5 posts tagged with "programming"

"Programming is dead."

A friend said so when he heard I was working on dev tools. It was right after LLM’s coding abilities shocked the world. He felt it pointless to continue building tools for human programmers anymore when AI is taking over this profession. You'll never be wrong by predicting without attaching a time frame. Dead when? At least for the time being, the emergence of generative AI has introduced more work for programmers, some more difficult than before.

Whether AI will replace human developers is too big a topic to tackle. However, we can keep an open mind and explore different roles that AI can play in software development. Let's conduct thought experiments to imagine what each means to us.

No matter what programming language you are using, one common suggestion you all probably hear is that:

Don’t use switch statements

Besides people usually forgetting to add the break statement, the more profound reason is that developers often avoid using special cases in their code. Instead, they prefer to use more flexible and powerful constructs such as polymorphism or dictionaries.

Our Story​

My co-founder and I are building the full-stack toolkit ZenStack on top of Prisma. One major feature is allowing define access policies declaratively in the schema. It started with Him reporting an issue for that:

One big piece of conventional wisdom for software operation is "never expose internal-facing services to the public", and databases (especially SQL databases) fall into that category. It's good advice because data stored in them are usually highly sensitive and indispensable to most systems' proper running. Investigations with honeypots showed that publicly open databases are discovered within hours after they become active and start getting attacked within a day. What's scarier than this is you often don't even know you ever had a data breach.

I initially tried GitHub Copilot, just briefly, around the beginning of 2022. It raised my attention partly due to its name - I hold a private pilot license and have always been an aviation enthusiast. At that time, I found the idea intriguing, but the product usability was not so satisfactory: both in terms of speed and quality of generation. I started to reuse it about three months ago, and now it has become indispensable to me and worth every penny of that $10/mon that I pay.

What makes me a happy customer? Let's figure it out.