Retired megastructurist. More of a fuck-arounder and find-outer.
Opinions are my own, and do not express the opinions of non-canonical dimensions.
| Website | https://thoseasters.com |
| Personal Site | https://warpspire.com |
| Location | South Lake Tahoe, CA |
| [email protected] |
It's funny to see vibe coders re-discovering the entire reason GitHub exists. I get it. These tools let you move fast. Branches and PRs can feel clunky and unnecessary.
The more interesting question: what should GitHub be right now? I'd argue for radical simplification. Focus on code viewing, dead simple issue tracking, and simplified PRs.
Way back when, I created The Zen of GitHub to direct the taste of a growing software company. I'm still really proud of it.
Fast forward twelve years. Now it's the basis for my agent instructions (with some edits). What a wild end-run.
I’m trying hard to keep this new phase of social media focused on building and where I see the world going.
But you know, long ago I worked with a16z as they tried to help me “fix” GitHub’s growth in 2012. There’s something you should know about Marc. He’s a fucking talentless tool. Ben is the one with talent.
Here’s an outhouse (the bonehouse) I built this summer. I made it out of trees we milled on site with the help of Pat. Pat is a great guy. Fuck Marc Andreessen.
I haven't had this much fun building things with computers since 2007. I'm up late building shit, writing, sketching in my backyard all day. I'm playing with new toys people are building. Just look at this silly thing an old pal built: https://studio.neato.fun/
It's given me an energy I desperately needed to escape from the bullshit three-ring circus that is the world right now.
It's also absolutely destroying my sleep schedule. I just went to bed at 8pm and woke up at 4am. Feels like I'm 23.
Within the scope of software companies, my view is that these gains are VERY REAL in a way previous promises (Slack, JIRA, etc) were always fantasies.
Millions of "programmers" are going to lose their job because they never provided value to customers. Tech companies are filled with cruft and bullshit right now.
At the same time, thousands of Bosses are going to destroy their companies because they don't understand this technology at all and see it as a replacement for humans.
I think at this point, every coder gets it.
We are going to see Bosses use this new technology to wreak havoc on the knowledge work economy. Some of it will be warranted. A lot of it won’t.
I wrote this to help my friends. What do you think?
Everyone I met early on in my career in open source were on this path. We built things to be free, to be shared, to give power to the masses. To share knowledge as freely as possible.
And now that we've finally realized that path, I don't know how y'all aren't jumping up and down with joy.
These models are little knowledge terrorists. They wreak chaos, break free the knowledge of the human race.
They steal from each other just the same way they stole from everyone else. This is why there are no moats. Everything can be stolen. Knowledge wants to be free. True artists don't give a fuck about ownership or copyright. That's capitalistic nonsense.
In fairness, I also did not use the late 90s internet to build my ethical framework. Asking a computer to do ethics is dumb and you shouldn't do it.
Do any of you remember the *insane* shit that was floating around the late 90s internet in terms of ethics & philosophy?
I just stuck to my Warcraft II PUDs and programming tutorials.
It is wild to me to watch so many old tech folks who grew up in the age of the birthing internet to be so against AI.
Stealing of copyrighted content to make it free?
Powerful tool that coalesced power to the few who learned how to wield it?
Ability to run bleeding edge tech on your own hardware, free of capitalist masters?
Ability to learn any subject by yourself late at night on a computer?
It all matches exactly my experience with the late 90s internet.
