Do you save time by using a calculator / spreadsheet or try to do all calculations in your head, because your ability to do quick calculations degrades the more you rely on tools to do it.
I'm not too worried about degrading abilities since my fundamentals are sound and if I get rusty due to lack of practice, I'm only a prompt away from asking my expert assistant to throw down some knowledge to bring me back up to speed.
Whilst my hands on programming has reduced, the variety of Software I create has increased. I used to avoid writing complex automation scripts in bash because I kept getting blocked trying to remember its archaic syntax, so I'd typically use bun/node for complex scripts, but with AI I've switched back to writing most of my scripts in bash (it's surprising at what's capable in bash), and have automated a lot more of my manual workflows since it's so easy to do.
I also avoided Python because the lack of typing and api discovery slowed me down a lot, but with AI autocomplete whenever I need to know how to do something I'll just write a method stub with comments and AI will complete it for me. I', now spending lots of time writing Python, to create AI Tools and Agents, ComfyUI Custom Nodes, Image and Audio Classifiers, PIL/ffmpeg transformations, etc. Things I'd never consider before AI.
I also don't worry about its effects as I view it as inevitable, with the pendulum having swung towards code now being dispensable/cheap to create, what's more important is velocity and being able to execute your ideas quickly, for me that's using AI where I can.
I like learning, I like programming, primarily because it lets me create whatever App I want. I'm continually choosing the most productive languages, IDEs and tooling that lets me be the most productive. I view AI in the same regard, where it lets me achieve whatever I want to create, but much faster.
Sure if you want to learn programming languages for programming sake, then yeah don't Vibe Code (i.e. text prompting AI to code), use AI as a knowledgeable companion that's readily on hand to help you whenever you get stuck. But if your goal is to create Software that achieves your objectives then you're doing yourself a disservice if you're not using AI to its maximum potential.
Given my time on this earth is finite, I'm in the camp of using AI to be as productive as possible. But that's still not everything yet, I'm not using it for backend code as I need to verify every change. But more than happy to Vibe code UIs (after I spend time laying down a foundation to make it intuitive where new components/pages go and API integration).
Other than that I'll use AI where I can (UIs, automation & deployment scripts, etc), I've even switched over to using React/Next.js for new Apps because AI is more proficient with it. Even old Apps that I wouldn't normally touch because it used legacy tech that's deprecated, I'll just rewrite the entire UI in React/Next.js to get it to a place where I can use text prompts to add new features. It took about ~20mins for Claude Code to get the initial rewrite implemented (using the old code base as a guide) then a few hours over that to walk through every feature and prompt it to add features it missed or fix broken functionality [1]. I ended up spending more time migrating it from AWS/ECS/RDS to Hetzner w/ automated backups - then the actual rewrite.
I keep seeing articles religiously pushing htmx, what I'm not seeing are sophisticated examples or apps written with it, just more basic example and interaction examples.
I personally prefer UIs with great encapsulation/composition, which used to be Vue, but with AI starting to write more of my UIs now I've switched to React/Next.js for new non-progressive UIs.
Given oligopoly cloud corps are the biggest exploiters of OSS (to everyone elses detriment), I'd prefer an OSS license that was simply OSS for everyone under < $1B ARR.
> Given oligopoly cloud corps are the biggest exploiters of OSS
Not exploiters unless they are breaching OSS licenses. Why do you think Cursor exists? The forked and made VS code their own. Why is it exploiting when Amazon or MS is doing the same? Am nowhere close a fan of these corps but we need to be very clear when throwing words around like exploiters.
All the LLMs are probably breaching the OSS license though. We don't care about that cos we need it. How can we complain about something we use daily eh?
What are they exploiting? Are they violating the terms of the license? The point of OSS is that there aren't arbitrary restrictions to its use; you can do what you like with it and the open source maintainer has absolutely zero obligations to continue supporting the software, or implement any of your requests.
This is not a "real" (i.e. GAAP or accounting standards) metric, so that would seem like a bad idea.
The trouble is that lots of even the accounting metrics are gameable, but a comptent auditor(s) probably won't let the metric divulge too much from "reality" (i.e. conformance with accounting standards).
Despite having an unlimited warchest I'm not expecting Microsoft to come out as a winner from this AI race whilst having the necessary resources. The easy investment was to throw billions at OpenAI to gain access to their tech, but that puts them in a weird position of not investing heavily in cultivating their own AI talent and being in control of their own destiny by having their own horse in the race with their own SOTA models.
Apple's having a similar issue, unlimited wealth that's outsourcing to external SOTA model providers.
It's now used by a huge number of developers for running local dev environments, and emulating server products (Google firebase and Prisma both embed it in their CLI). Unit testing postgres backed apps is also made significantly easer with it.
One use case, when doing unit tests, Docker containers, would make it too expensive with many tests. SQLite's type checking is far less strict than Postgres, which would not catch errors that would occur the real database due to type mismatch.
Having something like this, that I can quickly spawn and know, I am getting exact behavior as prod database would be a lifesaver!
Hmm single user website run as HTML from some folder? I guess you could embed this from s3 for multiple users but probably this would be like running multiple engines from the same dir.
Postgres features are much nicer, honestly if you are using any sort of orm none of this matters. by design they isolate you from many of the more interesting features of the database. And in general this is probably a good thing. But if you enjoy hand writing artisanal sql postgres is far more pleasant to use than sqlite, not that sqlite is bad, it is very good, just... thin after using pg.
AI tools value simplicity, fast bootstrapping and iterations, this rules out the JVM which has the worst build system and package repositories I've ever had the displeasure of needing to use. Check in gradle binaries in 2025? Having to wait days for packages to sync? Windows/Linux gradle wrappers for every project? Broken builds and churn after every major upgrade. It's broken beyond repair.
By contrast `bun install` is about as good as it gets.
Gradle is something that only Android devs should be using, and because of Google imposes its use. Had not been for Google and Android Gradle plugin, almost no one would care.
Please give me Java tools over C, C++, JavaScript or Python ones, any day of the week.
Only .NET and Rust compare equally in quality of DX.
AI tools value simplicity?!?
Check in the Python dependency management chaos, what it is the proposal this month, from what AI startup doing Python tools in Rust?
Maven is excellent! Once you understand it, you can work with almost any Maven project without needing to learn the specifics. I’d take Maven or Cargo any day over anything in the JavaScript or Python ecosystem.
Sounds like cope. Great Type System, Language Server, IDE Integration, compiler feedback, tooling ecosystem, DX Hot Reload - all things that made it the most used programming language on GitHub.
Overcomplicated type system. Language server seems redundant to mention, everything has a language server. Everything has ide integration. Everything has decent compiler feedback. Everything has hot reloading.
Pretty much all major languages have all of those features save hot-reloading, but that only even makes sense for UI written in an interpreted language.
Being able to update the code while it's running is useful for all kinds of use cases. Desktop apps, web apis, server side rendered web apps, .net blazor apps, etc.
It's nice to be able to see what your changes do without rebuild and restart.
I am unsure why people feel the need to say this about Gradle. If you aren't doing anything fancy, the most you will touch is the repositories and dependencies block of your build script, perhaps add publishing or shadow plugins and configure them accordingly but that has never been simpler than it is now. Gradle breaks when you feel the need to unnecessarily update things like the wrapper version or plugins without considering the implications that has. Wrapper is bundled in so you don't have to try and make a build script work with whatever version you might have installed on your system if you have any, toolchain resolution makes it so you don't even need to install an appropriate JDK version as it does that for you.
If the build script being a DSL is the issue, they're even experimenting around declarative gradle scripts [0], which is going to be nice for people used to something like maven.
So now there will be Kotlin DSL, Groovy DSL and declarative DSL, spread out over up to five files in the project root. Gradle is like C++, trying to climb out of it's complexity hole by digging deeper every new version.
The problem with Gradle is that it never had a clear philosophy to begin with. It's trying to be everything to everybody, changes best practices every year and has enough features that the project at hand could entirely be built out of Gradle scripts itself.
And oh, it still requires an update to run everytime a new JDK is released even though the SDK is the most backward compatible thing ever written.
I personally never had to do a clean install, and thought this is being perpetuted due to a mixture of habit and paranoia.
In any case, what are the proposed benefits of the "kotilization"? I tried it about a year ago but realized that it's just a syntax level-wrapper around the same old DSL underneath. In the end, I still viewed it as an ill-described DSL with a massive learning curve outside of happy-paths.
Europe's bright star has been quiet for a while, great to see them back and good to see them come back to Open Source light with Apache 2.0 licenses - they're too far from the SOTA pack that exclusive/proprietary models would work in their favor.
Mistral had the best small models on consumer GPUs for a while, hopefully Ministral 14B lives up to their benchmarks.
I mean, one is a government, the other are VCs (also, I would be shocked if there isn't some French gov funding somewhere in the massive mistral pile).
> I would be shocked if there isn't some French gov funding somewhere in the massive mistral pile
There is a bit of it, yes, although how much exactly is difficult to know. It’s not all tax breaks and subventions; several public agencies are using it, including in the army so finding out the details is not trivial.
2. Did ASML invest in Mistral in their first round of venture funding or was it US VCs all along that took that early risk and backed them from the very start?
Risk aversion is in the DNA and in almost every plot of land in Europe such that US VCs saw something in Mistral before even the european giants like ASML did.
ASML would have passed on Mistral from the start and Mistral would have instead begged to the EU for a grant.
This takes me back a few years when the first of my Uni friends had a baby, they spoiled him with so many toys that their lounge room was like an obstacle field where you had to be careful where to step, but despite all his toys the baby spent all his time while I was there playing with the door spring.
There's something therapeutic about door springs, that you just have to stop and play with it.
I'm not too worried about degrading abilities since my fundamentals are sound and if I get rusty due to lack of practice, I'm only a prompt away from asking my expert assistant to throw down some knowledge to bring me back up to speed.
Whilst my hands on programming has reduced, the variety of Software I create has increased. I used to avoid writing complex automation scripts in bash because I kept getting blocked trying to remember its archaic syntax, so I'd typically use bun/node for complex scripts, but with AI I've switched back to writing most of my scripts in bash (it's surprising at what's capable in bash), and have automated a lot more of my manual workflows since it's so easy to do.
I also avoided Python because the lack of typing and api discovery slowed me down a lot, but with AI autocomplete whenever I need to know how to do something I'll just write a method stub with comments and AI will complete it for me. I', now spending lots of time writing Python, to create AI Tools and Agents, ComfyUI Custom Nodes, Image and Audio Classifiers, PIL/ffmpeg transformations, etc. Things I'd never consider before AI.
I also don't worry about its effects as I view it as inevitable, with the pendulum having swung towards code now being dispensable/cheap to create, what's more important is velocity and being able to execute your ideas quickly, for me that's using AI where I can.
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