Coz just about everyone wants to be that one guy in Nebraska thanklessly maintaining this bit of digital infrastructure, apparently?

Yeah me neither.

I think the only thing that would convince people to move away from curl at this point would be if curl had a heartbleed level vulnerability and failed to fix it quickly.

Curl is so important that if it had a heartbleed and didn’t patch, someone would and people’d just apply it until it was fixed in tree.

Individuals don't but lots of companies do, so that they can threaten to rugpull it later if you don't pay them millions.

I did some of this stuff in college and what bugged me was that the spec actually ended up more complex than the code and it had bugs.

That was a long time ago and they said that formal methods were the future back then, too.

It's possible for that to happen but probably means either the function is too trivial or you're missing some abstraction in the spec

It's also possible it's not the future of programming.

The issue isnt that theyre overlooking new value created it's that you're overlooking the enormous power imbalance some parties are using to exploit others for material gain.

Uber's profit margins are about 10% value created and 90% exploitation of power imbalance between the rich corporation and itinerant drivers and less well capitalized competitors.

Whether somebody acknowledges this reality or not tells you where their political allegiances lie.

The entire "app-based rideshare market" was created by Uber, and in 2026 they don't capture anywhere close to 100% of it. An Uber driver's share of profits without Uber existing is $0.

Back before Uber existed I was ordering a taxi on a website and they even had real time tracking. Yeah it wasn't an app, but most things weren't at that time.

Why is that relevant to what I said?

Because what you said is nonsense. They are capturing a fraction of the value they created with the invention of app-based ridesharing. They are not dipping into some magical pool of "exploitation" to juice that. Anyone that is unhappy with being an Uber driver can literally do anything else. Nobody is forcing them, there is no exploitation.

> Uber's profit margins are about 10% value created and 90% exploitation of power imbalance between the rich corporation and itinerant drivers

That feels like a number you are just making up based on hating Uber.

If your tests align with the spec and the tooling is good it isnt tedious.

If you find writing tests tedious enough to make using an LLM to write them seem like a good idea you're probably churning out repetitive tests, unnecessary tests, tests which aren't great at catching bugs.

>Automating myself out of development

>I want to start by saying that I’m neither an AI-fanatic

Kind of like saying you are a fanatic before saying you aren't.

I don't think theres too much here (e.g. "spec driven development") I haven't seen elsewhere.

> I don't think theres too much here I haven't seen elsewhere.

Isn't that the rhyme here. I can't think of any article or discussion on AI here that contains anything new or noteworthy. And yet all those articles we've read before and all those "discussions" we've had before keep coming and coming. I have gotten bored and I'm just waiting for anything decisive to happen.

The fossil fuel lobbies want us to believe it is a way bigger problem than it is.

The people who echo that sentiment without educating themselves are giving them a helping hand.

I've never seen a greater disconnect between what I read on social media about vibe coding and what I've seen in real life.

In particular the whole "the best people are the ones who will use it the best". IME the best ones are the ones keeping it the most at arm's length while the people who embrace it the most churn out epic amounts of utter slop.

It's more of a culture of "but everybody else does it".

I like how HTMX does SPAs. It straddles the divide nicely between simple and capable.

it's kind of like saying like you could replace a king with an AI. the position is a relationship to power more than it is a function with a productive output.

a bad king and a bad CEO could be replaced with a spinning top with no loss in productivity (and maybe some gain).

oh, you mean the interest rates crisis...