I did! As a high school project. Literally, in high school, one of our assignments was to build a GUI that could make basic HTTP requests (GET and POST, and I think PATCH or something for extra credit) and display the result “nicely.”
Obviously not as full-featured as Postman or Bruno. But this is not something complicated or difficult or novel. My high school teacher had been using this as an assignment since the mid-2000s.
Because we don't have that special sort of brain that thinks turning such a simple useful tool into a commercial behemoth is a good idea? I doubt anyone there really things there is a useful purpose to it all, but they have to keep it in motion to keep their pay coming in.
So humans have replaced fighting wild animals with a huge range of other stresses over multiple generations. That has zero bearing on your ability to change the world. Nobody has been directing this. False platitudes like this suit a simplistic view of the world.
A smug attitude gets us nowhere. If certain platitudes help you cope with life and fine meaning, that's great. I'm pointing out that "if you don't like it, change it" is detached from reality and what's possible. It doesn't help realists and comes across as unfounded positivity, for which we could come up with any number of platitudes. What matters is if you truly believe in them.
There is definitely a reasonable salary and team and infrastructure budget for 'Postman exists'. Its when that team takes 400M in capital and the labor hours of 1,500 people that could have been used for... well honestly literally anything else, that it becomes... well beyond parody really?
I'm seeing another team doing this, with 99% agents, and quality, predictability of delivery and raw performance have taken a massive nosedive.
But even not caring about quality: Speed of development is abysmal. It was never something this team had anyway, they were always slow. So they don't care that they take a year and 20 people to do what another startup in the same space was able to deliver in a few months with a skeleton crew (and perhaps more quality).
To me the experiment has shown the results it should. It's self-serving to developers, and amplifies the good and the bad in them. It's not particularly good to users and not to companies if the developers aren't good themselves.
It's writing nearly all of the code where I work. It also reviews all of the code (I review it as well). You still have to guide it and hold its hand though. I dont write code by hand anymore (and haven't in almost a year). The job is now about managing the bots, understanding the architecture and keep everything aligned.
That’s a norm at my place as well. But it’s not free. We have definitely given up on quality (both code and general stability) and fully understanding what’s going on. People are generally working more as well, because of all the layoffs pressure.
Industry is betting that we don’t need to. I still consider it a bet because Claude Code this scale has become norm just for a year.
An agent writes 99% of the code. Then I fix some parts, re-arrange things, usually takes a few prompts. Then, there's code review, more changes, etc. But I hardly write code nowadays compared to a few years ago.
The vast majority of work people do is basically supporting simple CRUD type apps.
CRUD apps have long been a solved problem long before AI, no one should be spending a lot of time dedicating their life to figuring out how to write a better CRUD app.
If your bubble consists of writing critical high performance applications or bleeding edge research, maybe you have a use case for not using AI, but that is not the norm.
Did it though? Most people young today probably never pressed a physical play/pause/stop button in their lives. Still, they get it. Some icons outlive their era, some don’t.
> In the 90s everybody knew how a paper book worked
> Did it though? Most people young today probably never pressed a physical play/pause/stop button in their lives.
It's hard to call this an example of "skeuomorphism". Those icons were introduced on physical buttons with a certain meaning that everybody had to learn. They have exactly the same meaning on software buttons; the interaction that people have with them now is the same interaction that everybody has always had with them.
This isn't a case of the software appealing to a visual metaphor that made non-metaphorical sense before the software. It was just as much of a metaphor originally as it is now. You might as well call the word "edit" a skeuomorphism in modern software because past software also had "edit" menus.
> the interaction that people have with them now is the same interaction that everybody has always had with them
Right, that was my point. What does it matter what a diskette used to be? Unless something more obvious to convey storage/saving comes along, it’s hardly “crashing down” anytime soon.
The disk icon is skeuomorphic because it's a picture of storage media. That has now gone obsolete and, instead of being skeuomorphic, it's vestigial.
Play and pause icons aren't skeuomorphic. They're symbolic. There is no point at which they were a reference to some phenomenon earlier than or other than themselves.
Play, rewind and FF icons were referring to the physical movement of tape past the play head, back when you could see the tape. Don't know what pause came from. Maybe there was a pair of felt pads that would press the tape on either side of the head to keep it tensioned while preventing movement?
The double-pipe pause symbol originates on the video side, where pausing keeps displaying a freeze-frame image, and stopping does not. Audio players had pause long before (which just causes the drive wheel to un-grip the tape), but used a variety of different symbols.
I guess even without the physical buttons you had to just learn that "play" means "engage the appropriate technical machinery".
> "[play] The meaning "to cause (a recording) to reproduce what is on it" is by 1903, probably from the "make music" sense." - https://www.etymonline.com/word/play
“we all would like corporations to share their products with us, but forcing us to pay because of their proprietary license is extremely anti-freedom to me”
No one is forcing you to do anything, and least of all which software licenses to depend on. If you don’t like something, choose something else. Freedom, you know?
Sure, that is why you need to be early. I fully believe my company won't make it another 30 years (or 10), so we prepare for that. Also, I will be dead by then, but that is unrelated.
For now everyone is still sufficiently crap at using AI to need help. We had enough clients trying to build something themselves and then come crying to us.
Having a health problem that puts an end date on your effort must tint your business choices in a unique and interesting way. I find your ideas intriguing, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
You’re not wrong, but what an IDE does when opening a project directory is an issue with that tool, and not one directly addressable by the maintainers of the dependency management tool.
The more direct comparison would be whatever the equivalence of “npm install” is for a given language, and what it allows to run. Sounds like they’re making good progress to fix that, but it’s certainly more than a popularity issue.
> never heard anyone suggest the best sports teams should stop competing when they've won enough, or that the best inventors should stop, or the best artists
While they want you to believe that, there’s no correlation between being rich and being best, or even good, at anything. You’re not the best athlete because your mom and dad were the best athletes. But if your parents were wealthy, you’re wealthy.
If they want standards to be applied ”consistently”, great. They can start by paying their taxes.
If you have issue with the taxes they pay then you have issue with the tax code, but that still doesn't address any problems or apply any consistent values. How does moving money from one rich person to the richest organization in the world achieve any goal?
A transplant isn't any more a hat than having natural untransplanted hair is like wearing a hat. A hair piece could be argued to be something akin to a pricey hat, but a transplant is naturally growing hair that has simply been moved from a donor area.
It only works for some people. You need to have a good donor area and a lot of hair. And even then transplant can be rejected. Doesn't work for majority of bald people in their 30s/40s.
You are also most likely going to stay on Minoxidil and Finasteride just to stay safe and not lose your "investment". A botched hair transplant can look pretty terrible once you lose the original hair around it.
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