Tag Archive for ‘Rui Carmo’

Colton Voege:

Even if we assume people mean only the actual code writing process is now 10-100x faster, we should still be skeptical of how this maths out. When you write code, how much of your time do you truly spend pushing buttons on the keyboard? It’s probably less than you think. Much of your prime coding time is actually reading and thinking, often while waiting for compiling, a page refresh, or for tests to run. LLMs do not make rustc go faster.

What LLMs produce is often broken, hallucinated, or below codebase standards. The frequency of these errors go up with the size of the codebase. When that happens you have to re-prompt, which could instantly fix the problem or could be a huge waste of time. Or you can go in and fix the code yourself. But then you’re back to measly 1x engineer status, perhaps worse if you’ve gotten so used to vibe coding you forgot how to code. If you’re “embracing the vibes” and not even looking at the code produced, you’re simply going to hit a productivity wall once the codebase gets large enough. And once you do you’ll have to reckon with the complete lack of standards and proper abstractions.

Although I’ve mostly used AI tools in the context of writing, this has been my experience. It doesn’t actually make you more productive, it just turns a blank page into a page filled with stuff you need to edit. And I’m unconvinced that the process is in any way more efficient than just doing the work yourself.

The obvious exception being when you try to have the AI tools do something that you don’t know how to do. But that typically results in something that you don’t know how to edit because you’re unfamiliar with the tools or concepts. And what good does that do you? Unless you’re happy shipping things of questionable quality, I suppose.

(Via Rui Carmo.)

➝ Source: colton.dev

I’m with Rui Carmo on the new Reeder app — it just doesn’t work for me. The biggest sticking point is that it only syncs over iCloud. I currently use Miniflux as the backend for my feed reading, which allows me to read from all of my devices. If I switched to the new version of Reeder, I would only be able to read my subscriptions from Apple devices.

I’ll stick with my current setup of Miniflux, NetNewsWire, and NewsFlash.

➝ Source: taoofmac.com

Rui Carmo, on his iMac purchase:

Furthermore, given what they did to the iMac Pro (which foregoes even the RAM slot this iMac still has), I suspect that upcoming consumer iMacs will also not be user-upgradable by default, so I figured this was a great opportunity to buy a Mac that would allow me to upgrade something a few years from now. And I’ll take upgrading the RAM if that’s my only option, thank you.

I will probably be buying an iMac sometime this year and the ability to upgrade down the line is a major selling point for me. But my first instinct when buying an Apple product is to wait until a new model ships.

This is normally a smart move — wait a few more months and get a superior machine for the same price. But I don’t want to wait for a new model only to find out that Apple removed the RAM upgrade door in the next generation iMac. Then I’ll be stuck scrambling to find a previous-generation machine in the configuration I wanted or having to pay Apple’s exorbitant prices to upgrade the machine’s RAM.