Yes, and ironically there are promotion ladders that explicitly call out "staff engineers identify problems before they become an issue". But we all know that in reality no manager-leader is ever going to fix problems eagerly, if they even agree with someone's prediction that that thing is really going to become a problem.

I think this is often true and it's the limiting factor that prevents complexity from spiraling out of control. But there's also a certain type of engineer who generates Rube Goldberg code that actually works, not robustly, but well enough. A mad genius high on intelligence and low on wisdom, let's say. This is who can spin complexity into self reward.

I am the type of engineer who prefers simplicity and I have not found a way to make AI increase the simplicity of code I'm working on. If left to its own devices, Claude absolutely loves adding more member variables, wrapper functions, type conversions, rather than, say, analyzing and eliminating redundancies. So my experience is that AI is more closely aligned with the engineer type for whom the solution is always "add more code", rather than whatever its human manager would do.

I agree, it just sucks at understanding style and simplicity.

It's good at code generation, feature wise, it can scaffold and cobble together shit, but when it comes down to code structure, architecture, you essentially have to argue with it over what is better, and it just doesn't seem to get it, at which point it's better to just take the reins and do it yourself. If there's any code smells in your code already, it will just repeat them. Sometimes it will just output shit that's overtly confusing for no reason.

Actually I have seen successful promotion packets based on elimination of complexity. When maintenance of a complex system becomes such a burden that even a director is aware of it, "eliminating toil" is a staff level skill.

More than once I have seen the same project yield two separate promotions, for creating it and deleting it. In particular this happens when the timescale of projects is longer than a single engineer's tenure on a given team.

But yes, avoiding complexity is rarely rewarded. The only way in which it helps you get promoted is that each simple thing takes less time and breaks less often, so you actually get more done.

How is diversification unique to crypto? They could have bought us dollars or gold or a lot of other things even before Bitcoin. And the day that Trump decides to make Bitcoin illegal, its worldwide value still plummets. Besides which, crypto is not keeping anyone out of physical jail. China does not stop at seizing your bank accounts.

I've tried very earnestly to use opus 4.5 to get rid of some backlog tasks that were too tedious to do manually. It turns out that they're still extremely tedious because I have to make every single non trivial decision for the model, unless I don't care one iota about the long term sustainability of the code base. And by long term, I mean more than a week. They're good for saving keystrokes or doing fuzzy searches for me. "Design"? No, that is an anthropomorphism.

I actually had a perfect use case for slopcoding - I needed to scrape a search result and turn it into a csv and a bunch of files.

Totally possible with a hour or so or coding but annoying and not that fun. Completely trivial, tons of stuff like it, piece of cake

Claude got something that looked like it was worked, and didn't. I figured out why, told it what to fix, and it didn't.

Finally after several rounds, it kicked off...and then hung on...something? idk what, it doesn't look like it was rate limited

Also it said the code would check to see it had already downloaded the file and if so, skip it. It definitely did not do that lol

At this point it was 90 minutes--an hour of yelling at the computer and another 30 minutes of my ADHD ass forgetting that I had it running

I like it as fancy autocomplete because it's usually helpful and I can silence it for 20 minutes if it's annoying me, but man.

US data, total transactions:

Visa: $3 trillion, 52% Mastercard: $1.4 trillion, 24% American Express: $1.1 trillion, 19% Discover: 0.3$ trillion, 5%

Nearly as common as Mastercard is shocking. Didn't know it was that close

Credit cards alter the power dynamic between customer and merchant, especially in a world where so much commerce is remote. I appreciate protection against fraudulent merchant activity, as well as the ease of use relative to alternatives (who likes carrying cash or a checkbook?). Not having to pay for a month is nice but not the reason I use credit cards.

Amex has less than 10% worldwide market share and is a distant 4th behimd unionpay, visa, mc. I don't see the monopoly here.

I have to say I was relieved when my Amex card issuer switched to visa because owning an Amex is a pita. I think they build their business on various rewards programs, the brand itself is garbage in my eyes.

Btw, that is what Caesar said to his friend who betrayed him along with all the other senators. I fail to see how accusing chatgpt of betrayal makes sense here, so I'm assuming you have a misunderstanding of the phrase.