Yes. He mentions that in passing that saying people will accuse him of hating on it because he didn't profit from it. I think his point of view is that his company's attempt was smaller scale and not part of the $10B+ waste?
In any case I don't fully understand what he's trying to say other than negating the hype (which i generally agree with), but not offering any alternative thoughts of his own other than- we have bad tools and programming language. (why? how are they bad? what needs to change for them to be good?)
Working on a side project that I hope to launch in the near future, I can relate. At first I tried sharing with friends/family
but noticed how disinterested anybody who isn't working on it themselves are.
I personally thrive on conversation and a back-and-forth to hone my ideas and thoughts so it's definitely been hard.
I ended up settling on creating system prompts for both OpenAI and Anthropic for co-founders with the explicit prompt that they critique and challenge my thoughts.
In ChatGPT web interface you can create a folder for that context and then all my conversations in that folder relate to my project.
It isn't perfect but it does help and it's a soundboard that's available 24/7, and lets me develop my thoughts, do my research, etc.
There's a risk of it being an giant echo chamber. But then again, most startups are until they hit the market and start validating against reality.
Virtualzing (or windowing, as it is sometimes called) is definitely one way to tackle this problem. However, it's not a silver bullet. The more complex the UI/rendering is, the more optimizations you will need. The demo you link shows a very simple rendering with no complex user interactions, mouseover events, etc.
what kind of codebases were you working on? I've had the pleasure of working on 2 big companies using rails, each with well over 50 engineers and the code base was so relatively easy to jump into. The beauty of rails is that if you follow its guidelines, anybody can jump right in.
what alternatives do you
find are better when scaling up with more engineers?
The biggest issue I’ve seen is when companies hire 4 junior engineers with zero or minimal Rails experience to bootstrap their product, let them loose, and… yeah everything quickly becomes a mess.
Nobody understands the conventions so they cargo cult whatever they found from a blog that was last updated in 2013. Or they find novel and extraordinary solutions to problems that the framework literally already solved. Or they have zero experience modeling things in a database—much less doing it the way ActiveRecord encourages—so every battle is always uphill.
The biggest problem with convention over configuration is when you have a team where nobody understands the conventions. But what else do you expect?
I don't believe I've ever seen 4 junior engineers who don't know what they're doing build anything other than a mess. I don't have any experience with rails, so I can't say whether the mess would be worse, but those engineers are definitely going to make one without guidance.
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