At what point people will realize "his first term" isn't a good bar and its certainly not because "he resisted" rather he at least had some better advisors and GOP had some control over him.
This time around GOP has been flattened into his mouthpiece and the government is fully of sycophants. Its not that he's in his final years more like his yes-men are afraid of being booted out and replaced with another power hungry nincompoop sycophant.
If people fell for this "but this didn't happen in the first term" even then they are to blame for this mess, they voted for this person in the first place. Just like being ignorant doesn't let you escape from legal consequences, it should let people escape from outcome of their actions.
Whenever the topic of Chinese infrastructure comes up I am reminded of a 2016 Wired documentary about Shenzhen. It was positive portrayal of hacker culture in Shenzhen. But one thing really stood out to me. They had demarcation line separating the city and “urban village”. It looked like lots of poor people lived in the urban village. The guide mentioned that the urban village will be torn down completely in 3 months to expand the city and people had to move. It sounded like gentrification. The host was impressed by the efficiency.
But it made me question how many countries can actually be that “efficiency” because matters of uprooting large swath of population will take years not months and run into significant legal challenges as well.
To be clear use of eminent domain and gentrification happens even in US but I doubt it can be as “efficient” as a technocratic government. It’s not a knock on Chinese government, just something I always wonder.
Gentrification is when existing communities that used to have decent if basic living situations get gradually priced out of an area as richer people and their expensive amenities move in. Gradually, as house prices go up and food gets more expensive, people sell and move. It's a slow, mostly voluntary thing, or at least, driven by market forces rather than official mandates.
Tearing down a slum is a much more disruptive thing that instantly displaces a entire community. Although it's unclear what happened to that community in this case and I can't find anything clear about it online (lots of clearly biased articles for one side or the other though).
True, most engineers hate meetings because as your rightly point often there can be too many "types" of meetings - team meting, issue tracking, backlogs, design reviews, triage etc etc. Out of the 7-8 working hours, a senior engineer might be in meetings for 4-5 hrs. Then they bitch and moan that they are spending too much in meetings and not enough time coding. A reason for that is projects often have unclear or even changing requirements along with tight deadlines.
Sure today with AI, code can be produced faster than ever. But the requirements being unclear or always evolving hasn't really changed. Today many non-engineers assume that what they have in mind is straightforward and can be created by AI. That is not true. Unclear requirements lead to unclear results. Garbage in Garbage out. Getting the right input is still the most important part of software. That has not changed. That is the collaboration piece of software.
And sure within the software community there are folks who don't like to collaborate even on requirements, they are more than happy to follow someone's lead. They like their manager/architect to "shield" them and do these tasks for them. These silent warrior type engineers are going to be the most impacted due to AI coding. Because they have no visibility and even if they are 5 rated coders, there is always going to be "But AI can produce code. What else can you do if you wont even collaborate?"
So, it's not very cut and dry. Engineers come in all shapes and size.
My larger enterprise world today AI adoption seems to have taken a turn for the worse.
Finance folks reached out asking if they could vibe code their own app using Copilot/Cursor/Claude for finance planning purpose. And because they know my management freezes whenever there are whispers of "our CFO said so" they even paraded that reasoning - "our CFO "tested" Lovable and he is convinced and asking us to vibe code the app".
If that is not enough they ended with a nicely wrapped reasoning of "we need to try this to be sure that using vibe coded app can exist in enterprise finance with appropriate data security and maintainability".
And mind you this is a reasoning at a company with more than 20+ billion in revenue.
> Finance folks reached out asking if they could vibe code their own app using Copilot/Cursor/Claude for finance planning purpose.
Having worked with these finance apps (Hyperion, Axiom, Workday etc), they're very data heavy and getting good performance out of them requires real engineering, so much so that they come with their own spreadsheet software to handle the multi-dimensional multi-million-row datasets (along with many other requirements like auditability, version control, workflow, consolidation etc) that excel just can't handle with all its limitations.
On the other hand, there's the 'Let Them' theory [1].
Run for the hills. These sorts of businesses can get by with an old dos app running in an emulator to manage sales and inventory. They don’t care about maintainability or anything we care about. If it works it works and they will squeeze it to work as long as they possibly can. Which could very well be three decades or more.
Because the next email is going to be "we demoed the app to our CEO and he loved it and he wants it in production". I have never seen the team back down from their ideas.
And also, I have been in similar sounding scenarios multiple times. They talk big when everything is going smoothly and nothing is on the line. The day shit hits the fan, they will furiously message me on Teams and insist that I support them in finding out issues. So far it has been about mostly about shitty design choices. This is at whole new level. They want to vibe code an app which will be used to plan and guide company's direction for the next year.
I think it’s fairly normal at least in my career - rush to ship something, lots of “we’ll polish this later,” two years go by, get called into vp/cto/whoever’s office when the debt comes calling like “what the fuck why is this like this???” and I have to say “that ‘later’ we decided is now I guess”
The script I have fairly seen being played is where the one doing MVP gets rewarded and moves on with a promotion. The weight of completing and stabilizing the MVP falls on some one else who is not vocal enough in terms of influence. Ironically the flashy MVP does not includes monitoring, logging, security, edge-cases, CI-CD, DR, scaling which is why vibe coding is getting so popular and everyone seems to be under the impression that engineers are not needed anymore.
Personally I find using and managing Claude sessions and limits is getting exhausting and feels similar to calorie counting. You think you are going to have an amazing low calories meal only to realize the meal is full of processed sugars and you overshot the limit within 2-3 bites. Now "you have exhausted your limit for this time. Your session limits resets in next 4 hrs".
Yep, it just feels terrible, the usage bars give me anxiety, and I think that's in their interest as they definitely push me towards paying for higher limits. Won't do that, though.
People building these apps often have no idea about various data privacy rules.
I am part of a forum with many small business owners. One particular owner has been gung-ho about how he built his entire business app using vibe coding. And my first reaction was - All the power to him. It’s his business and he is free to do so.
But then came the question of data privacy rules and he had no clue. This was concerning because the impact went beyond his business. His response when the oversight was pointed out to him was that being ignorant of the law was enough to save him. Still he went to one of the vibe coding Reddit subs to get help. Then came back fuming because devs on Reddit asked him to hire real developers. He believes that these developers are delusional and a dying breed and AI is so ahead that developers are going to be dead in a years time.
My non scientific tests has been that GPT models follow the prompts literally. Every time I give it an example, it uses the example in literal sense instead of using it to enhance its understanding of the ask. This is a good thing if I want it to follow instructions but bad if I want it to be creative. I have to tell it that the examples I gave are just examples and not to be used in output. I feel comfortable using it when I have everything mapped out.
Claude on the other hand can be creative. It understands that examples are for reference purposes only. But there are times it decides to off on a tangent on its own and decide not to follow instructions closely. I find it useful for bouncing off ideas or test something new,
The other thing I notice is Claude has slightly better UI design sensibilities even if you don’t give instructions. GPT on the other hand needs instructions otherwise every UI element will be so huge you need to double scroll to find buttons.
I think you might benefit from the "superpower" plugin. Add the word "brainstorm" before your prompt and it does a little bit better at figuring out how you want things.
My last experience with Claude support has been rough.
I used a Visa card to buy monthly Pro subscription. One day I ran out of credits so I go to buy extra credit. But my card got declined. I recheck my card limit and try again. Still declined.
I try extending the Pro subscription. It works. Turns out my card had a "Secure by Visa" feature. To complete transaction I needed to submit OTP on a Visa page. This page appears when I pay for Pro but not while buying extra credits.
I open a ticket and mention all the details to Claude support. Even these details they come back with "We have no way of knowing why your card was declined. You need to check with your bank".
Later I get hold of a Mastercard with similar protection. OTP triggers on both subscription and extra usage page.
I share the finding and response is still - "We checked with our engineering team and we have no way of knowing why the other Visa card was declined. You have to check with your bank".
I gave up trying to buy extra usage.
My experience with Replicate has also similarly absurd. For testing I loaded $10 to my balance. But I keep getting rate limited with error that my balance should be above $5. Responses have been absurd. AI bot responded that my balance had to be above $10. On asking why the message said $5 the "human" support responded that it might be a "temporary hiccup". Later they came back that my balance had to be above $20 for full rate limits. I asked again - why was their rate limit error message not clear enough? No response for past 10 days.
Its like all these AI companies want to replace developers but their own systems is built using super glue.
I have almost the exact same issue.
My account used to be on a one card, which I cancelled. I've updated my Claude subscription to another one and worked without any issues including MFA/OTP.
For some reason I really don't understand, it's a different payment process in the on the Developer Platform page. When I tried to update there with 3 different credit cards (MC, Visa, AmEx) and using Stripe Link, they all got the same rejection. It's clearly some bug / issue on their side.
Their chat bot is honestly an embarrassment for a frontier AI company like Anthropic, generic, not helpful and trying to lecture me on what MFA/OTP implicating "it's you being to stupid to use a credit card".
I'm also waiting already for 2 weeks for a human support on my 2 messages.
This whole thread shows I am (and you are) not alone with this issue, so it's hard to understand how the "engineering team checked" and didn't find anything.
I've been building payments systems for over a decade and just projecting from this thread their support should be blowing up from such an issue - I know in my companies it would have.
I'll just note that I'm using revolut and some of my virtual cards on there appear to randomly be created as Visa or Mastercard.
Well, couldn't pay for Claude with my Visa (no matter if virtual or physical card), but found a comment on Reddit suggesting to use Mastercard, and that worked without a hitch.
So they certainly have a problem with their flow with Visa. I wonder if the payment flow was vibecoded from scratch, never experienced that with any other site.
I open a ticket and mention all the details to Claude support. Even these details they come back with "We have no way of knowing why your card was declined. You need to check with your bank".
This time around GOP has been flattened into his mouthpiece and the government is fully of sycophants. Its not that he's in his final years more like his yes-men are afraid of being booted out and replaced with another power hungry nincompoop sycophant.
If people fell for this "but this didn't happen in the first term" even then they are to blame for this mess, they voted for this person in the first place. Just like being ignorant doesn't let you escape from legal consequences, it should let people escape from outcome of their actions.
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