Well put! Now that we have a magic tool that can generate tokens on demand, the quality of the underlying idea gains enormous importance relative to the code. Tokens are cheap. Good ideas are not.

I would like to hope that some people take advantage of this newfound agentic power to create better theories. But there's a sizable population that seems intent on generating more and more code, regardless of quality.

The plant still need solar energy. They still need electricity within the tissues of the organism to survive (ATP and krebs cycle). Humans have always burned organic matter for light.

Not trying to be a pedant but "Light without electricity" falls down when examined from any angle. It's not a serious claim.

GeoJSON is firmly rooted in the "simple features" model of spatial data. Sometimes called the "vector data model", this is ubiquitous in GIS. Each geographic entity (aka "Feature") has a single geometry and many non-geometry attributes. Each feature is independent.

The vector data model (for better or worse) is the basis of many systems because it fits the tabular/relational style so closely. What is a feature but a row in a table plus a special column describing its geometry? Topological relationships are ignored by design.

TopoJSON, ESRI coverages, the internal OpenStreetMap data model, and a few others are notable exceptions. They explicitly handle spatial relationships, at the cost of making the model unintelligible to row-based processing.

One could hope that we'd use these newfound agentic coding powers to actually realize value, improve quality, etc. Instead I see enshittification and stagnation. What are we even doing with all these tokens?

But the flipside is, I see the same gym crowd at the coffee shop next door and we always have a good chat there. Context matters.

But I found myself laughing at the style; just ranting about software like a cartoon villain in his bathrobe. No fucks given.

Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work? Now that coding is automated, we have to elevate our ambitions.

Ironically, Phish's music emerges from egoless expression (to paraphrase keyboardist Page McConnell). Giving up your own personal stake in the process is literally what brings something as beautiful as Phish's music into existence. We need to do the same with our software; give up the notion that "our" code is meaningful.

YES. The beauty of programming is and always was that, first, you enjoyed it and, second, for some oddball reason you could actually get paid to do it. And one can't produce anything good unless you actually love working on it which means you want to put yourself working on it. The outcome might accidentally serve the one who pays for it but ultimately what did get the work finished was the sensation when you were reaching the point where you would finally tie things together and see everything you designed come to life and work together.

AI doesn't give you that personal involvement. We can do it but it's a different line of work and we care very little about what goes in and what comes out. We just do the grunt work of connecting the two ends. We're not for a fuck interested in elevating ambitions which is a word that relates to what is outside while all the good stuff comes from the inside.

Yes.

> Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work

I care about the outcome, which is why I don't trust it to a fucking LLM

Valuing quality over velocity is not selfish

Fully agree. I never mentioned velocity or advocated for lower quality. In fact, this statement very well sums up my point: we should care about the thing we're producing, not our personal experience of coding it.

In my experience anyone saying they're still producing high quality work while using LLMs is full of shit when the work is actually reviewed properly

Most of my interaction with AI models and agents is still mediated by a keyboard and still requires a lot of "typing ascii characters". ;-)

BTW, there's nothing preventing you from using AI agents and staying in the flow state. If you want that, the universe is not stopping you. In fact, not dealing with the minutia of source code may well free us up and allow even greater flow experiences.

You say minutia, but others say well organized notation and predictive systems. At least for me, writing code is as easy as writing English and with less effort.

Unless Page McConnell is creating his music with AI these days, I don't think this point holds.

    claude-local () {
     MODEL=$(curl --silent localhost:1234/api/v1/models | jq 'first(.models[].loaded_instances[].id)') 
     ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:1234 ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN='' claude --model $MODEL
    }

The Story of CO2 taught me something I had never considered. It wasn't exactly that photosynthetic life started pumping out O2 and chilled the planet. Snowball earth happened way later. It was photosynthetic life that got buried in sediment and locked it away from aerobic respiration. The amount of carbon stored in the earth's crust is insane. Fossil fuels are just a minuscule fraction of that.

This has some implications for our current climate: If we want to use biology to sequester carbon (growing trees, algae, etc), it's only a temporary sink unless we lock it away for eons. Once it's eaten/burned, the CO2 is right back in the atmosphere. In short, we gotta physically put it back into the earth's crust if we want to draw down carbon.

20% of the world's oil production. But only half is sold on the international market, the rest is used domestically. So roughly 40% of the world's purchasable oil comes through the Strait.