Thuita Wachira

Trying to go somewhere, a line of code at a time.

[🇰🇪 James WaNjeri @JamesKWaNjeri]

Did you know that Sagret hotel name comes from Samuel and Margaret Kibathi? Yes, this is the Muthokinju news section

[Thuita Wachira @thuitaw]

Facts. I was expecting them to shatter world records. Mediocre performances all round.

[Lets @LethuMkhwanazi]

Enhanced Games is proving an unintended point about doping. You sort of need to meet it half way with elite talent.💀

[Lets @LethuMkhwanazi]

Enhanced Games is proving an unintended point about doping. You sort of need to meet it half way with elite talent.💀

[boris @boristane]

I want my agent to just deploy to prod, I don't want prs anymore

[Malvin @ManOfFocus_]

Elon Musk was right when he said, "Go Get your fucking confidence back. Without it, you will fail miserably no matter how skilled or smart you are."

[kache @yacineMTB]

At my company we stopped doing code reviews. There's no point now

[Thuita Wachira @thuitaw]

@kariukigitau

[sankalp @dejavucoder]

tech bros to finance bros today

[Matthias Schmidt @eurofounder]

If the EU built Claude

[Thuita Wachira @thuitaw]

we should be good. Claude got this. #AGI

[sui ☄️ @birdabo]

everybody calm down.

i got this.

[sui ☄️ @birdabo]

everybody calm down.

i got this.

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

My body is a machine that transfers comments from my Managing Director to Claude and then back to my Managing Director

[🐬 @triplexdshott]

until it happens to you, you will think you are very careful, very responsible, very smart, very religious, very mature, very private, very etc.

[Thuita Wachira @thuitaw]

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Chrisman @chrisman]

this trial is wild.

elon: they stole a non profit to make themselves billionaires.

openai founder: no way.

openai founders journal: man i can’t believe we are stealing this non profit. feels unethical but at least i’ll be a billionaire.

[Chrisman @chrisman]

this trial is wild.

elon: they stole a non profit to make themselves billionaires.

openai founder: no way.

openai founders journal: man i can’t believe we are stealing this non profit. feels unethical but at least i’ll be a billionaire.

[Nic Barker @nicbarkeragain]

To be a little less vague, I suspect that we're likely (not certain, but likely) to be entering into a period of unprecedented software degradation, and we're going to be seeing an increasing frequency of outages like this across many high profile products.

But IMO the cause is actually not just the-one-thing-that-everyone-is-always-talking-about, it's a number of things that have all been bubbling away at just below critical levels for a long time. Some of the things off the top of my head:

- Poorly designed / optimised software has been getting a free ride on hardware improvements pretty much since the invention of the computer. That chapter is now coming to an end, and will only be worsened by the enormous industry-wide pivot to producing & innovating on AI specific hardware, rather than general purpose CPUs etc.
- The ZIRP era created a temporary suspension of reality in our industry, and now that it's ended we need to deal with the hangover. Companies that spent years making no profit, paying extravagant compensation to employees / shareholders and giving away server time for free are now pivoting into extraction mode, which is putting further pressure on their low quality software. QA is being laid off, hardware budgets are being reduced, timelines for shipping features are becoming more aggressive, etc.
- The enormous amount of free money incentivised too many new people to join the industry too quickly. This has led to an abundance of poor quality education programs (bootcamps, uncertified colleges etc) and an influx of people into the industry who frankly aren't interested in programming. If you compared the average person in the industry now to 20 years ago, I suspect the difference in motivations would be stark. I'm not saying it's these people's fault necessarily, it's simply an inevitable result of the absurd compensation / performance expectations ratio that our industry has enjoyed for the last 15+ years. Working for a tech company has also become socially prestigious, which further adds to the problem.
- Because computer programming was once an incredibly niche area of interest, many of our fundamental systems are built on trust. We're now starting to see that if systems like open source, public supply chain, discussion spaces, education etc become flooded with bad actors, we have no real mechanisms to deal with them.
- Our hiring / recruitment pipeline has totally misaligned incentives. Even before the AI resume / AI HR-filtering arms race disaster that we're experiencing now, the widespread adoption of the leetcode style interviews IMO selected for a very narrow personality type, and filtered candidates that would have made great contributions to the industry long term.
- The pivot from purchasing long term stable releases of software, to paying a subscription for constantly updating software has done huge damage to software quality as a whole. Companies have lost their incentive to get their software "right" because they can just "fix it later", and for the consumer - you can't just go back to the version of github that still works because the new one has problems.

This was all happening well before AI entered the picture. I won't belabor the point because there has been endless discussion about it. But to me personally, there are two additional and deeply worrying problems with AI code generation.
- It's undeniable at this point that it negatively affects the people who use it. It stops juniors from getting better, and it burns seniors out and makes them hate their jobs. Like it or not, humans are still the core of this industry, and I don't see this ending well.
- It's completely unfit for purpose in the most important, high-stakes situations. One of the reasons that we excuse all the small errors it makes, is because it's low effort to type "do it again and fix this bug". That kind of thing doesn't fly when you only get one attempt because a mistake results in data loss or an outage. The damage is done.

All the above has led to a silent exodus of many of our most experienced and impactful people. There are so many amazing programmers who made enough through stock options / compensation that they didn't need to work anymore, and were only doing it because they enjoyed it. Many of these people have just quit the industry and switched to doing hobby projects in the last 5 years. These are the types of people who have the experience and foresight to prevent the types of outages that we're seeing at github today.

It's very easy to assume that the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back is entirely to blame here. But I think it's a reckoning that has been on the horizon for a very long time.

[Thuita Wachira @thuitaw]

Well put.

[Nic Barker @nicbarkeragain]

To be a little less vague, I suspect that we're likely (not certain, but likely) to be entering into a period of unprecedented software degradation, and we're going to be seeing an increasing frequency of outages like this across many high profile products.

But IMO the cause is actually not just the-one-thing-that-everyone-is-always-talking-about, it's a number of things that have all been bubbling away at just below critical levels for a long time. Some of the things off the top of my head:

- Poorly designed / optimised software has been getting a free ride on hardware improvements pretty much since the invention of the computer. That chapter is now coming to an end, and will only be worsened by the enormous industry-wide pivot to producing & innovating on AI specific hardware, rather than general purpose CPUs etc.
- The ZIRP era created a temporary suspension of reality in our industry, and now that it's ended we need to deal with the hangover. Companies that spent years making no profit, paying extravagant compensation to employees / shareholders and giving away server time for free are now pivoting into extraction mode, which is putting further pressure on their low quality software. QA is being laid off, hardware budgets are being reduced, timelines for shipping features are becoming more aggressive, etc.
- The enormous amount of free money incentivised too many new people to join the industry too quickly. This has led to an abundance of poor quality education programs (bootcamps, uncertified colleges etc) and an influx of people into the industry who frankly aren't interested in programming. If you compared the average person in the industry now to 20 years ago, I suspect the difference in motivations would be stark. I'm not saying it's these people's fault necessarily, it's simply an inevitable result of the absurd compensation / performance expectations ratio that our industry has enjoyed for the last 15+ years. Working for a tech company has also become socially prestigious, which further adds to the problem.
- Because computer programming was once an incredibly niche area of interest, many of our fundamental systems are built on trust. We're now starting to see that if systems like open source, public supply chain, discussion spaces, education etc become flooded with bad actors, we have no real mechanisms to deal with them.
- Our hiring / recruitment pipeline has totally misaligned incentives. Even before the AI resume / AI HR-filtering arms race disaster that we're experiencing now, the widespread adoption of the leetcode style interviews IMO selected for a very narrow personality type, and filtered candidates that would have made great contributions to the industry long term.
- The pivot from purchasing long term stable releases of software, to paying a subscription for constantly updating software has done huge damage to software quality as a whole. Companies have lost their incentive to get their software "right" because they can just "fix it later", and for the consumer - you can't just go back to the version of github that still works because the new one has problems.

This was all happening well before AI entered the picture. I won't belabor the point because there has been endless discussion about it. But to me personally, there are two additional and deeply worrying problems with AI code generation.
- It's undeniable at this point that it negatively affects the people who use it. It stops juniors from getting better, and it burns seniors out and makes them hate their jobs. Like it or not, humans are still the core of this industry, and I don't see this ending well.
- It's completely unfit for purpose in the most important, high-stakes situations. One of the reasons that we excuse all the small errors it makes, is because it's low effort to type "do it again and fix this bug". That kind of thing doesn't fly when you only get one attempt because a mistake results in data loss or an outage. The damage is done.

All the above has led to a silent exodus of many of our most experienced and impactful people. There are so many amazing programmers who made enough through stock options / compensation that they didn't need to work anymore, and were only doing it because they enjoyed it. Many of these people have just quit the industry and switched to doing hobby projects in the last 5 years. These are the types of people who have the experience and foresight to prevent the types of outages that we're seeing at github today.

It's very easy to assume that the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back is entirely to blame here. But I think it's a reckoning that has been on the horizon for a very long time.

[siddharth ☻ @siddharthkp]

staff/senior engineer thought:

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

CFOs realizing that their AI token budget is going to be higher than the salaries of the people they laid off

[signüll @signulll]

my friend & we’re discussing individualism in america at dinner cuz we saw so many ppl eating alone. & it got me thinking that individualism esp the rabid american strain reshapes structural environments in ways most ppl drastically underestimate.

the obvious symptom is selfishness which is me, me, me. individual goals displace shared ones. but most things that matter can’t be done alone. a man can’t have a child. partnership is required, & partnership requires deal making.

& deal making gets harder the longer you’ve been operating alone. you build a foundational layer w/ prefs, habits, non negotiables & it becomes very rigid. by the time you’d need to adapt, you can’t. ironically this foundation becomes a kind of a cage instead of a platform.

you see the output everywhere now. women don’t want a relationship unless it’s the best thing in the world… & not cuz they’re shallow, but because highly individualistic people don’t need, they only want. & wanting, unlike need, has no natural ceiling. it can’t really be satisfied, only deferred.

in essence sustained individualism makes ppl structurally incapable of the compromises that used to produce the lives they still claim to want.

[Jason @mytechceoo]

Someone’s going to announce this on LinkedIn