Posted by serjester 3/31/2025
Can we please retire this dichotomy? Part of why teams do this in the first place is because there's this language of "being left behind."
We badly need to retreat to a world in which rigorous engineering is applauded and expected—not treated as a nice to have or "old world thinking."
Uhh, no, that's pretty much the point. A developer without basic understanding of version control is like a pilot without a basic understanding of landing. A ton of problems with AI (or any other tool, including your own brain) get fixed by iterating on small commits and branching. Throw away the commit or branch if it really goes sideways. I can't fathom working on something for 4 months without realizing a problem or having any way to roll back.
That said, the one argument I could see is if Cursor (or copilot, etc) had built in to suggest "this project isn't in source control, we should probably do that before getting too far ahead of ourselves.", then help the user setup sc, repo, commit, etc. The topic _is_ tricky and I do remember not totally grasping git, branching, etc.
And miss out on the sweet, sweet VC millions? Naah.
Isn't all of these very deterministic? You can predict what's going to be discarded by the compression algorithm. Eventual consistency is only eventual because of the generation of events. Once that stops, you will have a consistent system and the whole thing can be replayed based on the history of events. Even with fuzzy search you can intuit how to get reliable results and ordering without even looking at the algorithms.
An LLMs based agent is the least efficient method for most of the cases they're marketing if for. Sometimes all you need is a rule-based engine. Then you can add bounded fuzziness where it's actually helpful.
Instead of creating easy-to-navigate help sections of the website, and explaining the product and everything clearly, the flashy vendors simply put everything behind an opaque model as if that's somehow better.
Then you have to guess what to type to get the most basic info about fees, terms and procedures of a service.
You want to see how the Pros are doing it? Well, they're not using any AI! Tesla, for example, still has a regular PDF and a regular section-based manual (in HTML) where you can read the details about your car.
$TSLA is priced as being the most innovative auto manufacturer, and they're clearly proficient with the AI (Autopilot/FSD), yet when it comes to user's manual, clearly they're following the same process as all the legacy automakers always have had (besides not hiding the PDF behind a parts paywall, and having an open-access HTML version of the manual, too, of course). Why? Because that actually works!
And that is the Unix philosophy