This does not seem to be a good write up at all, see nullc’s explanation in this discussion of (what seems to me) the actual root cause whereas this article spent a lot of words making the argument that bad commit messages must mean bad code, later using the assertion to try “prove” what the technical problem was.

I agree that a bad commit message combined with a big commit is a huge smell, but as it’s just metadata for the code and not the code itself, it is not in itself evidence in any form.

That being said, probably okay after explaining the technical code issues for the author add a couple of a sentences about how all this was was part of 1000s of a lines of code changed in commits with useless messages which demonstrates generally bad code hygiene.

I think what is the author is getting at is that if you are cavalier in your commit messages when the stakes are low, chances are you aren’t taking writing code that handles money seriously. Made me think of some merges I could have taken more seriously.

You mean my DIY projects that result in a dozen trips to Home Depot aren’t optimal :)

Ha. Yeah. Plumbing is the worst for this. I'll buy like twice what I think I need, including some coupling to one size larger and smaller and some larger and smaller pipe. I learned after fixing a well took SIX TRIPS.

(Turns out the line to the gauge was borked, so it never turned off the pump, so the pressure built until it busted my pipes.)

Bingo. Obviously being deficient is bad, but the reason supplementation seems unimpressive is this is one of those proxies for healthy lifestyle. Kinda like how grip strength is correlated with longevity but banging out tons of hand gripper sets isn’t going to do much for you health.

Exactly this! People think the one shot gets them to 95% complete on an implementation of their vision. Issue is, it actually gets you the AIs vision adjacent to what you want, and coercing that into the actual implementation you want is now 95% of the work.

This is really no different from working with humans. A visionary founder has to spend tremendous effort to get their engineers to will a vision into existence. This will be the key skill with AI.

Or the person just likes to lock into flow states at the point of maximum leverage. Previously that was coding. Now it’s commanding agents.

Seriously fun! A first it felt frustrating but it was interesting that at a certain point (after about 10 minutes) I suddenly got an intuitive feel for the ball’s trajectory and it became addictive at that point.

My only gripe is you render the bonus notification too near the ball and it distracts me and makes it harder to keep a combo going.

Isn’t a big part of the issue that social media is free and funded via ad revenue. So the business incentives push towards addictive engagement and increasing viewing time to see more ads. Not so different from traditional TV, but 1000x more potent since it’s a personalized algorithm.

What if instead of banning these addictive services we require companies to charge for them and disallow advertising revenue. That changes the entire business model, and there is no longer a strong incentive to have users spend as much time on the platform as possible. In fact, the best customer would be one that subscribes but barely uses the platform.

For me this all comes back to the perverse incentives that arrive when advertising is the primary source of revenue for the largest companies in the world. Social media allows advertising at scale never seen before and it’s no surprise that it’s been weaponized in ways that are actively harming people.

Probably not much other than scale. Facebook is large enough that they can hire behavioral researchers to make this stuff more addicting while looking the other way and raking in the money. I think Roblox is just as bad (maybe worse) regarding addiction for kids. I’ve played hundreds of hours with my sister’s kids and the way all these low quality slop games handle grinding, progression, and pay gating is honestly disgusting.

But then again, I manage to get myself addicted to a video game usually once a winter for a few weeks, and don’t play games for the rest of the year. There’s really no solution to this, but I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is hopelessly addicted to shallow digital experiences.

I suspect the issue was Sora likely had a very low ratio of consumers to creators which makes a route to monetization unlikely. There was no incentives for doom scrolling consumers to migrate to Sora when they were already getting plenty of short form videos on FB, IG, and TikTok.

The network effects of the other two platforms are too strong, and a value prop of “watch similar videos but they’re all AI” is not strong for consumers.

Also, say what you want about AI slop, but I was on sora a lot for a few weeks and there was a real explosion of creativity on there. It felt new and exciting and creators were engaging with each other and sharing feedback and tips. I generated a ton of videos and surprised myself with a flury of creative ideas.

Completely agree. It’s very telling that the majority of write ups on effect agentic coding are essentially summaries of software engineering best practices.