I think the post you're responding to would agree, but is trying to make the argument that it isn't worth the cost:

> spent insane amounts of money, labour, and opportunity costs of human progress on this

That said, I would 100% approve of certain people pouring all their energy into AI to rather focus on teaching squirrels chess!

I reckon a lot of re-writes tend to take "them 5x as long as they had hoped" and "isn't even any easier than the old code" exactly because writing the code wasn't the problem in the first place.

It's business logic, edge cases and other small necessary details that accumulated over time which make the code 'messy'. Once you've integrated all those in the new system, it likely looks equally messy. And discovering and implementing all those extra requirements is probably what took you the longest.

Not to say this applies to all re-writes or that AI tools can't help the process

Access is one of my concerns with coding agents - on the one hand I think they make coding much more accessible to people who aren't developers - on the other hand this access is managed by commercial entities and can be suspended for any reason.

I can also imagine a dysfunctional future where a developers spend half their time convincing their AI agents that the software they're writing is actually aligned with the model's set of values

Feels weird sharing a linkedIn post, so here is the text:

> Today, Y Combinator is announcing that YC-funded startups can choose to receive their funding ($500k) in stablecoins. > > We believe stablecoins like USDC are setting the stage for a new fintech renaissance and broader global access to financial services. Sending money should be as easy as sending a text message. Stablecoins make that possible: cheap, fast, and global, using currencies people already trust. > > Some of the fastest-growing YC startups in recent years like Aspora and DolarApp use stablecoins to power faster, cheaper financial services across India and Latin America. Plus, with the passage of the GENIUS Act and growing adoption by financial institutions, we’re bullish. > > Whether crypto-focused or not, we expect many YC startups to use crypto in some way, from payments to banking to capital raising. > > If you’re building onchain, apply for our Spring ‘26 batch by Feb 9: https://lnkd.in/dHEJ9Fc > > And for more on how we’re thinking about building onchain and the types of startups we’re excited to fund, check out our Request for Startups: https://lnkd.in/gSaJ_Xst

And how do we know you won't go and rent out your account to some AI once it's been white-listed (≖_≖ )

Speculation - Starship is a dead end all of this is a play to inflate IPO prices for SpaceX during the AI bubble. Then cash out and start a new private space company?

We used to call the 1.44MB (3.5inch) disk stiffies, since they are rigid, while the physically bigger disks we used to refer to as floppies.

And they used to fail all the time, especially when you had something that spanned more than a single disk.

Is that name used with an eyebrow raised, or did that particular double entendre not make it out of the UK?

My level of English was very basic during the age of stiffies, so that double entendre never occurred to me at the time

> We used to call the 1.44MB (3.5inch) disk stiffies

Are you from South Africa? I understand it was the standard slang name there -- and nowhere else, because of the double entendre.

I am indeed. Very specific knowledge of South Africa you have there :)

I did grow up in Africa, but West not South.

But yeah, when that nickname was current, it was quite famous -- and nobody else dared use it, even the Aussies! :-D

I don't rely on stars as the main signal of quality, but very low stars could stop me from looking into the things that I do use as a signal:

   - number of contributors
   - open issues
   - merged and unmerged PRs
   - commit history
   - the code
   - project governance

Some of these are also tied into GitHub rather than the git repo itself

This is one of my pet peeves! No one should normalize the idea of piping curl output to bash.

Installing any 3rd party dev dependency without sandboxing should terrify you. These supply chain attacks are not hypothetical.

Trusting other devs to not write malicious code has led to a surprisingly small number of incidents so far, but I don't think this will extrapolate into the future.

With more lines of code being auto-written without deliberate intent or review from an accountable author, things can only get worse!