I just registered my kid for fall school athletics, and now feel like Heracles returning from the underworld with Cerberus on his back.
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“Doesn't the bottom line get affected by broken software?”
Ah, the trillion-dollar question.
Under consumer capitalism, in a competitive market? Yes.
Under investor capitalism, in a world of monopoly and capture and extraction? No, no it does not.
@inthehands @mk30 I only started to understand the damage of monopolies and anti-competitive behaviour after reading Matt Stoller.
His dissection of Amazon Prime was eye opening.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/amazon-primes-free-shipping-promiseBut then I read his post about anti-competitive cheerleading and my mind was blown. Cheerleading... If something like cheerleading can be monopolized, is there anything safe?
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-and-the-fall-of-a-cheerleading -
OK, I guess I wasn't done after all.
Much of the opining about developer backlash to LLMs falls into two loose theoretical categories:
(1) Labor problem: developers now experience employment threat, loss of job security, layoffs, new levels of worry about the future
(2) Identity problem: developers used to feel special because generating code was placed on a cultural pedestal (sign of a special third brain lobe or whatever), that perceived specialness was a pillar of our personal identity, and now our egos are bruised because machines can do it and we don’t feel special anymore
While there’s doubtless truth to both of those in some / many cases, I posit a third theory:
(3) Purpose problem: contrary to popular belief, developers actually care quite a lot about the people who use our software and we derive a sense of purpose and meaning from doing what we believe to be good work; the current environment undermines that, not just LLMs but LLMs as part of a broader vortex of enshittification, and our world is effectively saying “everything you cared about doesn't matter, you can't hope to fight to make it matter, and you are stupid for caring”
I think there's evidence for that last theory in the kinds of despair you hear from developers: not just anxiety about paying the bills, not just angry feather-puffing, but a kind of existential despair that comes from the unraveling of one’s internal sense of purpose and meaning.
4/3
@inthehands In a related vein I read this the other day and thought it was good
https://ryancheley.com/2026/08/17/what-if-maintainer-burnout-isn-t-burnout/
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Number 3 is me.
I've been writing my software for 23+ years. As an employee, a contractor, and then as a partner with a larger percentage of ownership each year until I owned it all.It's my baby, it feeds the employees in my tiny company, and runs the businesses of my ~85 clients.
I'm going out of my way not to enshitify our product, and to continue to provide quality and value, and I'm not going to let LLMs near our code (for both the ethical and technical reasons).
Good luck and godspeed. You are not alone in this!
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OK, I guess I wasn't done after all.
Much of the opining about developer backlash to LLMs falls into two loose theoretical categories:
(1) Labor problem: developers now experience employment threat, loss of job security, layoffs, new levels of worry about the future
(2) Identity problem: developers used to feel special because generating code was placed on a cultural pedestal (sign of a special third brain lobe or whatever), that perceived specialness was a pillar of our personal identity, and now our egos are bruised because machines can do it and we don’t feel special anymore
While there’s doubtless truth to both of those in some / many cases, I posit a third theory:
(3) Purpose problem: contrary to popular belief, developers actually care quite a lot about the people who use our software and we derive a sense of purpose and meaning from doing what we believe to be good work; the current environment undermines that, not just LLMs but LLMs as part of a broader vortex of enshittification, and our world is effectively saying “everything you cared about doesn't matter, you can't hope to fight to make it matter, and you are stupid for caring”
I think there's evidence for that last theory in the kinds of despair you hear from developers: not just anxiety about paying the bills, not just angry feather-puffing, but a kind of existential despair that comes from the unraveling of one’s internal sense of purpose and meaning.
4/3
@inthehands I was waiting for an AI system which parsed my whole code, created a symbolic representation of not only the code but also its environment and even meaning extracted from comments, and used precise symbolic logic to locate and fix mistakes.
What we got instead with LLMs was a fuzzy pattern matcher which guesses what your code is doing based on something similar it saw on its training set, and outputs plausible code by merging samples it saw during training.
It has its uses, but...
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Put more concisely:
I’d bet money that developer reaction to LLM-driven development would be •very• different if its practical effect were to force management to slow down development and sink more money into quality.
5/3
Yes. “Moral injury” is indeed a relevant concept here.
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@inthehands In a related vein I read this the other day and thought it was good
https://ryancheley.com/2026/08/17/what-if-maintainer-burnout-isn-t-burnout/
Saw and appreciated that too, and yes, it's another part of the picture for sure.
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The software in question is Arbiter Sports (arbitersports.com).
The headliner among the •numerous• software flaws I encountered in this single registration process: the site fails form validation when making subsequent edits — or no edits, just resaving unchanged! — to a form that the system •had already accepted•.
The only user-visible message is “Required Information Missing.” (There was no required info missing; again, it already passed validation.) The problem, visible only in the Javascript console, was that the site was rejecting non-alphanumeric characters in a phone number it had pulled from its own database.
The fix was to make some keystrokes in the offending field to force the site’s Javascript to re-sanitize it for the back end.
2/3
@inthehands Impressive. And a bit beyond the capabilities of users who aren't computer science professors!
And d.u.m.b beyond words on the part of the registration software.
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@inthehands Here is a good faith argument in favor of AI assisted coding. We, the blind community, have been asking for years to make accessibility a priority in software development. For decades we've heard "it’s not on the roadmap". So we decided, with the help of AI, to take matters into our own hands.
@ysotomayor @inthehands That was always possible by building new tools or extending old ones -- and that applies to all sorts of goods that haven't existed but could.
AI makes those things feasible via plagiarism, which was also always possible - just not allowed.
AI just makes that plagiarism more accessible to people that don't have the skills to build those new tools or to extend old ones.
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Number 3 is me.
I've been writing my software for 23+ years. As an employee, a contractor, and then as a partner with a larger percentage of ownership each year until I owned it all.It's my baby, it feeds the employees in my tiny company, and runs the businesses of my ~85 clients.
I'm going out of my way not to enshitify our product, and to continue to provide quality and value, and I'm not going to let LLMs near our code (for both the ethical and technical reasons).
The ethical things are the big ones for me but for a long time I thought LLM dev just wasn't a way to make software you can stand over.
Then I get a job somewhere that it's used every day.
Now I KNOW it's not a way to make software you can stand over.
I could tell you stories but I would need several drinks.
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Put more concisely:
I’d bet money that developer reaction to LLM-driven development would be •very• different if its practical effect were to force management to slow down development and sink more money into quality.
5/3
@inthehands
Software was troubled before LLMs offered to fix it. Many have enumerated the causes but all seem beyond repair. I’ve offered my solutions which all seem dated. One has only ask, who benefits from the disfunction? -
@inthehands
Software was troubled before LLMs offered to fix it. Many have enumerated the causes but all seem beyond repair. I’ve offered my solutions which all seem dated. One has only ask, who benefits from the disfunction?That’s a good question, and it’s a sociopolitical and economic question.
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Put more concisely:
I’d bet money that developer reaction to LLM-driven development would be •very• different if its practical effect were to force management to slow down development and sink more money into quality.
5/3
@inthehands As an added note; The labour issues were starting to grow as a problem anyway - we passed the point where "Learn to code" was a path to a stable career before the slop, as far as I can tell;
and the identity issues... really, how can you have that much of an ego about it when you occasionally get outdone by - or seriously work alongside in the FOSS side of things - a literal child or teenager, who's not even out of grade school yet? -
OK, I guess I wasn't done after all.
Much of the opining about developer backlash to LLMs falls into two loose theoretical categories:
(1) Labor problem: developers now experience employment threat, loss of job security, layoffs, new levels of worry about the future
(2) Identity problem: developers used to feel special because generating code was placed on a cultural pedestal (sign of a special third brain lobe or whatever), that perceived specialness was a pillar of our personal identity, and now our egos are bruised because machines can do it and we don’t feel special anymore
While there’s doubtless truth to both of those in some / many cases, I posit a third theory:
(3) Purpose problem: contrary to popular belief, developers actually care quite a lot about the people who use our software and we derive a sense of purpose and meaning from doing what we believe to be good work; the current environment undermines that, not just LLMs but LLMs as part of a broader vortex of enshittification, and our world is effectively saying “everything you cared about doesn't matter, you can't hope to fight to make it matter, and you are stupid for caring”
I think there's evidence for that last theory in the kinds of despair you hear from developers: not just anxiety about paying the bills, not just angry feather-puffing, but a kind of existential despair that comes from the unraveling of one’s internal sense of purpose and meaning.
4/3
@inthehands Yes, absolutely tagging myself as 3 here. Nicely expressed, thank you.
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@inthehands As an added note; The labour issues were starting to grow as a problem anyway - we passed the point where "Learn to code" was a path to a stable career before the slop, as far as I can tell;
and the identity issues... really, how can you have that much of an ego about it when you occasionally get outdone by - or seriously work alongside in the FOSS side of things - a literal child or teenager, who's not even out of grade school yet?I mean, there are some absolutely absurd egos in the tech world, so. But big picture yes.
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I mean, there are some absolutely absurd egos in the tech world, so. But big picture yes.
@inthehands Yeah, there are some, but, that's the case with.. basically everything. I haven't noticed that being a thing on the scale of the entire population though - more than an attribute common to the most spoiled and richest, and occasionally found in others, but, not much worse in general than like... among real engineers, lawyers, physicists, whatever other 'male'-dominated "thinky" sort of career
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OK, I guess I wasn't done after all.
Much of the opining about developer backlash to LLMs falls into two loose theoretical categories:
(1) Labor problem: developers now experience employment threat, loss of job security, layoffs, new levels of worry about the future
(2) Identity problem: developers used to feel special because generating code was placed on a cultural pedestal (sign of a special third brain lobe or whatever), that perceived specialness was a pillar of our personal identity, and now our egos are bruised because machines can do it and we don’t feel special anymore
While there’s doubtless truth to both of those in some / many cases, I posit a third theory:
(3) Purpose problem: contrary to popular belief, developers actually care quite a lot about the people who use our software and we derive a sense of purpose and meaning from doing what we believe to be good work; the current environment undermines that, not just LLMs but LLMs as part of a broader vortex of enshittification, and our world is effectively saying “everything you cared about doesn't matter, you can't hope to fight to make it matter, and you are stupid for caring”
I think there's evidence for that last theory in the kinds of despair you hear from developers: not just anxiety about paying the bills, not just angry feather-puffing, but a kind of existential despair that comes from the unraveling of one’s internal sense of purpose and meaning.
4/3
@inthehands I think the (3) "purpose problem" doesn't adequately characterize it.
It's not about our purpose. If our non-programming selves and everyone else would be fine without us having to make software, this "loss of purpose" would not be a big deal.
The problem is that the things we care about are bound to software working right. Not exposing our privacy. Not breaking and losing our data. Not exploiting wetware bugs in our brains to serve evil people's political and economic goals. Not policing who we can communicte with and what we see. Not erasing our history and rewriting it out from under us. Etc.
Software will not work right when it's vomited by machines owned by and serving the interests of our enemies.
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@inthehands
Software was troubled before LLMs offered to fix it. Many have enumerated the causes but all seem beyond repair. I’ve offered my solutions which all seem dated. One has only ask, who benefits from the disfunction?I believe the answer to that very good question is: The terminally dysfunctional Villionaires of Silicon Valley.
One need only look at the people who have succeeded over the years in technology monopolization to see the symptoms of a mental health disorder that causes one to become a Tech Villionaire: Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Ross Perot, Steve Jobs, John McAfee, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel...
The list goes on with a parade of obsessive unethical perverse anti-social sociopath narcissistic behaviors beyond the pale.
These truly weird involuted obsessive creatures of the night are like vampires sucking the life out of the global economy while creating legions of dysfunctional thralls hanging on their every malign word as they promise, like Annie, that tomorrow is just a day away if we would but turn a blind eye and empty our wallets today to buy Snake Oil 0.x fresh from the pump-and-dump before we miss out on the next new thing like rubes.
That's who. And nobody else, but.
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@inthehands Here is a good faith argument in favor of AI assisted coding. We, the blind community, have been asking for years to make accessibility a priority in software development. For decades we've heard "it’s not on the roadmap". So we decided, with the help of AI, to take matters into our own hands.
@ysotomayor
@inthehands I would absolutely put the lack of accessibility in existing software front and center in the "software is already terrible" category. It's more of a cultural priority issue than a technical lift issue, but it's part and parcel of no one caring about UI design in general. -
I’ve been thinking a lot about the gulf between people who think LLMs can cut 90% of the cost of software development or whatever and people who think that’s a pile of catastrophes balanced on top of a nonsense wish.
I think a lot of that chasm boils down to the fact that software is already •terrible•, and people have very different feelings about that. I don't just mean “Liquid Glass is ugly” terrible; I mean “it’s broken and insecure and unreliable and just doesn't flipping WORK” terrible, like Arbiter Sports.
We are right now in a war between people who think software should treat humans humanely and people who are perfectly willing to offload their development costs onto captive users in the form of wasted time, anger, anxiety, and other forms of personal harm even more severe than those. That war was raging well before LLMs entered the picture, but LLMs drove it to fever pitch. I’m extremely skeptical of the idea that LLMs make any significant positive contribution to the long-term speed or cost of writing •good• software, but they clearly have the potential to lower the floor for •bad• software to unheard-of levels at unheard-of speeds. How you feel about that fact probably predicts a lot about how you feel about the “LLMs can 10x software dev!” hype.
3/3
@inthehands
Unfortunately, Gresham's Law also applies to software. -
I just registered my kid for fall school athletics, and now feel like Heracles returning from the underworld with Cerberus on his back.
WOW is that online registration platform bad software.
1/3
@inthehands I hear you. Ours is Bound, which seems *deeply* routed into school districts at this point.
I do not wish this time away, but let's just say that when I am finally done with the umpteen systems I have accounts for to manage my kids' journey through school, I will be quite glad.
