I should really give it another look, I usually ended up not adopting it for projects because of the boilerplate and high setup overheard, but those are both things that ai agents can usually be trusted with. Maybe the calculus has changed.
Yeah Bazel is a PITA to do yourself. I haven't tried but I'm confident Claude et al. would handle it just fine. By similar logic I recently adopted NixOS for a lot of my servers; Claude is perfectly happy to slog through the pain of Nix configs for me.
I’m not a fan of generative AI for the use case because it’s rote enough to do deterministically, but deterministic code generation is getting better and better.
Gazelle, the BUILD file generator for Go, now supports plugins and several other languages have Gazelle plugins.
I’ve used AI to generate BUILD file generators before, though. I had good luck getting it to write a script that would analyze a Java project with circular dependencies and aggregate the cycle participants into a single target.
It’s gotten easier of late because Bazel modules are nice and Gazelle has started support plugins so it can do build file generation for other languages.
I don’t like generative AI for rote tasks like this, but I’ve had good luck using generative AI to write deterministic code generators that I can commit to a project and reuse.
If the goal is to simply undercut the incumbent with roughly the same product than it doesn't really matter if the incumbent starts using LLMs too as their cost structure, margin expectations, etc. are already relatively set.
Having been on a bigco team that underwent the same sort of headcount growth in a very short time I have to imagine that "more than tripling our headcount in that first year" was likely more a driver of the inability to keep up than a solution. That's not a knock on the talents of anyone hired; it's just exceedingly difficult to simultaneously grow a team that fast and maintain any kind of velocity regardless of the complexity of the problems you're trying to tackle. The culture and knowledge that enabled the previous team's velocity just gets completely diluted.
That assumes the regime cares more about the economic prosperity of their people than about staying in power. So far they seem to care more about power. North Korea provides a model for how terrible the situation can get for every day people in that sort of arrangement.
North Korea is effectively an island. Iran has many neighbors and long borders. They have no choice but to be at least semi integrated into the world and strong enough to defend themselves.
Their economic prosperity is more linked to Oil than Internet.
Plus, the elites economic prosperity is also linked to their not being protests and for the toppling of govt to not occur and they might be willing to offset some losses to keep the average population in check
Which sucks for the average iranian but we saw how their protests were cracked down with 20-30 THOUSAND people killed and Iran hiding bodies etc.
I have heard that all shops are either shut down or running at the most minimum capacity. Economic prosperity just isn't a question now in Iran.
Yeah, foreign intervention is probably the best option at this point. If the elites are willing to murder tends of thousands of innocent people, then I see no moral issues with foreign intervention to get rid of IRGC and current government using any means necessary.
No wonder our grandparents generation were good with mechanical things. If they were looking at materials like that all the time - I feel like you'd build an intuitive sense of how common household devices work pretty easily if it were so clear and accessible.
Literature on doing things was much more practical. There was a culture of things being repairable. There was a pride in one’s work. Check this out if you don’t believe me: http://vintagemachinery.org/pubs/1617/30720.pdf
The rise of the publicly traded corporation run by fiduciary duty has, in my opinion, squeezed out repairability, pride, and workmanship for marginal financial gains.
I fear it won’t have been worth it in the long run. Shame short term incentives run the show.
Materials like this are infinitely more accessible to us than our grandparents generation. We all have devices in our pockets that can get to service manuals for our products in minutes. I can have common parts at my door overnight from Amazon with the press of a button on my phone. Every local hardware store carries replacement cartridges and gaskets for common faucet types.
The reason our grandparents generation was good at fixing things is because they had to be. My grandparents lived through the Great Depression and worked difficult manual labor jobs. Contrary to the Reddit memes about how past generations lived like kings on trivial jobs, they worked extremely hard for everything and made it last.
It’s really easy to get service manuals and do basic maintenance on simple things like faucets these days. I think the only reason it’s becoming common for people to not know how to do basic repairs or even find basic service information is that many people grew up never having to think about it. I still have adult friends who went from living with their parents to dorms to rented apartments who never learned the first thing about maintaining or fixing things around the house because they’ve never had to and they don’t want to - and they can keep going that way without really losing anything. It’s a choice at this point, but it works for them.
Manuals are fairly easy to find, but in my experience they are dumbed-down. They mostly contain simple Ikea-like instructions and a lot of legalese CMA warnings. That is not a dig at Ikea. Their instructions are great for assembling flatpack furniture. But servicing a faucet, a garage door or a lawn mower is on another level.
This state of affairs is partly due a change in the nature of products. They are in general more complex and no longer meant to be repairable. They are meant to have shorter life spans, and if serviceable are meant to be serviced by professionals. How much that is an improvement for the consumer, is questionable IMO.
> Manuals are fairly easy to find, but in my experience they are dumbed-down.
I just linked to the full CAD library for the modern version of these parts, though. It’s not dumbed down.
Use the search phrase “service manual” and you can find documentation for every appliance in your house. I frequently fix appliances for friends and even neighbors and have yet to be unable to find the service manual.
Same for cars.
I’m so confused by this comment section. Why is everyone convinced that the situation is so much worse today?
> Materials like this are infinitely more accessible to us than our grandparents generation. We all have devices in our pockets that can get to service manuals for our products in minutes.
You mean minutes to find the right bootleg manual site with PDF for an adjacent product category, then some more minutes to realize you cannot safely (if at all) get at the manual, some more minutes to find a different bootleg PDF site, realize that it's actually not close enough to the model you have, and 1h later, finally find the good enough PDF... only to realize that "service manuals" today are often useless, and decide to repeat this process on YouTube?
> I can have common parts at my door overnight from Amazon with the press of a button on my phone.
Overnight is often too long. Also good luck finding the right parts and reconciling conflicting IDs between manuals, manufacturers and vendors.
> Every local hardware store carries replacement cartridges and gaskets for common faucet types.
Except when 90% of the faucets are uncommon, and support for them gets effectively discontinued after a few years.
Now contrast that with our grandparents, who usually had repair manuals included with the product, most parts were universal (and probably on-hand or extractable from something else at home), and you could actually go to a local hardware store where the clerk would be able to figure out what parts you needed on the spot, and with luck had them in stock.
I'm not claiming our grandparents had it better in general, but let's also not pretend there are no downsides to ongoing specialization and market competition. We may have more stuff, prettier stuff, better stuff[0], but nothing is ever compatible with anything, it's that way on purpose, and people are no longer supposed to repair anything themselves.
I mean, a generation or two ago, people frequently learned to do things like replace spark plugs and alternators and mess with oil changes.
My generation learned how to plug computer components together and install operating systems and drivers.
The reason people did that is because they (more or less) had to.
The generation being born today will need neither of those skill sets.
Cars, by and large, stay working for as long as people care to keep them and the things that do go wrong are, mostly, uneconomical to fix at home.
It's likewise rare for, dunno, uninstalling a video game to accidentally delete some crucial OS dependency that causes the thing to need to be reformatted.
It's hard to say what skills the next generation will learn, but I can guarantee there will be something that they need that their children will not. And that they'll complain about their children being useless for not knowing whatever that is.
No, we just outsourced car maintenance to professional shop services. Both because mechanical aspects have become reliable enough to last a year without maintenance and because electronic/computer aspects are mind-bogglingly complicated.
> because electronic/computer aspects are mind-bogglingly complicated
And because it's software, it happens to be a perfect way for the manufacturer to extract rent (er, "recurring revenue") from car repair business. It's not complexity that's shaping how end-user repair experience looks like, but the fact that you often need proprietary connector, proprietary software, and a valid license key to interface with the car's computer.
And because plenty of engineering goes into designing subsystems with the explicit but unstated purpose of making them close to impossible to repair without ultimately resorting to help from the manufacturer.
Software is just the latest layer on the cake. Non-repairable designs, special tools, unavailable parts, unavailable instructions, fragile and error prone procedures, encryption, and more. They're all occasionally used to with the main purpose of blocking any attempt to easily repair without generating revenue for the manufacturer and their network.
Source: I have family working for two large car manufacturers both in engineering and management, who have personally experienced explicit demands to make things hard to repair by the owner but make them in a way where a reasonable explanation can be used for plausible deniability.
> I mean, a generation or two ago, people frequently learned to do things like replace spark plugs and alternators and mess with oil changes.
These are all things I learned to do myself and have done recently (even the alternator).
Like I said, it’s easier than ever.
I’m kind of baffled that I’m getting downvoted for saying it on HN. Anyone with a little resourcefulness and a willingness to get their hands dirty can do these trivial operations too.
It's not just that; being a very small undifferentiated supplier in a volatile commodities market with very high fixed capital costs, unpredictable/uncontrollable production capacity and long production lead times is a very difficult business, regardless of the industry.
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