softwaredevelopment

Hello. OK. I give. I'm sick of twitter. I'm looking for cool people to follow. Point me at good accounts?

My interests are #design #neuroscience #3dimaging #datascience #softwaredevelopment #research #uiux #hci and #art

#Perl: older than some #programming careers, younger at heart than you think.

It’s evolved a lot since 1999 — modern features, cleaner syntax — yet it still runs code you wrote decades ago.

(And if you’re wondering: #Perl6 was renamed Raku in 2019 — it’s a sister language, not a successor.)

Curious? Returning after a long break? @shiar’s cheat sheet is a perfect quick‑scan: https://sheet.shiar.nl/perl

#coding #SoftwareDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #RakuLang #Perl5

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 were 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

這兒有沒有開發者是用 AI 來開發程式的？
大家現在主要都用什麼工具呢？感覺最近一些工具越來越「降智」了。
而且以前常用的 AUGMENT 現在也變相漲價了，改成 token 計費……
大家現在還在用什麼開發輔助工具呢？感覺這些 AI 工具背後的資本割韭菜意圖滿明顯的

#開發 #程式設計 #AI開發 #軟體開發 #程式工具 #Programming #Coding #AItools #SoftwareDevelopment #TechTools #開発 #プログラミング #AI開発 #ソフトウェア開発 #ツール #augment

The other day I had the intrusive thought

AI is intellectual Viagra

and it hasn't left me so I am exorcising it here. I'm sorry in advance for any pain this might cause.

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

One issue I'm noticing when learning Go is that the idiomatic nature of the language is making the learning process more difficult for me than C++ or C#.

With C++/C# you can focus on how to write code and then how to design code, but there is a very tight coupling of these concepts in Go that is taxing my brain and pretty much forcing me down the tutorial route, which I tend to struggle with compared to the language reference route.

#Golang #Go #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment

#Programming #Python #JavaScript #CSharp #HTML #Code #WebDevelopment #Tech #Developers #SoftwareDevelopment

Microsoft Copilot putting ads in pull requests on Microsoft Github is expected behavior.

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

I put the text below on LinkedIn in response to a post there and figured I'd share it here too because it's a bit of a step from what I've been posting previously on this topic and might be of some use to someone.

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).

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #coding #dev #tech #SoftwareDevelopment #programming #nihilism #LinkedIn

Nowadays programming in a programming language I don't use daily seems to always require an upgrade cascade of editors, tools, plugins, dependencies, libraries, my DNA, ??? I put some effort into keeping my environment static but all it takes is one autoupgrading thing I missed to kick off one of these cascades, and it feels like whack-a-mole trying to find and lock down every possible cause. This time it looks like a newer version of scala metals might have stopped supporting Java 11 and somehow got updated without my knowledge (maybe? I'm guessing).

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

Well now...

Don't know how much attention any of you pay to #Mastodon #SoftwareDevelopment, but this is very interesting:

Off Github:

Person MJ:

"IMHO community/contributor communication has gotten worse and decreased from an already pretty minimal point in the last few months (with the exception of your engagement on this issue).

There has been basically no progress around the stagnant portions of the backlog.

If the reality is that you do not want external assistance, I would encourage you to just admit that publicly, update the docs to reflect that, close non-team-originated PRs/issues, etc."

Person ES:

"FYI, Andy resigned, so not sure who the point person is for this now"

Person AP:

"Some personal news... after an amazing 3 years working with the Mastodon team, first in developer relations and then as communications lead - it’s time for me to move on (after April 28). It’s been a privilege to work on something as meaningful and important as the Fediverse. 🧵👇🏻 (1/4)"

Here: https://macaw.social/@andypiper/116403015255633865

The most underrated skill isn't knowing how to use every new tool - it's knowing which ones to ignore so you can actually get some work done. #SoftwareDevelopment

Do you want to help testing @badgefed and provision your local test instance?

Easy

docker pull ghcr.io/tryvocalcat/badgefed:latest &&
docker run -v `pwd`/data:/app/data \
-p 8080:8080 \
-e SQLITE_DB_FILENAME=/app/data/badges.db \
-e AdminAuthentication__AdminUsers__0__Id=your-mastodon-username \
-e AdminAuthentication__AdminUsers__0__Type=Mastodon \
-e MastodonConfig__ClientId=your-mastodon-client-id \
-e MastodonConfig__ClientSecret=your-mastodon-client-secret \
-e MastodonConfig__Server=your-mastodon-server \
ghcr.io/tryvocalcat/badgefed

And then open a browser and go to http://localhost:8080 or http://localhost:8080/admin

#docker #badgefed #openbadges #softwaredevelopment #testing #fediverse #activitypub

I posted about the Claude Code leak on LinkedIn and almost immediately someone attacked me about my criticism. They tried the "take a look at COBOL and get back to me" angle.

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

Anthropic apologists still coming out of the woodwork to run cover for them or complain, 24 hours after I posted that the Claude Code source code is horribly ill-structured.

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

I just had an interaction on LinkedIn in which the person claimed we don't code anymore, we "manipulate data". When I pushed back, they gave a PHP regular expression as an example. Apparently what they meant by "manipulate data" is "modify highly-structured strings according to a syntax", an activity they don't seem to recognize as coding. 🤦‍♂

Do instructors just not teach the code-data duality anymore? Data is code is data is now a mystery?

#ComputerScience #tech #dev #coding #software #SoftwareDevelopment #literalism #LinkedIn

I recently reread Fred Brooks's 1986 classic No Silver Bullet, which you can find here: https://www.cs.unc.edu/techreports/86-020.pdf . I think it is useful to re-consider Brooks's distinction between the essential complexity versus the accidental complexity of software development in light of the recent mania behind using LLMs for coding. Which of these types of complexity does LLM use address? Does it introduce more of either class of complexity?

In light of what I've seen, LLM use seems to provide the illusion of addressing both kinds of complexity in the short-term while it increases essential complexity in the long-term. It may or may not reduce some accidental complexity; the verdict is still out, as far as I can tell. Judging from the recent leak of the Claude Code front end source code, LLMs seem to introduce an enormous amount of new accidental complexity.

To the extent that LLMs are in the category of what Brooks calls automatic programming, this quote he shares from David Parnas is important:

Automatic programming always has been a euphemism for programming with a higher-level language than was presently available to the programmer.

The "higher-level language" LLMs trade in is English, which Dijkstra has strongly argued makes for a poor programming language. But even if, contra Dijkstra, it turns out LLMs somehow change that equation, we are still stuck with Brooks's argument that higher-level programming languages largely only address accidental complexity. They do not get at the essence of what makes creating software systems difficult.

Taken together, all this seems to suggest that LLM use in coding is a net negative, and if the above is to be believed it will result in worse outcomes, not better, over the long haul. Definitely re-read Brooks and see if you agree.

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

I realized that if I was writing a program and it didn't always work, I had a choice: I could either fix it, or call it AI.

--David Parnas

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

Welp. I've been using GitLab for over a decade and have been pretty happy with it. Deployed and maintained several instances, some personal, some for small hobby orgs, some for work.

But it looks like it is time to ditch GitLab for good:

> Software will be built by machines, directed by people. AI is the substrate on which future software gets built. Agents will plan, code, review, deploy, and repair.
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/

#GitLab #AI #FuckAI #SoftwareDevelopment

Been experimenting with a way to browse post replies right within the main feed as a threaded view.  You can click on each post or navigate using A or Z to go up and down.

Feedback would be awesome before I get to far down the rabbit hole on making sure it's all wired up.

#elefeed #mastodonapps #software #mastodon #mastodonclients  #feedback #softwaredevelopment

Gradient ascent is superior to generate-and-test in any domain in which you have even a heuristic gradient that is sometimes wrong.

Why people working on software where something serious is at stake would throw out known gradient to use a code generator + testing is beyond my capacity to understand.

https://1password.social/@1password/116580082041363054

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #VibeCoding #Software #SoftwareDevelopment #tech #dev #security #InfoSec #PasswordManagers

"Organizations aren’t burning millions or hundreds of millions of dollars a year on AI because it’s good, they’re doing it because they are run by people who do not know what the fuck they’re doing.

Generative AI is catnip for hall monitors, snitches, toadies, and any other group that hates work and loves talking down to others. Put another way, it ingratiates losers who believe that learning to do or being good at something is a waste of time, because they deserve to just do what they want without any of that messy “effort.”

While I’m not saying every LLM user is an imbecile, they’re built to convince the mediocre and incurious that they’re remarkable, and it turns out that a great many of them run venture capital firms and Fortune 500 companies.

I also want to be clear that while there are sane and normal people who use these things, they’re mostly drowned out by a crowd of people that oscillate between bootlicking and regurgitating capitalist mythology in a way that makes it hard to trust anybody who spends significant amounts of time using an LLM.

One thing you’ll notice about the most moistened AI boosters is that they lack much degree of pride in their work. Everything they say must, at some point, compliment the mindless, unprofitable, unreliable tool underneath it — how “incredibly powerful” it is, how it’s “only getting better,” how it’s “only the beginning” of something that’s eaten over a trillion dollars and absorbed the majority of venture capital."

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AIBullshit #AIBubble #AIHype #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment

Re: https://hails.org/@hailey/116657391001259044

I love this post for several reasons, one being that it got me thinking. The Bad Tech aside, generally speaking modern software development seems hyperfocused on change at the expense of stability. git has countless features for managing changes to source code. What's the equivalent tool for managing the stability of finished software? What's the tool that tells you "Great! You're done now, congratulations!"

Surely there are pieces of software that are mature enough that we do not need to keep updating them (*) with new features. The industry seems to provide little fanfare or reward for reaching or even approaching such an end state.



#tech #dev #software #SoftwareDevelopment #coding

(*) Bug fixes, security patches, and porting aside.

Let's talk CLI/TUI and Developer Workflows!

I’m looking to refresh my local toolkit and I’m curious: what are the absolute "must-have" CLI or TUI programs in your current rotation?

Whether it's a specialized utility for a specific language, a terminal-based interface for a common service, or a workflow-changing alias, I want to hear about it. I’m especially interested in tools that prioritize keyboard-driven navigation and accessibility.

My Current Favorites:

To get the ball rolling, here are a few tools I’ve been leaning on lately:

• uv — Fast, reliable Python package and project management.
• fzf & ripgrep — The classic duo for fuzzy finding and searching.
• tmux — For session management and persistent terminal workspaces.
• jq / yq — Essential for wrangling JSON and YAML without leaving the prompt.

What about you?

1. What is one tool you've discovered recently that you can't live without?
2. Are there any TUI-based clients for web services (like Mastodon, GitHub, or RSS) that you recommend?
3. Do you have a favorite "hidden gem" script or small utility?

Mentions & Groups

@programming
@linux @terminal_u_i@lemmy.ml @selfhosted

Hashtags

#CLI #TUI #Terminal #OpenSource #FOSS #Programming #DevTools #Linux #SysAdmin #Workflow #Python #Backend #ArchLinux #KeyboardDriven #Accessibility #SoftwareDevelopment #TechTalk

This rsync thing has me thinking about the difference between the "free as in beer" model of free software and the "free as in freedom" model the FSF originally put forward. There are important differences, and it's meaningful when a project changes from one model to the other, which is one way to narrativize what's happened to rsync.

I think "free as in beer" software is more appropriately called "Libertarian and Open Source Software", or LOSS. Among other things it involves no obligations on other people, and expects no obligations in return (*). But this means it's an everyone for themselves, anti-communitarian endeavor. We should be honest about this. We should also be honest when a project changes state from FOSS to LOSS, because that's a meaningful change, and actually is a loss in my view.

I continue to believe that enthusiastic embrace of AI/LLM coding tools is a leading indicator of an impending FOSS→LOSS transition.

It seems to me at least one driver of the uproar over rsync is that a bunch of people thought it was a FOSS project but it had, in a short period of time, converted into a LOSS project and the shock was jolting (understandably). As a FOSS project, rsync served a community function, leading people to depend on it, make assumptions about its longer-term stability, and so on. Those are reasonable expectations of a communitarian project. As a LOSS project, rsync is under no obligations to anyone and the maintainer(s) can change the software at any time, for any reason, at their discretion alone. It seems rsync is a LOSS.

#tech #dev #software #SoftwareDevelopment #FOSS #freedom #rsync #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs

(*) Putting aside whether this principle is consistently applied or hypocritical.