No AI needed at all. Only humans.
On the other, the economy and market conditions are brutal for the little guys. Incumbent behemoths hoovering up value, talent and financing.
Instead of shaking things up as usual when a major paradigm shift hits, AI has mostly been a centralizing, consolidating force. Not that I was expecting it to be otherwise, but it's certainly dismaying to witness.
Or am I being too pessimistic / glorifying the past?
It's easier than ever to make your own furniture. IKEA is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to publish a video game. Steam is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to 3D-print tractor parts. John Deere is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to switch to solar power. The petroleum industry is bigger than ever.
One person reverse-engineered Coca Cola, made an exact taste-alike and published the formula. You can make some at home. Coca Cola is bigger than ever.
Something fundamental is wrong with the economy.
In this case: these statements aren't contradictory, they're complementary. It's easy to publish a game on Steam, where the audience are and the money is. It's also easy to publish on itch.io where no money is.
I bet a small team of the quality of the kind developers who are attracted to hacking on Ghostty could recreate the subset of GitHub functionality they actually need in ~six months. It's just the problem of how to pay for the ongoing care, maintenance and hosting? Maybe another opportunity for Mitchell's particular brand of philanthropic OSS.
Of course, you lose out on some things like ease of user access and various protections.
Not just the web either. It feels like the whole world is in a race to throw shit together and cash out as quickly as possible: influencers, hustle culture, enshittification, etc.
My pet theory is that all of the global chaos around the climate, politics, pandemic, etc. is leading people to no longer believe in the future. Once you lose that, all that's left to care about is the right now. No one takes the time to scrimshaw the deckrails on a ship they believe is sinking.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Or perhaps another adaptation:
God, grant me the serenity
to accept the enshittification I cannot change
the courage to improve the things I can
and the wisdom to know the difference.People need to stop bemoaning it, and think and do something. The enshittification is an idiotic, failing, extremely short-sighted strategy.
It's a huge opportunity - your competition has stopped investing in its product, fired its talent, treats its customers with utter contempt, and is managed by imbeciles. Who is a better target for disruption? Hire the talent, market your quality, treat your customers with respect, point out the BS your competition does every time they do it. Stop staring at your navel.
We each have to work on our areas of quality - and when everyone starts doing that, the world changes.
I think the "ridiculously dramatic" part is the whole love letter to GitHub, not the frustration.
And I think it is fair to say that it is ridiculously dramatic. Which is okay, of course, I'm not criticising here. Just like it would feel ridiculously dramatic (at least to me) if someone explained that they cried today when they stopped their subscription to Netflix in order to move to another service, because they love Netflix so much.
I don't think it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about great tools rusting or makerspaces closing...
I am just saying that when Mitchell mentioned it being "ridiculously dramatic", I think he was not talking about the frustration but rather about the fact that he cried about leaving GitHub.
It's okay to feel sad about something and to also feel that it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about it.
Thanks for the downvotes though.
Another gigantic unspoken issue is that people have started building tons of stuff with React on purpose for some reason.
Yes, it does.
> React is getting a bad rap because it’s visible when the issue is clearly their backend.
Two things can be bad! Except that in this case one of them is unnecessarily bad, because nobody forced them to use a front end system which defaults to terrible failure handling.
This is, in fact, on topic: github actions seemed to me like a bad idea from the start, to me, but I let my co-workers and "network effects" convince me that I was being grumpy and that it was fine, and so we've adopted it. And now ... here we are. It was exactly as bad I thought it was, and it reflected a broken engineering culture.
I am not again performance bonuses, but they should be attach to better metrics. Eg the number of happy users is still up in 3 years time. Or something like this.
Companies know how to make good product, but if they don't have "new and shiny" to impress us anymore, then their only alternative is to make things worse so they can heel turn and then make things "better" by unmaking all of the worse things they did.
They can also milk their customers coming and going in the process.
It's not "enshittify or lose", its just raw greed. Things will get better again, either that or a competitor will destroy them. Enshittification is just the current meta and a new one will come soon enough.
I think it's that company management has no incentive to do well. So they have no reason to push this down to the bottom tier of workers who actually make the products. The feedback loop is open. They make an order, the product gets worse, the line goes up, they don't know the product got worse and they have no reason to care anyway.
Slop didn't start with AI.
The West already forgot how to manufacture things, and we are now forgetting how to code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907879
1. The company builds a moat and just remains shit.
2. New entrants either displace the company entirely (most likely) or competition slows the enshittification process (distant second) or reverses it (almost never).
What about lock-in, being a monopoly? Why wouldn’t you maximize on saving costs? Sure some people leave, but the majority is not going anywhere. And if the platform dies they’ve made more money than to keep it alive.
Companies aren't getting cheap loans right now so they're desperate to juice their stocks so that upper management can secure their bonuses.
That's why "get shitty" is necessary.
When they've wrung it dry, pocketed all of the crumbs of raw cash they can get, then they'll either collapse due to overmilking their products or they'll realize that the only way to refatten the calf is to bring in new customers, so they'll unshittify it for the fresh infusion of customer money.
It's a cycle, and one I predict will inevitably lead to many of these companies' collapse.
I think it’s “find natural monopoly and reduce costs (aka enshittify)”.
Github is a natural monopoly and users cannot go anywhere. Unless you’re famous like Mitchell Hashimoto.
If you think you need those sweet GitHub stars, I can't help you.
> If you think you need those sweet GitHub stars, I can't help you.
The majority of users need it.
https://lists.sr.ht/~machocam/public-inbox/%3C46e343ec-c932-...
GitHub back in the day was a healthy version of "Move fast and break things". I wonder what's different.
AI slop code
It's not a coincidence that every impressive result done using AI has come from someone with a track record of impressive results before AI. AI isn't magic. It doesn't make you good at stuff you're bad at.
If it just shat the bed completely, you'd have an easy argument to replace it with something else; instead, it would be technically competent (Hi, Raymond!) but covered in stuff that made it infuriating to use (Hi, Redmond!), especially if you didn't live in it day in and day out.
FWIW, some people used to (or still do) say similar things that software is significantly worse because people use "unserious" languages like PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript. It brought about so much cool shit that I don't think it's worth saying we should've stuck with only C and Java.
That's definitely great for work life balance, and I don't think any less of them for that, but passion seems to be gone.
I would be doing what I do for work if I was employed or not. That's how everyone I used to work with was. Now everyone seems to do the minimal, with the goal being more to direct blame than solving neat problems.
Used to be nerds hanging out on IRC, distributing Slackware, hacking trialware, modding games, etc. that had the passion and problem solving determination to do software work, which used to be harder due to lack of access to information.
OTOH what a great time for a budding engineer. I'm in my mid 30s, and no longer have the same stamina and passion as in my teenage/20s, but in the last 5 years I've learnt so many things I could not have done so back in the day. I learnt and experimented way more around random topics like compilers, OS, electronics, databases because of ease of access to information, AI (:shrug:), even though I have way less free time.
CV-driven development, a treadmill of features nobody needs that hurts stability we do need.
Hardware, I don't know. Possibly always was too, I think even non-tech hardware was pushing more features as an excuse for shorter product lives back around the Great Depression, give or take a decade.
Too bad it's not reminiscent of the Hotmail purchase where they tried to move off the BSD servers and ended up with new accounts on the relatively unreliable Windows-based setup, and old accounts routed to the original BSDs.
Have you ever tried to run anything from the 80/90s era? Segfault everywhere, "fatal error was successful", kernel panic, BSOD, screen freeze for any reason and its opposite.
Nothing serves better good all time than bad memory as they say.
Not that the gigabit of useless crap to show essentially a few ko of text is fine, but the abuses and horrors that humans commit just shifted a bit where they land, it's not like there was a time were we had a land free of human dirty stuffs.
I take it you're agreeing with the sentiment since you had to go back 40-50 years to make your point.
KISS and you sleep better.
That and the problem of forever chasing trends and never saying: "It's done" without reinventing everything every couple of years (trends again)
Sounds too easy? It is of course simplified, but the core still holds true.
GitHub just worked, but they had to migrate to React because "that's what everyone else uses"... Pure Enshittification.
They seem to have changed the primary source of data in the issues and pull requests tabs (w/o filters applied) from the underlying database to the elasticsearch search index, which has the side effect that there's a noticeable delay between state change of an issue/pr and an update in the UI. But as seen today, these can get out of sync, and apparently they even had data loss in the index.
I would really like to know their reasoning for making that change. I can totally imagine that they wanted to "simplify" so the UI uses only a single data source instead of two.
As a user it's incredibly annoying to have a delay between issue/pr state changes and the search index picking it up.
When the outage happened yesterday I sort of figured it was something I had been noticing building up or something.
With that said, Mitchell complains about outages. These started directly after Microsoft acquisition[4] and are attributed to migration from AWS to Azure.
[1] https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/ho...
[2] see html source for tags
Yesterday we saw PR pages that displayed no error, just displayed wrong info. I would have preferred to get an error page than outdated or empty lists. I was guessing this was related to the React migration but I don't really know.
Like, what user-hostile intention was the reasoning behind that? I am literally imagining a product manager smoking a cigar and laughing at the RUM session replays of me losing my shit.