or democracy/civilization attack. DHS/Putin siccing this kind of thing on democratic voter rolls around Nov. elections could be the least of it.

i could see a long tail of impenetrable chaos as private correspondence gets hacked, ppl get divorced, fired, fight back, flood the zone with their own reputationslop so they have a grounds for denial, decide to take it ALL down to distract. recursive waves of tyranny/chaos. this isnt the singularity we were promised!

Let's take that vibe coded product and iterate what it gave you 100 times, as you tweak it to fit your vision. When you do that 101st iteration, can you prevent it from breaking something else, or changing it in a way you don't like it?

What if it doesn't understand what you're asking it to do and keeps failing and you have to keep rolling back? Can you understand the 20,000 lines it's generated so you can make the change yourself without tearing your hair out? Can you fix bugs in it that it can't, without starting from zero and having to understand the whole codebase?

To guard against this, the best course of action is probably modularization and composition, right? The Unix philosophy, ie building small, focused tools out of small, focused tools.

yes - i've thought that could work. returning to a more protected object oriented programming model (with hard-defined interfaces) could be a way - "make these changes but restrict yourself to this object" etc.

If you take the author's arguments on face value, you just hit YOLO button and have one iteration and publish it to production fast so you are on the market before competition does the same.

Just run it a 102nd time to fix the error from the 101st time, obviously /j

with these posts I always wonder, what happens when this code runs into a customer? Or 1000 customers, or a million? All with their own divergent needs year over year.

I have just gotten off 3 years as a developer for that kind of project, and I used the best AI tools diligently every day. It often saved me time. Like from some small drudgery of half day of flailing about in config land. Or it could generate some nice rails controllers and a javascript front end from a well-written spec. writing tests was also a strong suit.

but just as often it failed to understand the depth of the product and its myriad concerns and led me down the garden path, reducing my efficiency.

Aside from that, a large part of my job was the parts that weren't coding - wrestling with specs that were far from ready for primetim, chaotic internal processes, deployment, internal coordination/communcation, talking to customers, etc.

In the end it seemed like it saved me maybe 20% of my time overall. Nothing to sneeze at.

I get that greenfield apps that have no customer contact can be created with a phrase now. That's pretty amazing. But I would love to see Opus 4.6 up against a real beast of a codebase that you're far from a master of.

I take it; still obsessed.

holy crap, that's amazing. i struggle to get my head around the agent hype - but i guess this video helps a little. I have Agent FOMO, I guess.

I think it's a more about the cool factor than it is the value creation. I just don't get so many emails that I need something else to summarize them for me and plan my day.

i wonder if the skills will divide a bit. That there will be those who still program by hand - and this will be a needed skill, though AI will be a part of their daily toolset to a greater or lesser degree.

Then there will be the AI wranglers who act almost like DevOps engineers for the AI - producing software in a different way ...

yet tim cook still feels the need to attend the melania premiere

"barratry" - thanks for that one, too!

The Myanmar story was definitely the worst (Mark Z + callow execs being willfully ignorant as Facebook clearly inflamed ethnic cleansing there and caused many deaths).

Later in the book, the China story was a close second. In order to get into China (to "grow") - exec team agreed to host Facebook's servers in China where the government could get access to customer private data, so they could stifle dissent.

Tons of other weird/bad/embarrassing stuff too. The author, a member of the core executive team, was seriously complicit but redeemed herself in my view with this no-holds-barred account of the complete lack of ethics up top.

In general a damning portrait of the executive team as just not giving a shit about anything except for growth and willing to actively participate in dictatorship in order to make it happen.

I want to point out a few things here because people are going to split hairs about definitions and other irrelevancies

I don't know exactly how they do this in non-english languages, but english speakers have complained that all the posts they see from friends are the most abrasive and inflammatory. Specifically those. So it's not just "a neutral platform". If this was happening in Myanmar then of course it inflamed ethnic tensions

Second, Facebook's barging into emerging markets - with Free Basics, they sent letters on behalf of Indians to the telecom regulatory body (including net neutrality advocates who were very much against it). Facebook in Myanmar would not even be a thing in the first place were it not for their larger internet.org initiative. (I don't dislike "social media". It's fine to connect with people, but not the way FB does it) Whether we ought to have these services wholly decentralized or some sort of KYC system - dunno. But FB (and specifically Zuckerberg) are just bad faith actors

If the system was decentralised and started helping out a genocide, what would the mechanism be for stopping that?

The free-speech absolutists would presumably just shrug but that seems absolutely wild.

But you're not addressing my fact it was artificial ranked ordering. Also, Facebook (per Sarah Wynn Williams) was told about this and they did nothing about it

I’m aware Facebook didn’t act, I wasn’t aware of the rankings.

I’m just wondering how a decentralised system would manage something like this.

> In order to get into China (to "grow") - exec team agreed to host Facebook's servers in China where the government could get access to customer private data, so they could stifle dissent.

That's exactly what Apple does with iCloud in China.

It wasn't just Chinese data, though. It was access to all customer data. They also built tools specifically for searching and filtering that data that they told congress were impossible to build...

I am still a WindSurf user. It has the quirk of deciding for itself on any given day whether to use ChatGPT 5.2 or Claude Opus 4.5 in Cascade (its agentic side panel). I've never noticed much of a difference, they are both amazing.

I thought the difference must be in how Claude Code does the agentic stuff - reasoning with itself, looping until it finds an answer, etc. - but I have spent a fair amount of time with Claude Code now and found that agentic experience to be about the same between Cascade and Claude Code.

What am i missing? (serious question, i do have Claude Code FOMO like the OP)

Wondering too, I found Windsurf excellent for what it does, but do miss my preferred $EDITOR

I have tried the Cascade toolbar with RubyMine and it works well ...