Finding Nemo is one of the funniest movies. I can never again hear whale sounds without thinking of that flick, among other memorable scenes.

I'm trying to remember when we gained sovereignty over Sweeden, but can't come up with a date.

Donald says he only has to think about it, and ownership becomes law, just like "declassification".

Dot-Com Bubble: "We'll move X to the Internet and do X on the web! Invest!"

AI Bubble: "We'll move X to a data warehouse and do X via AI! Invest!"

ShoeGPT

...AI

No one has experimentally demonstrated what happens if you try to eat an anti-pizza, but theory suggests that it is probably not good.

One would need to take an antiacid.

...enough for anyone!

- Sony Gates

Maybe if you [Americans] locked your nutcases up...

Our Supreme Court gave the most egregious ones immunity from that.

Guessing motivations is poor evidence in either direction.

...Streisando Effectux

Honey bees ARE an invasive species in North America. Invasive species are bad, right? /s

Paper mills are truly awful to be around. Necessary, but awful.

I think you really hit the nail on the head. The most successes I have had with LLM code is when it's building on an established foundation, a well-structued database, well-structued MVC set up, or whatever. If you're using a well-documented framework, that's another plus.

If you know enough to guide the AI in the direction you want it to go, you're far more likely to get good results. Heck, I've had good luck with just writing a function prototype and having it fill in the guts. I've had good luck telling it to refactor so-and-so class according to whatever principles. I use it regularly with great success to write elaborate SQL from plain english prompts.

It feels very much like the end of an era. I do not by any means think software development as a job is going away--I'm not even sure jobs will ultimately be lost--but it will never be like it was before, for better or for worse.

I only started using Claude Code a few months ago, and you are absolutely correct about the cli / code-integrated tools.

I had Claude translate a COBOL (esque -- DATABUS) program into a modern language and framework today. The plan phase took about 6 minutes, I made a few edits to the plan, and writing portion took about 4 minutes. I got claude to run some tests comparing outputs, and they were identical. I then myself ran similar tests and got the same results. Pretty neat.

I hate having to tweak the legacy DATABUS code and recompile. The subroutine / goto method of programming is hard to wrap my head around now.

To be fair, Kasparov came back and won in 1999 and earned a 6 game draw in 2003. There was a period where the grandmasters were figuring out weaknesses in the AI play.

I can't say I've followed chess at all recently, but my impression is that humans are no longer competitive.

Now do Go.

30 years ago Go was considered almost an almost impossible problem for an AI program to compete at even a high amateur level.
20 years ago Go programs started being able to beat strong amateurs / weak professionals
10 years ago AlphaGo decisively beat the best Go players

We're in a situation where improvements in the performance of AI system are linked to both more advanced techniques and massive increases in compute power. I don't see either one stopping any time soon.

Progress can be scary.

Is that all AI's fault? I also don't know how bad the job market for beginning coders is!

I graduated from undergrad a bit more than 20 years ago with a computer science degree. At the time there were less than 100 majors per year. This was roughly 4-6% of the student body. Comp sci was well behind economics, public policy, biology, political science, and maybe some others in terms of popularity.

Starting in the 2010s, the number of computer science majors started to grow very rapidly. In 2024 there were almost 500 majors! Almost 1/3 of the entire student body was a computer science major.

This is a national university that historically was not especially a "tech" school. I thought the quality of computer science students in the early 2000s was not especially high. I was the only person in my introductory 80+ people required class who had any experience in asm. I was able to take a couple of grad level classes, and my experience there was that most of the students were H1Bs (or related) who were simply there for more credentializiation. Many undergrad students talked about they just wanted to get their degree and then move straight into management. Yuck. (This is all one of the reasons my primary career today is not as a developer!)

In any case, it seems absolutely insane to me that my school is spitting out that many majors. I'll be curious to see the 2025 and 2026 numbers...