Comment by dlisboa
5 hours ago
There should be a concept called "engineering privilege".
I see some companies do things that are widely out of their core product and engineers there just having fun with a bunch of different stuff with seemingly no commitment to bring in revenue. They'll re-invent/re-write things constantly, write a new compiler/package manager for their chosen language, create new frameworks, new open source projects unrelated to their companies, etc.
It must be awesome to be able to work in these conditions and still get paid. I'm not hating on it, it's how we get a lot of the good stuff we use.
> They'll re-invent/re-write things constantly
Re-invent is fine, that's how we actually get the good stuff we use.
Re-write (frequently) is usually a sign of bad power dynamics in the team, code rot and generally bad engineering management, in my experience.
That's why most React shops end up in this vicious cycle of constant re-writes of a perfectly fine working system for this reason. Yeah, must be really nice getting paid for it too.
My favorite example was from Joel Spolsky's company, where bright engineers got bored with working on bug tracking software so they wrote their own C# compiler.
You mean wasabi or whatever it was called?
It may seem weird nowadays but at the time it made sense since wasabi was "transpiling" VBScript (on which their existing codebase was written since they were all into Microsoft products at the time) to other languages in environments where VBScript didn't exist (e.g. IIRC they could transpile to PHP - and there isn't "one" PHP).
They were basically making shrink-wrap software running on an environment (the web) that wasn't made for shrink-wrap software (especially at the time) and came up with a technical solution to it.
FWIW they weren't the only to attempt something like that. HaXe is basically the same idea and was used to port a ton of games from Flash to all sorts of platforms and Monkey was another similar attempt (i think most people aren't aware of these two because they were gaming related and really limited to indie games).
Because every company may have different needs that are not fulfilled by standards software. We have seen the large number of companies whose goal is to make custom software for other companies So is not always that reinventing is fun, but it may actually be needed.
The same logic also applies for software that is used internally. It's not always that developers want to rebuild stuff, but that they need to rebuild or alter software to fit their / company needs.
We have not even talked about cost or licensing or other issues.
Yes except a lot of it isn't even fit for their purpose and they don't rely on it. Facebook switched from Cassandra to HBase because "eventual consistency is a difficult pattern". No shit, really?
I used to call this developer indulgence.
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> Every change is linked to the agent conversation that produced it. From any line of code, find the conversation. From any message, jump to the code it touched.
This is how Zed leapfrogs the field and becomes a centicorn.
If you can train a model to operate at a higher level and with looser requirements, you've gotten rid of engineers in the loop and built a system for the automated synthesis of high quality software.
You're training systems to produce higher quality chain of thought across the entire software development lifecycle.
This is training data for the next stage.
It's not just a step, it's a leap towards real productivity that your agents will actually use!