Effort is not a good signal for value. Never has been. Just because someone took 10 more hours to finish a task doesn't mean they did a better job or they care more about the result.
But a lack of effort is a good signal for a lack of value.
Eleven times out of ten, your initial idea is garbage. If you write it up, or let AI do that for you, the result is garbage. But if you go through the effort of structuring the idea and thinking about how to express it and how to phrase the details, you may learn what's wrong with the idea and how to improve it.
Effort is, however, an okay proxy for giving a shit.
You’re right that some folks can share more value in fifteen seconds than others might in fifteen hours (setting aside that the first set of folks might have got to that point by way of fifteen years of practice first). That’s hard to gate on. But keeping out shitposters and spammers by requiring a modicum of effort is at least somewhat effective.
I'm not mad that they have a fork of some FOSS software that they use. I'm upset that they're actively trying to take away other people's freedom under the banner of a non-profit whose mission is to support FOSS software projects.
That's worse than just some random group lying loudly about its intentions. They're getting tax benefits that probably should be yanked unless they change their charter. They also accepted donations to further the existing charter, and they're doing the opposite.
You could tell from tone and polish how much effort someone had put into writing an answer. That was a pretty good signal for some topics on forum sites like Stack Overflow. There were always nuts and cranks who would happily spend an hour writing well-formed prose about nonsense or something obviously wrong, but the eloquent ones were few and far between. Now every crank is equally eloquent and can spit out 1,500 words of passable prose in seconds.
Designs can't be easily split into a pure light or dark mode, though. Before light/dark modes were popularized, it was common to have some parts be "dark" and other parts be "light," depending on the design (for example, would the iOS 5 game center be "dark mode"?). Elixir's website uses a mix of light and dark to delineate sections.
One consequence of software recently supporting light and dark schemes is that UI designs end up committing to all white or all dark, rather than tastefully choosing a color scheme that best frames its content in context.
Because making segfaults impossible is simply a better solution to playing a game of whack a mole of "crash, root cause, fix and add test for that very specific bug"?
They are. And have been since the 1970s, and will continue to do so for another 50 years.
Particularly the fixing bugs parts. So often is one bug manifested across 200 lines in 50 different files, and to fix it you need the same 5 exact keystrokes across those 200 lines. vim (or in my case Emacs) macros will allow me to find the fix in the first of these lines where I also define the macro, and then apply in mere seconds across the other 200 lines.
As for writing test cases, copy-paste has worked fine since unit tests became popular in the 1990s, and will continue to work fine for the next 30 years. editor macros are not too dissimilar to copy-paste-edit.
Which is fine. Burn your tokens (with all the carbon emissions they generate in data centers) doing more involved tasks like that. Don’t waste it on silly, easy things like simple macros, search/replace, etc. AI doesn’t need to be a hammer used for everything.
My flow state with AI is having 5 different conversations at the same time making good progress on all of them by giving key insight and feedback at the right times.
You can actually go super fast with the right setup and focusing only on the important details like ensuring the shape of the APIs make sense and that test quality is good.
