[Go Make Things] The magic developer wand...

By rahmat hidayat

Friday, May 23, 2025

​ Need front-end help but don't need a full-time employee? I now offer subscription front-end engineering. Ship faster and build better systems. Pause or cancel any time. … doesn't exit. I can't find the post anymore, but a month or three ago, Miriam Eric Susanne posted something about how we keep building extremely problematic tools with the promise that we'll work out all of the bad stuff at some imagined point down the road. Sure, it uses 8x as much water to do the same thing. But look how cool it is! We'll figure that before we launch. But you know what happens. They don't. And then it launches, and does massive amounts of harm to lots and lots of people. And people say stuff like… Sure, it's got some problems now. But we'll solve for that later. I've even heard people argue that AI's massive environmental destruction is "fine, actually," because… What if AI comes up with the solution to global warming? It won't. It can't. And even if it could, throwing puppies into the puppy killing machine to solve the puppy death problem is immoral and fucking stupid. There is no magic wand. Problematic tech doesn't work itself out over time. If anything, the systemic issues become further entrenched, and eventually, every just accepts them as a price of doing business. Do not accept "we'll figure that out later" as a response to pointing out meaningful problems. It's a con. Solve the problems or abandon the project. Learn more about subscription front-end engineering. Ship faster and build better systems. Cheers, Chris ​ Want to share this with others or read it later? View it in a browser.​ ​

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