Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st November 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no. If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high. > The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) > > Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them. (Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Happy Halloween, fellow sneerers!)

Welcome to November, and welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • lagrangeinterpolatorEnglish
    6·
    4 days ago

    Why has productivity not increased dramatically if everyone is using LLMs all the time already?

    Honestly, the manifesto should have stopped here. They admitted defeat right out of the gate. But the manifesto must continue, because the LLM cannot fail, it can only be failed. I wonder if this report is starting to get under their skin.

    The first is a change in engineering culture and engineer mentality. Your job has fundamentally changed. It is no longer to write code, and LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster. Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster.

    This is not even a meaningful distinction. If I use an IDE command to change the name of a method everywhere it’s used, did I change all the names or did the IDE change all the names? What difference does it make?

    I can only see this as them ordering engineers to use the AI more and go faster. The manifesto talks a good game about how “expertise” and “good engineering practices” are not dying, but telling engineers to offload more of their work to AI has the unavoidable tradeoff of making these things worse.

    As a side question, how is it that all of these fuckers always want to use the precious gift of AI to go faster, not to, say, give their engineers more time to improve the quality of their software? Almost like they don’t actually give a shit about good engineering practices!

    The second reason we have not been able to take full advantage of the AI revolution is that we have been almost completely stuck at phase 1 — using LLMs to speed up tasks as part of existing workflows. But writing code is not the only part of the software development lifecycle, and what happens when you eliminate a bottleneck? Another takes it is place.

    At least they’re realizing that maybe one of the anti-AI talking points has some merit to it. But they don’t seem to realize why they need stuff like code review and CI/CD: the AI is unreliable and these processes are needed to reduce the probability of a major fuckup reaching production. All they think is, hey, more opportunities to use AI!

    (“Another takes it is place.” I had to look at the original text to make sure. At least we know the CTO wrote this himself after many drinks at 3 am. Damn, why are all those people on the internet so mean to us? I’m gonna show them!)

    The third reason is a collective action problem. Using LLMs effectively to write code is something an individual engineer can do for themselves… But to retool the company at large requires amounts of both organization and resourcing that we simply have not invested in yet.

    What do I even say to this? Once again the problem is that there isn’t enough AI, and the solution is to buy more AI. We’re gonna buy so much more AI that we’re retooling the entire company and shoving it up every bodily orifice.