zwilderrr

I recently learned a formula from my son's playgroup teacher that has made boundary-setting much more palatable because it makes the whole thing feel less like a high-stakes endeavour. It goes like this:

"I know you want <something> but <rule-that-comes-first>."

As it relates to playgroup: "Timmy (not my son's name, btw), I know you want to jump around right now, but there's a rule that we don't jump during circle time. If you want to jump, that's fine, but you have to go outside of the circle to do it."

Simple and effective, and not personal.

I had an adult version that happened this morning, where I said: "The opportunity sounds great but I have an investment policy that I check in with references first before I hand over those kinds of documents."

It wasn't personal, it wasn't an attack, it was just a <rule-that-comes-first>.

My wife was one of the first to sound the alarms (to me, that is) about the layer of garbage code and massive "comprehension debt" AI is surely creating.

"Are CEOs aware that more and more, no one actually knows what they are doing?" she asked, in earnest.

When I told her that I'm actually seeing a shift in tech articles and memes expressing that sentiment, I wondered if what I was observing was actually true, or if my ultra-optimized media feeds were just showing me what I wanted to see.

But then I realized that I found many of those articles on hackernews! This made me grateful that there's a (somewhat) objective counterbalance in my life to what every other website tells me to think.

So, thank you.

Wondering if anyone is actually using useActionState, useTransition, useOptimistic, etc, in the wild, or if they are still relying on form libraries and data fetching frameworks. If yes, please indicate what (size) company you work for.

I don't think I'm old, but I get great joy in writing a simple utility function by hand, without ai. Just yesterday I wrote a function that removes the ending punctuation from a string, if present, and adds a period instead. I also wrote onDone, onSubmit, and onCancel handlers using more than my tab key.

Yet it seems to me that this is quickly becoming the stuff of an older generation, of people who move slowly, of a dying breed who care about silly things like craft and form.

Don't get me wrong--I'm all over AI, especially at work where speed also counts. But there's something so satisfying in writing code without AI that it makes me wonder if, in fact, I'm quickly becoming irrelevant.

And does it matter either way?