“But by all means, keep shitting up the codebase with Claude…” – the same managers, probably

Second point still stands.

Once again: source?

Once upon a time the junior dev’s job was to clean the mainframe and type up the punch cards.

Source? Because I worked for a utility that used to use punchcards. I actually had a card reader and paper tape drive behind me in the server room where I worked. The old timers would come in and reminisce because it beat working, and none of the guys I talked to let “junior” devs touch the punch cards.

Imagine if they let the new guy waste a bunch of cards to put the machine in an unworkable state, or fuck up the punches from someone else’s code, or – and this was a very real problem – drop the entire box on the way to the computer. The cards were srs business and the concept of “junior” didn’t really exist because computing was a brand new field.

No profession is safe from stagnation.

Yeah, yeah. No profession is safe from short-sighted leadership taking a short-term gain instead of growing their talent either. That’s not something to celebrate.

Bob Ross taught you that you could paint if you applied yourself. It wasn’t the domain of neurotic weirdos in the throes of creative agony, stabbing canvases in paint-splattered lofts to distract themselves from the super-gonorrhea they picked up from their last model: you could just sit down and paint a thing and enjoy yourself.

AI bros are claiming that they’re bringing art to the masses. Bob Ross actually did it.

We usually do it in the oven while the stuff is smoking outside but, yeah, I’ll bet that’s amazing. I’ll try it out.

Thank you!

I’m looking for side quests to put in the smoker while I’m waiting for the main entree. What temp and how long do you let them smoke for?

Word salad is your friend. The bigger the context of the prompt, the more it has to thrash. So if you ask it for a longform essay about elephants in the blue diamond-shaped trifold organza station wagon and the quality of fudge it can expectorate in the style of an old timey sea captain who just dropped his iPhone over the starboard bow, it has to pull in more data. And then tell it that whatever it did was awful and nonsensical and it should redo it.

Alternately, ask for a list of one thousand random numbers, with no repetition, between one and a million. Whatever it does, tell it it’s wrong and duplicated numbers and/or gave you too few. Repeat.