Christophe B.

Any fan of point-and-click adventure games out here?
I have a Steam key for Syberia 4 (The World Before) to give away. It's not very challenging but features a great story and stunning graphics.

Someone got promoted at Google for coming up with one of the worst usages of Gen AI I can think of. This is outright dangerous and irresponsible.
https://www.404media.co/google-earths-new-ai-lets-anyone-fabricate-completely-bullshit-satellite-images/

In other news, LinkedIn added a funny but deceiving "Seems like AI slop" button to their website and apps. Not to show you less AI slop but to help them avoid feeding AI slop to their AI models.
#linkedinlunatics

Days since last API incident: 0

A colleague quietly changed the behavior of an API and broke mobile apps in production without anybody noticing until I did today.
"Whoops, now we can't fully revert the changes because the frontend in production is already relying on the new behavior."
Why do mobile apps always have to pay the price and get the blame?
#API #mobiledev
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSKp2StlS6s

#Cloudflare #layoffs

An engineering lead at my client's company often compares developers using coding agents to farmers using industrial tools to increase their production instead of handcrafting everything.

This analogy always felt wrong and now I understand why: code is reusable and doesn't need to be mass produced. Code is the tailor-made tools that controls your production. And you need all the craftsmanship you can get to make these tools as reliable as you can to ensure production doesn't go off the rails.

Of course Odoo added an AI chatbot button in their main interface and there is no setting to remove it, despite the chatbot saying otherwise.
https://www.odoo.com/documentation/master/applications/productivity/ai.html

• Third, it's insulting because it implies that I'm resisting change and unable to adapt, even though I've been developing software for two decades and have embraced many new technologies over time. Of course I'm going to adapt and use whichever tools become the norm because they proved to be helping producing better, safer, maintainable code more easily and in less time. But today I'm still not convinced AI agents are helping to achieve that goal, mainly because they are very opaque tools.

Another argument I hear frequently is "AI is here to stay even after the bubble explodes and in the future every developer will be using coding agents of some sort so you better adapt now."

Three things bother me about this statement:

• First, "AI" is nothing new. What's new is the hype and some of its applications like these coding agents.
• Second, no one can predict the future and we still have a lot to learn about the long-term effects of using these AI coding agents in production.

My client is insisting for me to actively try AI agents to "see how they can help me work more efficiently".
But it's not actually about efficiency because I believe I'm already efficient enough: I do alone in 4 days what two colleagues do on iOS in 5 days. Not thanks to "AI" but thanks to a sane codebase that I know well and excellent tools.
It's about optics and marketing, being able to say to customers that "our product was made possible by AI and all our employees use it".

Omarchy is still listed on https://frame.work/linux 😔

If you're late to the party like me, here's one of the most interesting articles about using LLMs for coding:
"Your LLM Doesn't Write Correct Code. It Writes Plausible Code."
https://blog.katanaquant.com/p/your-llm-doesnt-write-correct-code

I want to warmly thank #Square engineers for Dagger, OkHttp, Okio, Retrofit, Moshi, Picasso, JavaPoet and KotlinPoet, Seismic, TimesSquare, LeakCanary, Anvil, Wire, Tape, SQL Brite and SQLDelight, Otto and other outstanding contributions to the Android and Java ecosystems.
It's truly the end of an era.
#Block #layoffs #AndroidDev