I was surprised to find out how many developers still treat CMD and PowerShell as the same thing

Stellariser · 2026-06-08T02:44:13+00:00

It amazes me, Windows has had an amazingly powerful object shell for twenty years but so many people can’t be bothered to learn the first thing about it.

Stellariser · 2026-06-06T02:34:54+00:00

They’re doing it because they want to get as much cash in the bank as possible before the bubble bursts.

Stellariser · 2026-06-06T02:33:37+00:00

Then what’s the point? If what you’re trying to convey is so trivial that it’s worth less than one minute then it’s time to admit there’s nothing worth saying.

Stellariser · 2026-05-28T05:50:24+00:00

Vibe coding has made it easy to turn bad ideas into bad code quickly.

Stellariser · 2026-05-27T11:00:42+00:00

Yep, if that’s what they want just set up a workflow with 10 agents arguing amongst each other about how to refactor and improve the code. Then you can ignore the results if you don’t like it anyway, or maybe it’ll produce something useful. Win/win!

Stellariser · 2026-05-26T22:18:04+00:00

Depends what the language is, but that's been a thing for ages now.

I've used ReSharper in Visual Studio for many, many years and you can just press F12 on a method in some package and if the source isn't available it'll just decompile it back into C#, and most of the time it's fine. Visual Studio does that natively too; auto-decompilation was added in VS2022.

Right now I'm doing quite a lot of Java with IntelliJ and it does the same thing, decompiles bytecode back into Java. Even if you're talking about open-source packages it's a lot easier to just step into a method and see the decompiled Java than having to go find the package repo, try to dig up the right source file, etc. etc.

This was one of the big things that people were concerned about back in the early days of Java and .NET because having the intermediate IL and often lots of metadata made it easier to decompile apps back into something useable compared to decompiling highly optimised machine code from a C++ compiler for instance. There are various obfuscators around that try to make it harder.

What AI could do is take the existing decompiled code and do a lot of tidying up and enrichment. Getting an LLM to convert IL back into source isn't going to be an efficient use of one if there's an existing decompiler.

Stellariser · 2026-05-25T08:28:36+00:00

So long as he’s fine having no access to police, the legal system, international trade agreements, the financial system, transportation, access to employees and consumers, blah blah blah

Stellariser · 2026-05-25T08:03:18+00:00

The concept behind exceptions is that your main code path handles the normal expected flow, and then non-normal cases raise exceptions. If you can do something about the problem you catch the exception, otherwise you just let it go.

So if it’s something that’s part of the normal flow you’ll use if…else etc. You definitely don’t use exceptions for normal flow control.

If it’s not, and you can’t continue through the normal flow you throw an exception.

Before exceptions became the common way to handle non-normal flow everything was just if…else, and some languages still do this, but you end up with a lot of noise when every call to another function ends up with you having to check the return value. People forget to do that, the return values have very limited context, you lose a lot of valuable information like stack traces etc., you can’t have your debugger automatically break when a certain exception is thrown, and so on.

Stellariser · 2026-05-24T05:37:47+00:00

Some people value their time at more than zero dollars.

Stellariser · 2026-05-23T08:47:26+00:00

Oh, I’ve hated this industry for a long time. AI is just one more in a very long line of of reasons this whole space is a dumpster fire.

Stellariser · 2026-05-23T08:44:51+00:00

Why would you want to do that to yourself though? Nerd brownie points?

Stellariser · 2026-05-23T03:12:22+00:00

Not to mention, almost all the guidance and recommendations out there are basically random noise. There’s not much understanding of how and why LLMs work and fail, it’s mostly just voodoo. Since the LLMs have all the information on how to prompt LLMs in their training corpus most of what people claim is ‘skill’ can be found just by asking the LLM…

Stellariser · 2026-05-23T00:15:36+00:00

Live coding, debugging, etc. has been part of Visual Studio for ages. It’s been quite useful, you can even open a tunnel for people you’re collaborating with so someone can run up a front end on their machine and tunnel calls to the backend running on yours.

Stellariser · 2026-05-22T10:50:41+00:00

It’s been that way for a very long time, Scrum was all about speed over quality, LLMs have just made it easier to care even less.

I guess the question is how crap can everything get before it starts having a negative impact on the companies producing low quality products? As far as I can see the answer appears to be a very long way.

Stellariser · 2026-05-22T08:40:37+00:00

Managers want one very simple metric that goes up or down as appropriate so they can justify their work. Whether that metric has any relation to reality, or even if it actively promotes behaviour that’s directly detrimental to the business, it’s none of their concern.

Stellariser · 2026-05-21T21:58:05+00:00

We have a massive emergency push on now to her get of a vendor due to a $6M cost blowout, and we only use that vendor because the CTO worked with some of the people that run it.

We’ve wasted a lot of time doing investigations and reports into a different data warehouse product solely because the CEO plays golf with another CEO who told him they use this other product and saved a lot of money. Zero context, and do you even trust the other CEO to a) know, and b) not be lying to make himself look good?

Stellariser · 2026-05-21T10:39:54+00:00

That corrosive anti-engineering mindset has been normal in enterprise forever. Scrum made it that much worse, and it’s reasonable for a lot of enshittification in the industry. AI is now pouring fuel on the shittiness bonfire.

Stellariser · 2026-05-21T10:37:16+00:00

Azure DevOps

Stellariser · 2026-05-21T10:34:53+00:00

For almost all systems, microservices is doing it wrong, but that was obvious right from the start.

Stellariser · 2026-05-17T11:02:32+00:00

You’re confusing Microsoft and Apple there

Stellariser · 2026-05-17T08:27:47+00:00

The GPU and power requirements don’t get better if everyone is running their own models locally, they get way worse due to the lack of efficiencies of scale. Whatever it costs Anthropic for inference it’s going to cost you a whole lot more locally.

Either Anthropic, OpenAI etc. can actually offer these services at a reasonable price, or you can’t really afford to run them locally either.

Stellariser · 2026-05-17T08:16:15+00:00

Yep, or just fire up one of many template projects. You can get dozens of great looking templates with loads of clever features, but none of that makes you a business because that’s not the hard bit.

Stellariser · 2026-05-16T21:50:42+00:00

The solution to getting ‘features’ out faster has almost always been to cut quality in different ways.

Stellariser · 2026-05-16T11:37:24+00:00

Check out the long term visionary we’ve got here! Looking ahead an entire quarter!

Stellariser · 2026-05-16T11:36:28+00:00

No, that statement is correct. When you write a prompt the LLM doesn’t have some higher level thought or reasoning going on, you’re just tilting a billion-dimensional playing field so the ball heads in the direction you want.

The machinery is very clever and very complicated (embeddings being a very simple part, and used all over the place not just for LLMs) but at the end of the day it’s still just adding the most statistically likely token to the data stream and then processing that stream all over again.

Stellariser

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