Steve Yegge

I'm developing concern for Steve. He's been a well known developer and writer in the industry for years now (See his popular 'Google Platforms Rant' essay from years ago) [0].

Now, Yegge's writing tilts towards the grandoise... see his writing when joining Grab [1] and Sourcegraph [2] respectively versus how things actually played out.

I prefer optimism and I'm not anti AI by any means, but given his observed behavior and how AI can't exacerbate certain pathologies... not great. Adding the recent crypto activities on top and all that entails is the ingredients for a powder keg.

Hope someone is looking out for him.

[0] https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse452/23wi/papers/yegge-platform-rant.html

[1] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/why-i-left-google-to-join-grab-86dfffc0be84

[2] https://sourcegraph.com/blog/introducing-steve-yegge

Which specific ones though allow you to send input to a window without raising it? People have been trying to do "focus follows mouse [without auto raise]" for a long time on mac, and the synthetic event equivalent to command+click is the only discovered method I'm aware of, e.g. used in https://github.com/sbmpost/AutoRaise

There is also this old blog post by Yegge [1] which mentions `AXUIElementPostKeyboardEvent` but there were plenty of bugs with that, and I haven't seen anyone else build on it. I guess it's a good candidate though, perhaps the Sky team they acquired knows the right private APIs to use to get this working.

[1] https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/settling-osx-focus-follows-mouse-debate.html

I’ve found that experienced devs use agentic coding in a more “hands-on” way than beginners and pure vibe-coders.

Vibecoders are the best because they push the models in humorous and unexpected ways.

Junior devs are like “I automated the deploy process via an agent and this markdown file”

Seasoned devs will spend more time writing the prompt for a bug fix, or lazily paste the error and then make the 1-line change themselves.

The current crop of LLMs are more powerful than any of these use cases, and it’s exciting to see experienced devs start to figure that out (I’m not stanning Gas Town[0], but it’s a glimpse of the potential).

[0]https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04

Here is an example of a 2006 rant that qualifies: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html

OO conflates many different aspects that are often orthogonal but have been conflated together opportunistically rather than by sound rigor. Clearly most languages allow for functions outside classes. It's clearly the case today especially with FP gaining momentum, but it's also clear back then when Java and the JVM were created. I think smalltalk was the only other language that had this limitation.

Like others in this thread, I can only recommend the big OOPS video: https://youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI

> However, CI is not "configured", it is coded. . . . YAML was continuously extended to deal with that, so it developed into much more than just "markup", but it grew into this terrible chimera.

Brings to mind the classic "Kingdom of Nouns" [0] parable, which I read to my kid just last week. The multi-line "run" nodes in GitHub actions give me the heebie-jeebies, like how MUMPS data validation was maintained in metadata of VA-Fileman [1].

0. https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html

1. https://www.hardhats.org/fileman/pm/gfs_frm.htm

There is a great Steve Yegge post on how useful ad-hoc transformation of source code is: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food.html

The only time I have used this myself was an expat style transformer for terraform (HCL). We had a lot of terraform and they kept changing the language, so I would build a fixer to make code written for say 0.10 to work with 0.12 and then again for 0.14. It was very fun and let us keep updating to newer terraform versions. Pretty simple language except for distinguishing quoted blocks from non-quoted.