Yay! Fantastic!

Amazing story and inspiration <3

Okay fine we're doing a little origin story thread: how did I become a horse game consultant and what does that even mean? 🧵

Choose Boring Technology How to be old, for young people.

"Obvious" if you've been around a while, but still needs broader awareness:

> New tech typically has more known unknowns, and many more unknown unknowns

> software that’s been around longer tends to need less care and feeding than software that just came out

#UseWhatWorks
boringtechnology.club

Interesting article, thanks for sharing.

Does it have to be Ruby, or if the topic is interesting and technology-agnostic, is it ok to submit?

Make of it what you want, but I'm really moved by how people united around the project and how many kind words we heard. I didn't expect it.

To me, that's what Christmas is really about - people, being together, generosity, sharing, joy, beauty. And good food, but that's coming too :D

Świąteczna instalacja świetlna na rynku w Janowcu nad Wisłą – Wspieraj na Zrzutka.pl Wesprzyj naszą zbiórkę na instalację świąteczną dla Janowca!Znany lubelski artysta, Jarek Koziara, o którego przepięknych gwiazdach zrobiło się w ostatnim czasie głośno, zgodził się przygotować dla Ja...

Polish only, but for reference the fundraiser page
zrzutka.pl/ep5mzv

And the background story that sparked the idea of that collaboration:
jawnylublin.pl/jest-droga-n...

It's sad that a company that easily can afford to pay artists handsomely is doing things like that...

Coincidentally, I'm right now in the middle of a community initiative to get us hand-made Christmas lights done by an Artist (big A!).

And you know what?

People love & generously support it!

That sounds really interesting, adding to my list :)

So to me the most negative impact of AI I see all the time is what else is not getting done because of investing our limited resources in AI .

What conversations we don't have? What things we don't learn? What new brain connections we don't develop? What features or bugfixes we don't develop?

Unfortunately, our time, money, and attention are limited resources. If you spend it all on something, then you have less for all those other things.

Also, those other things you learn or build will stay with you even if somebody goes bankrupt or decides to not use it anymore.

Maybe my concerns seem silly, because using AI doesn't require you to stop doing all the other things.

And I agree, in theory it doesn't.

Yet in practice, those are examples of the actual impact of people getting enthusiastic about AI I saw at work and around me, and it scares me.

If you ask AI instead of talking to users or business experts, then how do you learn things that are not even written down, but are just "tribal knowledge" and "common sense" in that industry?

How does the fear of "being replaced by AI" impact your colleagues, customers, and users?

If OpenAI goes bankrupt or becomes too expensive, what knowledge and skills will you lose?

If you're doing something really cutting-edge and there's nothing you can "train on", then how does that constrain innovation and creativity?

If you exercise your brain less... what happens with your skills?

IMO AI is similar to debt - neither good nor bad by itself, but it certainly is an amplifier and seems like nobody even talks about the risks.

If we replace junior devs with AI, who will be seniors in 10-20 years?

If we replace our pair-programming buddies with AI, are we even a team?

They made lots of money quickly. I was jealous. My "results" were relatively ridiculous, even though we started in a similar place.

But today I'm here, and they're not. Because of taking on too much risk and too much leverage, they weren't able to adapt to change or wait it out long enough.

e.g. very few people buy property with cash. Mortgages are common and are considered the cheapest & safest type of debt.

But some professional rental companies went bankrupt during challenging times in recent years.

Because of rising interest rates, too high LTV, and too little cash reserves.

One point caught my attention - the effect of AI being the amplifier.

I think it's a similar thing with debt in finance.

Debt in itself is neither good nor bad in moral terms, it's just a tool. What is good or not is the terms and risk compared to the expected outcome and probability of success.

Comments are pure gold. PMs should just copy-paste and turn them into tickets and they'd have a roadmap ready for 2026.
Things like automatically recognizing tax and insurance payments as income costs or properly handling business trips.
But those are too hard and not interesting apparently :P

And as luck would have it I just came across a post about Polish accounting tool introducing AI that lets you do such "innovative" and "groud-breaking" things like getting a list of aged debts, reporting revenues across months, setting up reminders about upcoming payments, etc.

In fact, this is what bothers me most about fads like AI, earlier it was blockchain, big data, etc.
We spend so much time, money and energy chasing dreams instead of doing the obvious things everybody knows should be done and getting almost immediate benefits.
Easy to do, but also easy NOT to do.

The sad reality is that most software around (especially in B2B) is just plain bad products. It's so rare to find something pleasant to use rather than putting up with it because it's the least sh*y product available at the moment, or because it's cheap, or because your boss made you use it.

Those low-hanging fruits don't change reality as much as listening to your users (for real!), not assuming their expectations are silly and unreasonable because they're hard to implement or you don't immediately understand, not convincing bugs are actually features, etc.

For example, nobody would object to things like adding more (often absolutely meaningless) unit tests, doing months of simple refactorings, or upgrading to the newest infrastructure. They are important things, but the cost-to-benefit ratio is usually disappointing.

That article really resonated. After working for almost 15 years, mostly on legacy projects, it's obvious that code quality has little relevance to the overall "business success".
Of course, there's a limit, but we focus too much on red herrings.

deadsimpletech.com/blog/failed_...

Funny but not funny... 1st world problems.
My family got so good at cooking that finding a good enough restaurant food is hard.
A lot of "great" places recommended by others are either disappointing or cause stomach aches - too salty, oily or just not tasty at all.
Same for coffee. The best at home.

That's a really interesting take. Do you think a similar result could be achieved without AI? For example, by pair-programming with somebody very experienced with the system? If not, why not? I'm really curious and appreciate your insights, especially that my experiences were... mostly negative :P

I think you should get a job there, fix it, then leave ;) That's the only way.

Many little things like that add up and impact people's business, family and personal lives in crazy harmful ways.
At some point you're "locked-in", you hate it but if you leave your business may go bankrupt.
What a sad way keep "users" - by fear and keeping them too busy to try other ways :(