AI producing excessive amounts of code is a self-reinforcing phenomenon wherein you have to write huge diffs to get anything done due to the way the existing code is implemented
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@datarama @jcoglan path to a utopian society straightforward from here:
- all software is given markdown documentation and MCP backends, so that it can work with AI
- AI disappears due to collapse of economic logic and/or changes in IP law
- someone invents a programming language that can connect to MCP
This post is a joke, I think
@mcc @datarama @jcoglan In general I have been trying to survive through this era by, just improving our systems normally (lower latency, better APIs, better error messages, invalid states unrepresentable, DRY...). And claiming that the improvements make it work better with AI. Which for all I know could be true
Collapse the last two into "the AI corporate ecosystem no longer exists in its mid-2026 form and we, as a society, develop better mental models for what LLM-based instruction following systems are and (more importantly) aren't" and your joke becomes my actual prediction for the future.
@mcc I know this sounds like a fake answer but when people talk about it eliminating boilerplate my response it "I just don't write boilerplate and I don't understand why this is a problem" like genuinely this is not a pressing issue that I have when writing programs
@mcc like, the information density of code you write is directly under your own control. literally "you control the buttons you press"
@jcoglan @mcc I think that is generally true for a surprisingly small subset of programmers who are likely to be over-represented on Fedi. If you're writing business logic, which a whoooole lot of programmers are, usually you're stuck in languages and templating systems beyond your control, and there is a ton of boilerplate.
@vathpela @jcoglan so "AI" is a broken corporate system that refuses to fix itself giving itself permission to fix itself but ONLY if it does it through the jingly-keys "AI" technology. seems silly. what if instead we introduced macro systems and learning to program, and called it "supertechnology" or "hyperprogramming" and said it was worth $2 trillion dollars. would the corporation mandating the boilerplatey template system be willing to embrace a less-boilerplatey template system then
@mcc @vathpela @jcoglan the only flaw in this plan is that this technology would involve a well-compensated labor force whose psychological well-being was respected and cultivated, and the real purpose of “AI” is to destroy that. if they could destroy the power of labor without all the “boilerplate” stuff they’d be doing that instead
@glyph @vathpela @jcoglan perhaps at some point in the future, corporations will conclude that their purpose is to perform activities that result in a revenue higher than their expenses, rather than treating psychological terrorism against working classes as their primary objective.
unlikely, i know. but perhaps it is possible.
@glyph It's possible we should be thinking hard about trying to figure out what glitch in executive brains briefly allowed Bell Labs to exist. Was it the three-martini lunch? were c-suites just so fucking blitzed out of their minds they forgot to do a class war for a while there? is the trick to somehow get C*Os off of cocaine and back on alcohol? stimulants are the problem. depressants are the answer
@whitequark @mcc ironically the shift towards prescription amphetamine closely tracked the transformation of the wild overcompensated gateway to capital that was once wall st becoming instead a carefully managed workforce that looks more like regularly exploited workers. the much vaunted “professional managerial class” are just working class people with apartments that cost $7,000 a month
@glyph @whitequark yeah when someone says "PMC" my threat sensors go on high alert like someone is trying to lie to me but i'm not sure about what yet. it is the same feeling i get when someone says "middle class" or "affordability" or "AI"
@glyph @whitequark what if the PMC is a trick. what if the PMCs are all actually PMCs and they're trying to distract us with namespace collision. what if they're just waiting for the signal
@jcoglan boilerplate is a failure of abstraction. some languages give you enough abstraction to prevent boilerplate; some make this hard. if you find you don't encounter boilerplate, this suggests to me you're good at abstraction and your tools are allowing you to be good at it.
if people keep encountering boilerplate, my rec would be to adopt tooling that allows them to do abstraction. but i guess some people think adopting and learning tooling is too hard and letting an RNG write code is easy
also the anti-DRY-ness it tends to produce makes it incredibly difficult to know if you've covered everything that needs changing b/c the same concept has dozens of representations. this directly leads to more bugs