It is really not a big change to the way we work unless you work in a language that has very low expressiveness like Java or Go

If we include languages like C#, javascript/typescript, python etc then that’s a huge portion of the landscape.

Personally I wouldn’t use it to generate entire features as it will generally produce working, but garbage code, but it’s useful to get boilerplate stuff done or query why something isn’t working as expected. For example, asking it to write tests for a React component, it’ll get about 80-90% of it right, with all the imports, mocks etc, you just need to write the actual assertions yourself (which we should be doing anyway).

I gave Claude a try last week at building some AWS infrastructure in Terraform based off a prompt for a feature set and it was pretty bang on. Obviously it required some tweaks but it saved a tonne of time vs writing it all out manually.

I feel like it’s more the sudden overnight hype about it rather than the technology itself. CEOs all around the world suddenly went “you all must use AI and shoe horn it into our product!”. People are fatigued about constantly hearing about it.

But I think people, especially devs, don’t like big changes (me included), which causes anxiety and then backlash. LLMs have caused quite a big change with the way we go about our day jobs. It’s been such a big change that people are likely worried about what their career will look like in 5 or 10 years.

Personally I find it useful as a pairing buddy, it can generate some of the boilerplate bullshit and help you through problems, which might have taken longer to understand by trawling through various sites.

Well yeah strictly you don’t, but the idea of having a single machine under someone’s desk as a build server managed by one person where you have multiple dev teams fills me with horror! If that one person is off and the build server is down you’re potentially dead in the water for a long time. Fine for small businesses that only have a handful of devs but problematic where you’ve multiple teams.

Bottom line for most business though: As long as the cost makes sense, why bother self-hosting anything. That’s really what it comes down to. A bonus too, as most companies like being able to blame other companies for their problems. Microsoft knows that, and profited greatly with Windows Server/Office/etc. for that very reason.

Yup, exactly this. Why waste resources internally when you can free up your own resources to do more productive work. There’s also going to be some kind of SLA on an enterprise plan where you can get compensation if there’s a service outage that lasts a long time. Can’t really do that if it’s self managed.

I’m talking about in a professional environment. You basically need a team to manage them and have a backlog of updates and fixes and requests from multiple dev teams. If you offload that to something cloud based that pretty much evaporates, apart from providing some shared workflows. And it’s just generally a better experience as a dev team, at least in my experience it has been.

It’s not like internal build servers are 100% reliable, scaleable and cheap though. Personally I’ve found cloud based build tools to be just a better experience as a dev.

I mean after that, once the server is shut down and hosting bills are paid.

What will happen to the remaining donated funds once everything has been settled (assuming there’s funds left over)?

Sounds like it’s not the technical side that’s too difficult, but managing the users.

“Ok, so what you can see in the logs?”

“Sweetcorn.”