Claude Code is a CLI tool which means it can do complete projects in a single command. Also has fantastic tools for scaffolding and harnessing the code. You can define everything from your coding style to specific instructions for designing frontpages, integrating payments, etc.
Implementation differences do matter. I haven't found Copilot to have as many issues as people say it does, but they are there. Their Gemini implementation is unusable, for example, and it's not because of the underlying models. They work fine in other harnesses.
The author of that post Nolan is a pretty interesting guy and deep in the web tech stack. He’s really one of the last people I’d call "tribal", especially since you mention React. This guy hand-writes his web components and files bug reports to browsers and writes his own memory leak detection lib and so on.
If such a guy is slowly dipping his toes into AI and comes to the conclusion he just posted, you should take a step back and consider your position.
I really don't care what authority he's arguing from. The "just try it" pitch here is fundamentally a tribalist argument: tribes don't want another tribe to exist that's viewed as threatening to them.
Trying a new technology seems like what engineers do (since they have to leverage technology to solve real problems, having more tools to choose from can be good). I'm surprised it rings as tribalist.
The impression I get from this post is that anyone who doesn't like it needs to try it more. It doesn't really feel like it leaves space for "yeah, I tried it, and I still don't want to use it".
I know what its capabilities are. If I wanted to manage a set of enthusiastic junior engineers, I'd work with interns, which I love doing because they learn and get better. (And I still wouldn't want to be the manager.) AIs don't, not from your feedback anyway; they sporadically get better from a new billion dollar training run, where "better" has no particular correlation with your feedback.
I think it's going to be important to track. It's going to change things.
I agree on your specific points about what you prefer, and that's fine. But as I said 15 years ago to some recent Berkeley grads I was working with: "You have no right to your current job. Roles change."
AI will get better and be useful for some things. I think it is today. What I'm saying is that you want to be in the group that knows how to use it, and you can't there if you have no experience.
Honestly that's what makes this all the more dangerous. He's trying to have his cake and eat it too: accept all of the hype and all of the propaganda, but then couch it in the rhetoric of "oh I'm so concerned I can remain in a sort of moderate & empathetic position and not fall prey to tribalism and flame wars."
There's no both-sides-ing of genAI. This is an issue akin to street narcotics, mass weapons of war, or forever chemicals. You're either on the side of heavy regulation or outright bans, or you're on the side of tech politics which are directly harmful to humanity. The OP is not a thoughtful moderate because that's not how any of this works.
> You're either on the side of heavy regulation or outright bans, or you're on the side of tech politics which are directly harmful to humanity.
I don't think this has yet been established. We'll have to wait and see how it turns out. My inclination is it'll turn out like most other technological advancements - short term pain for some industries, long term efficiency and comfort gain for humans.
Despite the anti-capitalist zeitgeist, more humans of today live like kings compared to a few hundred years ago, or even 100 years ago.
But you seem to have jumped to a conclusion that everyone agrees: AI is harmful.
I used GitLab only as a remote repo for private projects, no CI at all. The laggy interface and that damn browser check every so often made me close my account.
The new direction isn’t Liquid Glass, but a more unified branding across Android and iOS. WhatsApp, Google Maps, Instagram, Netflix, Prime Video, and many others don’t look dated, because they don’t make heavy use of the older iOS design language at all.
Can you post a few ideas for fellow Europeans without disclosing what you’re doing? Are we talking small-scale stuff like "use Linux instead of Microsoft" or bigger, political things? Because as a German, I kinda feel pretty powerless and yet, I do have time and possibly resources that could be spent.
> when all someone knows is React or other frameworks, things get overengineered
The next level annoyance is that everybody just assumes React to be the default for everything.
Check the Shadcn website. The landing page doesn’t mention that this is a React-only UI library at all. Same with Radix. The marketing sounds like a general-purpose UI lib. You gotta dig around a bit to realize that this is React-only.
Thanks, I did not know this existed and I find it awesome. How was the experience using it? I wonder if it's well maintained or if it has any annoying quirks.
But that's just classically styled library like bootstrap? How is it in any way similar to shadcn where you copy the component definitions to your code and restyle them with tailwind? It looks visually similar, but completely misses the point of why someone would use shadcn. Also many of the components have degraded functionality on firefox, I couldn't use this in an actual production application.
Personally I also tend to hate on what React has made the modern web, and I say this as someone who's made money for the past 10 years making React apps, but reimplementing half of something poorly and declaring success because it looks kinda similar when you squint is just silly. Many (most?) "pure html frameworks" are like this unfortunately.
my brain for whatever reason won't accept react it's just instant ejection. i was there in the before times all the way up till jquery became uncool and i just tuned out of front end entirely once react and all the stuff driven by facebook became so ubiquitous, my soul just does not want to dabble in any of it.
i think im mostly just appalled at what feels like over complexity that might've made sense over a decade ago but perhaps im waiting for a more satisfying paradigm to come along. i dunno. i had some sparks of joy tinkering with golang to build ssr stuff, i dont keep up with wasm at all but i hope its cruising along.
i wonder if what im after is like some kinda dead simple easy to use declarative front end api that can be built from a backend, something like streamlit or nicegui that has great ergonomics and is easy to maintain but scales better and has better state mgmt than streamlit & puts all the power of a general purpose programming language right there with it. i love compiled things i hate setting up environments with runtimes and stuff.
I get the feeling. From someone outside looking in (haven’t done web work since the heyday of Rails), React and the associated modern stack looks a whole lot like a Homermobile built on the frame and engine of a go-kart, all held together with duct tape and twine sourced from TEMU. The idea that this is the web’s “final form” is difficult to stomach.
You were duped. Tesla‘s paint it black video is from 2016 and one the first obvious lies. People called Musk out on his BS 10 years ago, but he successfully managed to keep a "genius" imagine in the media up until COVID-19 hit. Media sentiment changed around 2020/2021 to adjust to reality of Musk being a massive fraudster.
Important point here: the discussion is about his character, but you’ve made it about his intellect.
I don’t think anyone can doubt that Musk is super smart. I’ve heard silly things like - he doesn’t do anything, it’s all his employees or board or assistant - but reading the history that’s obviously false.
It does seem some people can’t cope with the idea that someone is often an asshat is also brilliant. And I’m afraid it’s true with Musk.
I don’t think Musk is super smart. I think he has some skills that account for how he got to his position other than privilege and luck, I think he probably works hard (or at least, harder than me), but I can’t get to “super smart”.
On the one hand he does some things that seem very smart, on the other he does many that are very stupid (cave divers ordeal). So it’s a bit more nuanced than that.
> I don’t think anyone can doubt that Musk is super smart
I doubt it. He was born into money and was lucky enough to make some excellent purchasing decisions. His various talks and arguments on the internet show him to be fairly stupid in my opinion. I've heard tell that his successful businesses are mainly successful when the staff learn how to manage Musk and prevent his dumbest ideas.
What objective evidence do we have that Musk is smart?
Basically: he's extremely rich
Working hard and being very good at negotiating compensation packages and picking the right companies/products to be involved with (and a bit of luck) are all sufficient for exorbitant wealth though.
E.g. there are plenty of people just as smart as Bezos who didn't hitch their wagon to the "sell something easy on the web" idea at the right time
He was asking you to try to 'steelman', or take seriously the strongest version of, the arguments of your counterparts, rather than being dismissive.
"Plants like CO2" is not a counterargument to "Increased atmoospheric CO2 will have a number of outcomes that are net negative for humanity", so I presume they're asking you to actually think about the argument being made and respond to it, not some other, made up one.
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