving code. And to do that you must not only understand the problem you’re solving but also how you’re solving it (or how you thought you were solving it) through the code you’ve already written and the code you still have to write.

So it should come as no surprise that one of the hardest things in development is understanding someone else’s code let alone fixing it when something doesn’t work as it should. Because it’s not about knowing this programming language or that (learning a programming language is the easiest part of coding), or this framework or that, or even knowing this design pattern or that (although all of these are important prerequisites for comprehension) but understanding what was going on in someone else’s head when they wrote the code the way they wrote it to solve a particular problem.

It frankly boggles my mind that some people are advocating for automating the easy part (writing code) by exponentially scaling the difficult part (understanding how exactly someone else – in this case, a junior dev who knows all the hows of things but none of the whys – decided to solve the problem). It is, to borrow a technical term, ass-backwards.

They might as well call vibe coding duct-tape-driven development or technical debt as a service.

🤷‍♂️

#AI #LLMs #vibeCoding #softwareDevelopment #design #craft

You don't have to pretend that Claude Code's source code is lovely just because you like using it or are impressed by whatever madness is going on around AI right now.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Anthropic #Claude #ClaudeCode #ClaudeCodeLeak #AgenticAI #tech #dev #software #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment

Buddy. I've written COBOL. I spent several years working almost daily with a 3-million-line monstrosity of a COBOL program. I was working on another app that interfaced with it, but in that work I occasionally had to read the code and in a few cases modify it. Granted I haven't spent as much time looking at the leaked Claude Code source code (and won't lol), but nevertheless I confidently declare that Claude Code is worse. "Spaghetti code" doesn't come close to describing this thing.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #ClaudeCode #ClaudeCodeLeak #Anthropic #Claude #tech #dev #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment #software #COBOL #LinkedIn

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #github #tech #dev #SoftwareDevelopment

The product delivery lifecycle is composed of service relationships. AI's main value proposition is freedom from relationships.

When designers champion AI tools, we are not making ourselves layoff-proof. We are reinforcing a system that frames us as unnecessary friction.

If we don't want to serve as janitors for vibe prototypes, We must invest in deliberately designing the service relationships that make up the PDLC.

https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/ux-works-through-social-relationships-ai-tools-are-erasing-them

#UXDesign #LLM #AI #Tech #softwaredevelopment

hey folks, can you recommend me #peertube accounts? I'm interested in #decentralization, #foss, #softwaredevelopment, #coffee, #tea and #creativewriting

I'm keen on seeing what's out there and been considering starting an account of my own.

🤦🏻‍♂️ Oh no... The line between a successful lunar mission and a $72 million piece of space junk can come down to a single line of code. 🚀 NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer mission just provided a painful lesson in systems engineering. Shortly after launch, a navigation glitch caused the spacecraft to lose its sense of direction. Instead of correcting its course, the onboard computer entered a loop that exhausted its entire fuel supply in less than a day. 😳

This wasn't a mechanical failure or a solar flare, it was a software error that prevented the craft from communicating with its own star trackers. When we build complex systems, we often focus on the big risks while ignoring the small, logical traps that can paralyze a machine. For the engineers who spent years on this project, it is a reminder that in space, there is no "undo" button for a bad update. 🌖

🧠 A logic error caused the craft to misinterpret its orientation.
⚡ The entire fuel reserve was spent trying to fix a non-existent course deviation.
🎓 Recovery efforts failed because the craft could no longer point its antenna at Earth.
🔍 This incident highlights the critical need for more robust hardware-in-the-loop testing.

https://gizmodo.com/the-stupidest-glitch-imaginable-killed-a-72-million-lunar-mission-in-a-single-day-2000728962
#Aerospace #SystemsEngineering #NASA #TechFailures #Vibecoding #Fail #SoftwareDevelopment #Software

#AskFedi time.
Can someone recommend me a good exchange rates API, probably hosted in Europe?
Not long ago, I was visiting a website of some open source project, and they were advertising their own exchange rates API. But I can’t remember the project or a website address. =(
Help.

#api #dev #development #softwareDevelopment #fedihelp

Paid service that will rewrite your git history to look less #vibecoded. Are we there yet?

#ai #vibecoding #vibecode #softwareDevelopment

Interview with Øyvind Kolås, GIMP developer

https://www.gimp.org/news/2026/02/22/%C3%B8yvind-kol%C3%A5s-interview-ww2017/

The second in a series of interviews with the GIMP team, this time with core developer Øyvind Kolås, also known online as Pippin.

See also https://pippin.gimp.org/

#GIMP #softwareDevelopment #libreGraphics #LibreGraphicsMeeting #GIMP3 #GEGL #interview #gratuitousHashtag #programmer

"...[The agentic tool (...) determined that the best course of action was to DELETE AND RECREATE THE ENVIRONMENT" -> MegaLoL!!!

"Amazon’s cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to errors involving its own AI tools, leading some employees to raise doubts about the US tech giant’s push to roll out these coding assistants.

Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment”.

Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the “outage” of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the costs of its services.

Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group’s AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption.

“We’ve already seen at least two production outages [in the past few months],” said one senior AWS employee. “The engineers let the AI [agent] resolve an issue without intervention. The outages were small but entirely foreseeable.”

AWS, which accounts for 60 per cent of Amazon’s operating profits, is seeking to build and deploy AI tools including “agents” capable of taking actions independently based on human instructions."

https://www.ft.com/content/00c282de-ed14-4acd-a948-bc8d6bdb339d

#AI #AIAgents #AWS #KiroAI #AICoding #CyberSecurity #SoftwareDevelopment

I’m rewriting one of my pet projects from #Flutter Web to server-rendered #HTML. Because there are too many shitty mobile devices with a single vendor-provided browser that doesn’t support nice things or have fundamental bugs in those things.

#FlutterWeb #Browsers #PetProject #Dev #development #softwareDevelopment

“AI can make mistakes” might as well be the slogan of our era. Even boosters admit that you need to spin the vibe code slot machine a few times to get a jackpot.

An employee with that degree of consistency would be fired.

So how do we redirect some of that unlimited grace from machines to humans?

https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/corporations-demand-perfection-from-workers-but-ai-gets-unlimited-slack

#UX #UXDesign #LLM #AI #tech #softwaredevelopment

For the uninitiated, what are typically called side effects include:

• Input/output (to the screen, to/from a disk drive, to a printer, to/from the internet, etc.)
• Relatedly, interaction (with the mouse, with the keyboard)
• Statefulness ("remembering" data in RAM)
• Parallelism (doing more than one thing at a time) and asynchrony (doing things out of order)

In what sense, then, are they "side"? And what on earth is being "managed"? Isn't that what we mean by "programming"?

#ComputerScience #SoftwareDevelopment #tech #dev #politics #FunctionalProgramming #SideEffects #effects

I would have loved to sit in on Microsoft's product management meeting, where they said, "We know what people want! More features and CoPilot in Notepad." Great to see that Notepad++ offers alternatives. Better yet, flee the CoPilot madness entirely and migrate to Linux.
#softwaredevelopment #productmanagement
https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-ruined-notepad-so-i-replaced-it-with-this-open-source-alternative/

99% of stakeholder "ideas" are just copying a feature they saw on a competitor's product. And the features they notice most are the ones that yell at their users the loudest.

Now all software (not just consumer apps, but also metrics dashboards) yells at you, and trains you to attend to its yelling. Strategy becomes dominated by the overriding need to make the good number go up.

https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/the-circular-logic-of-our-metrics

#tech #softwaredevelopment #ux #uxdesign #product #productmanagement

#ProjectAmber just introduced a new design proposal for Carrier Classes & Carrier Interfaces.

The goal? Extend record-style modeling to more Java types - without losing concise state declarations, derived methods, or pattern matching.

Read more ⇨ https://bit.ly/46jYPn2

#Java #InfoQ #OpenJDK #SoftwareDevelopment

I’m this close to releasing my first #iOS app. It will have a backend you can #selfhost.

#development #softwareDevelopment #iosdev #iOSDevelopment #indiedev #SelfHosted #selfhosting

There should be a mandatory, government issued certification requirement or something similar for people who want to handle / code systems that deal with non-anonymized user data.

You almost can't enroll to a gym or anything anymore without giving away data, but the stupid systems can't even handle "unsubscribe from newsletter which I never consented to anyway".

#privacy #softwaredevelopment

Yesterday evening I opened my task board with all the unfinished and planned things in my #homelab… closed it and started a new project.

I feel a need to have a serious conversation with my brain.

But the project is cool and already has a funny name. I’ll keep it in secret until the first release, though, if such a fantastic thing happens.
#development #softwareDevelopment #indiedev

Alex Hyatt is a professional software developer who makes videos about programming, design and related topics. You can follow at:

➡️ @alex

Hyatt has already uploaded 49 videos, if they haven't federated to your server yet you can browse them all at:

➡️ https://videos.alexhyett.com/a/alex/videos

#FeaturedServer #Programming #Coding #SoftwareDevelopment #Dev #PeerTube

Ja KI, danke für deine Kreativität 🙄

#KI #AI #AISlop #Developerlife #SoftwareDevelopment

We are looking to fill lots of roles at Six Feet Up. I'll be celebrating my 10-year anniversary soon, so you can trust when I say it is a great team.

We hire for remote work globally. Open positions are listed at the bottom of this page: https://www.sixfeetup.com/company/careers

#FediHire #Python #DataEngineer #Developer #SoftwareDevelopment #Sales #ProjectManagement #GetFediHired

In retrospect I might have written non-sense in place of nonsense.

If you're in tech the Han reference might be a bit out of your comfort zone, but Andrews is accessible and measured.

It's nonsense to say that coding will be replaced with "good judgment". There's a presupposition behind that, a worldview, that can't possibly fly. It's sometimes called the theory-free ideal: given enough data, we don't need theory to understand the world. It surfaces in AI/LLM/programming rhetoric in the form that we don't need to code anymore because LLM's can do most of it. Programming is a form of theory-building (and understanding), while LLMs are vast fuzzy data store and retrieval systems, so the theory-free ideal dictates the latter can/should replace the former. But it only takes a moment's reflection to see that nothing, let alone programming, can be theory-free; it's a kind of "view from nowhere" way of thinking, an attempt to resurrect Laplace's demon that ignores everything we've learned in the >200 years since Laplace forwarded that idea. In that respect it's a (neo)reactionary viewpoint, and it's maybe not a coincidence that people with neoreactionary politics tend to hold it. Anyone who needs a more formal argument can read Mel Andrews's The Immortal Science of ML: Machine Learning & the Theory-Free Ideal, or Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics (which argues, among other things, that this is a nihilistic).

Executives don’t want to just sell juice. They want to empower you with an agentic, customizable, and seamless juice experience.

But no one has stopped to think about what any of that actually means. Before designing a "solution," you need a good, *shared* problem definition. If the beautiful clarity within the design team shatters on contact with any handoff, you didn't finish the job.

Read more in this week's Product Picnic:

https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/your-problem-framing-is-sabotaging-your-strategy

#UX #design #softwaredevelopment #tech

Apply the DRY principle carefully - Don't Repeat Yourself, but don't abstract too early. Three instances of similar code might warrant abstraction, but two might just be coincidence. Premature abstraction creates complexity. #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment

Thinking of creating a github account, maybe writing some software.

Thinking of using the MIT license for stuff I write.
Are there any recommendations (and reasons) in terms of other/better licenses to use for FOSS that might provide more freedom or have less liability?

Boosting for reach would be appreciated.

#FOSS #softwaredevelopment #github #opensource

The future lies in embracing statefulness and effectfulness in self-modifying code. Unlike the bureaucratic procedure of rule-based coding, this style of programming is more like surfing, or performance, or gardening. Your task as a programmer is to plant a seed of code that unfolds into something beautiful, possibly guiding it as it unfolds if you have the mastery. I'll leave as an exercise for the reader what the soil is in this metaphor.

(I'm only half joking!)

#ComputerScience #SoftwareDevelopment #tech #dev #politics

#ComputerScience #SoftwareDevelopment #tech #dev #politics

#agile #scrum #tech #softwaredevelopment #meme #funny

Alt...

A library. A poster calls out "enter a new world, read a book". Children pull down a book marked "Scrum" from the library shelf, and get pulled into Snake Hell.

The pushback against AI slop is not imaginary or conspiratorial; it is real.

@icedquinn@blob.cat

#Cybersecurity, #AI, #softwaredevelopment.

@icedquinn@blob.cat

#Cybersecurity, #AI, #softwaredevelopment.

RE: https://blob.cat/objects/2196ff77-4cc2-4776-8888-c22afb2ff4db

Study: AI Slowed Software Development Down By 19%

A recent study put to the test a question on whether AI is speeding things up or slowing things down in software development.

https://www.freezenet.ca/study-ai-slowed-software-development-down-by-19/

#News #Technology #AI #research #software #SoftwareDevelopment #study

How could I miss the #Serverpod 3 release, which I was waiting for so long!? Now it is possible to serve a #Flutter web application directly from your backend. There are also a lot of other cool features.

#development #softwareDevelopment #dev #fullstack #Dart

Nextcloud has ambitious growth goals for 2026. A lot of new remote positions are open now:

- Engineers (#PHP, #JS, C++)
- Marketing
- Sales and Sales Engineers
- #HR (Germany)

➡️ Apply & share: https://nextcloud.com/jobs/

Boosts appreciated 🙏

#OpenSource #GetFediHired #FOSS #SoftwareDevelopment #Careers #Jobs #Hiring #Nextcloud #EU #WFH

Been writing some #BASIC again, on the Philips #P2000T and liking it. Surprisingly, you have to be a much better programmer than these days with powerful IDEs. On those early machines you had to really plan out your program, because you can't easily refactor to a great extent. Especially not on the P2000, which has no renumber command.

Oddly, it's the first time in a very long time that I enjoyed coding again.

#RetroComputing #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment

Alt...

Screenshot of a 40 characters by 25 lines screen, showing a load command and a snippet of a BASIC program, each line numbered, starting at 10000 and incrementing by 20. The text alternates between white, yellow and light blue.

Code comments should explain WHY, not WHAT. If you have to explain what the code does, it probably needs to be clearer. Save comments for business logic, edge cases, and non-obvious decisions. #Coding #SoftwareDevelopment

Story Points sind das „Security Theater“ der Softwareentwicklung. 🎭

Wir haben Fibonacci-Folgen, um Exaktheit vorzugaukeln, die es in der Komplexität nicht gibt. Am Ende doch in Personentage umgerechnet, um das Management zu beruhigen.

Warum wir aufhören sollten zu raten und anfangen sollten, den Flow zu messen.

Ein Deep-Dive für alle, die Schätz-Meetings hassen:
🔗 https://no-bullshit-agile.de/story-point-unsinn.html

Viel Spaß auf dem #39c3! #programming #coding #softwaredevelopment #storypoints

2025 has only intensified the struggles of past years. The challenge for us is not "how do we pull through?" but "how do we make a 'new normal' work for us?"

The answer, of course, is not to simply try harder. To prevent 2026 from going like 2025, we need to deliberately re-evaluate our own goals, and our relationships with our jobs.

Learn more in the final issue of the Product Picnic for the year — and if you like it, please subscribe! #tech #softwaredevelopment #ux

https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/burnout

Viel Spaß allen #dev auf dem #39c3!

#Agile wurde von Consultants erfunden, um Software-Lieferung effizienter zu machen – nicht um Entwickler glücklich zu machen. Dieser Guide zeigt dir, wie du das System so nutzt, dass es deinen Code schützt, statt deine Fokuszeit in der Meeting-Hölle zu verbrennen.

https://no-bullshit-agile.de/agile-fuer-entwickler.html

#programming #coding #softwaredevelopment

"Politics" isn't only about institutions. It's about organizing large numbers of people to do something they wouldn't otherwise do. Corporations organize large numbers of people to do things they probably wouldn't do if they weren't paid and/or didn't need the money to live. 10,000 people wouldn't spontaneously get together and spend the best hours of their days for months building a commercial jet airliner if there weren't corporate structures in place and a society that keeps them close enough to deprivation that they will do this in exchange for money.

#FOSS #OSS #OpenSource #software #OpenSourceSoftware #tech #dev #SoftwareDevelopment #politics #economics #corporations

AI is intellectual Viagra

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #DiffusionModels #tech #dev #coding #software #SoftwareDevelopment #writing #art #VisualArt

In a GitHub issue about adding LLM features:

I definitely think allowing the user to continue the conversation is useful. In my own use of LLMs I tend to often ask followup questions, being able to do so in the same window will be useful.

In the bug report:

Wow, really! What is it with you people that think you can dictate what I choose to do with my time and my software? You find AI offensive, dont use it, or even better, dont use calibre, I can certainly do without users like you. Do NOT try to dictate to other people what they can or cannot do.

Personally, besides the fact that I have a zero tolerance policy about generative AI, I've had enough of arrogant software developers. Read the room.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #calibre #eBooks #eBookManagers #AISlop #AIPoisoning #InformationOilSpill #dev #tech #FOSS #SoftwareDevelopment

Programming properly should be regarded as an activity by which the programmers form or achieve a certain kind of insight, a theory, of the matters at hand. This suggestion is in contrast to what appears to be a more common notion, that programming should be regarded as a production of a program and certain other texts.

A computer program is not source code. It is the combination of source code, related documents, and the mental understanding developed by the people who work with the code and documents regularly. In other words a computer program is a relational structure that necessarily includes human beings.

The output of a generative AI model alone cannot be a computer program in this sense no matter how closely that output resembles the source code part of some future possible computer program. That the output could be developed into a computer program over time, given the appropriate resources to do so, does not make it equivalent to a computer program.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #Copilot #AgenticCoding #dev #tech #SoftwareDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #programming #coding

P.S. This is not an invitation to post critiques about any of these technologies or recommendations about what I should be doing instead.

#scala #dev #tech #SoftwareDevelopment #coding #programming

Ordinarily, we believe that at least some of the problems we solve with software are difficult, requiring thought, study, research, and care. Not all problems are this way, but some are, and people who write software encounter them. Generative AI provides the illusion that these problems no longer require care. We can sloppily describe the problem to ChatGPT, Copilot, or some similar tool, it spits out sloppy code, and we sloppily verify that the code does more or less what we want. Depending on the context we're in, that might be perceived as adequate, even if the code doesn't work. The permission structure allows us to be forgiven: it's not our fault that our generated code didn't work, that's just part of the job. In a different context/structure, we would be critiqued for choosing to use a subpar method for solving the problem.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #tech #dev #SoftwareDevelopment #software

I don't want to use Copilot (1). It is bad and unethical technology. I don't want Copilot forced on me any more than I want other commercial products forced on me when I'm trying to do something else.

So I did what I usually do: make a uBlock Origin filter to hide the thing I don't want to see. Here's the filter to hide that Copilot box on Github:

github.com##.copilotPreview

They'll probably change the CSS and this rule will stop working, but for now it makes the offending box go away.

To use this, open the uBlock Origin settings in your web browser, choose My Filters, paste that string above in the box, and click Apply Changes. Refresh Github to verify it works.

#Microsoft #Github #Copilot #AI #GenAI #NoAI #SayNoToAAI #SoftwareDevelopment #coding #dev #tech

(1) I use code completion and other coding tools in IDEs, like many people who write software. Just not environment-destroying, copyright-infringing, Layoff as a Service aspiring anti-tech like Copilot

#dev #tech #coding #SoftwareDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #Programming #ComputerProgramming

Sorry, GenAI is NOT going to 10x computer programming
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/sorry-genai-is-not-going-to-10x-computer

#GenerativeAI #LLM #coding #SoftwareDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #10xEngineer #TechMyths

#ComputerScience #ComputerProgramming #SoftwareDevelopment #dev #programming #security #CyberSecurity #InfoSec

When I say passable: in graduate school I wrote a Prolog interpreter in java (including parsing source code or REPL input), within which I could run the classic examples like append or (very simple) symbolic differentiation/integration. As an undergraduate I wrote a Mathematica program to solve the word recognition problem for context-free formal languages. But I'd need some study time to be able to write these languages again.

I don't know what the hell prompted me to reminisce about programming languages. I hope it doesn't come off as a humblebrag but rather like old guy spinning yarns. I think I've been through so many because I'm never quite happy with any one of them and because I've had a varied career that started when I was pretty young.

I guess I'm also half hoping to find people on here who have similar interests so I'm going to riddle this post with hashtags:

#Coding #SoftwareDevelopment #ProgrammingLanguages #8086Assembly #BASIC #C #Pascal #perl #java #scala #LISP #Scheme #Prolog #Mathematica #ObjectiveC #matlab #octave #R #Python #Fortran #COBOL #Haskell #Clean #Flix #Curry #Factor #Unison #Joy #Idris #Agda #Lean #6502Assembly