Question is to cover rural communities as-is, do you and up practically replacing every car on the road with a bus? Bus is generally only better if you have significantly fewer of them to scale.

If you didn’t pay for roads, but you wanted public transit, I don’t see how that works.

There’s plenty of room to improve cities without having to bemoan that rural people are living wrong. About the only place I could see is making rural people switch over to intra-city transit instead of trying to have the cars wiork to get within a block of any given destination. That’s probably about as far I think to inconvenience rural people to meaningfully improve things.

Mass transit is only efficient if you have a density of people going the same way at the same time. A bus is only better when you have significant occupancy, and that’s not going to happen in very low density living.

My experience is that prepping a code review with LLM is a safer bet than having a person review LLM code. None of this should replace static analysis or human code review, but it can provide a rapid feedback about something that looks off either to the original developer or helping a reviewer catch a detail that might have escaped their attention span. LLM missteps don’t matter so much, since the audience is a human (an exceedingly high false positive rate is annoying, but not a disastor). Also why it makes for a handy facility for security, mistakes don’t matter, missing something is no worse than before, false positives can be ignored.

If your scenario is well served by TDD with absoutely comprehensive test cases that can grade with absolute perfect coverage of all the scenarios, then code gen can thrash on that and make progress, though it’s a bit token heavy because there’s a fair amount of guesses and reguessing. But if you AI gen the tests and the code, then you might get into weird states. Even if you didn’t mean to have the AI mess with the tests things can go south. A couple weeks back I tried to prompt up a change that I thought should have been reasonably within the capabilities of the model, along the way it failed a long standing test and fixed it by changing the test, making the determination that the test case needed correcting to let it pass, instead of trying to pass the test case. The test case was, in fact, correct, it screwed up.

Part of the problem is ‘writing code’ is about as diverse as ‘writing text’, and some folks are working in territory that the LLMs can chew through competently and others are places where the LLMs struggle, and then there’s the person lulled into a sense of security by being in the former category until one day suddenly they are in the latter unexpectedly for no apparent reason.

often instead losing their livelihoods.

Even more severe, the owner class got the government to classify property damage as punishable by death. They were actively having the government kill Luddites who had not (at the time) even so much as injured a person.

“Ai” has mostly wasted my time.

Particularly other people’s use of AI has wasted my time…

Out of the few that said AI made their productivity better, most of them couldn’t code.

Note this point makes business leaders so excited. They hear “cheap labor can be productive”. Missing the point that the output is supremely dubious. They are “productive” because they don’t even know if the result is good or not, and so they can accept what is handed to them.

Currently, have a feature I thought we should have done, but management said one of the sales reps vibed up the answer, so we don’t need to do it. I used it and pointed out that the result was actually incorrect, but management thinks I’m just some luddite because they can’t understand the nature of the problems either.

One thing worse than AI PRs is AI bug reports.

One is a user that experiences a symptom that could be described in a quick copy/paste with maybe a sentence. Instead they have “AI” dig in and generate a dissertation on what it thinks is the issue and the original issue is lost in the AI diagnosis. Since the user doesn’t even have it wired up to actually test the hypothosis, it is just the AI first guess, which is frequently wrong. Wasting my time and failing to provide data.

The other is someone letting AI run over code and report “bugs” as in “it disagreed on some detail in the code, even though no person has actually experienced misbehavior, nor is the particular issue a security issue, but it might be an issue that some person one day eventually might hit”.

But I totally feel the coworker that had questionable code before that is now just utterly hopeless thanks to AI. I have nothing to do with his project but occasionally got called in to figure out and explain why his code would flip out. It hasn’t passed test in over a month as it’s now eternally buggy. Any attempt he makes to fix bugs inevitably lands with more bugs. But it’s too far now, he can’t turn back (CodeGen rewrote his codebase in a language he can’t follow, so he can’t hand edit, and he’s too afraid to roll back to when he almost understood his code). Hilarious one time within a week where he reported he could work on his project no more because he had exhausted his tokens, and without the tokens he can’t do anything anymore. Framed this as a failure of management to fund his needs adequately.

I have been shocked at just how many people, people long in the business seem to actively hate writing code. How much additional work they are willing to go through to claim victory in development through prose. Spending hours trying to get CodeGen to fix a trivial CSS issue in a web page that would have taken less than a minute if they just hit f12 and looked at the offending element. I can’t fathom how they could stand their careers for sometimes two decades before CodeGen came available if they hated it just so much.

65k without even Inflation adjustment could be rough…

But this is at 47, much depends on what happened up to this point. For example if you had a very strong run and had 2 mil on a 401k already… I might be tempted to ride it out. I actually kind of like the idea of taking classes that I just feel like taking. Also depends on the family situation.

I’ve actually been imagining this sort of scenario for finishing out my career. I keep imagining my luck running out and needing to find something, anything to bridge me to retirement. Ideally with less office politics. Working at a university for access to classes has been on the list of fallback careers, under the hope that my 401k can largely take care of itself now.