This a valid reply to the "but have you tried it?" crowd. "How can you judge it if you personally haven't used it?" The argument can be used for any illegal drug, gambling, etc.
I think it's led to a huge advantage for defenders. Nuclear weapons favor attackers, or deterrence. But massive drone waves allow defense of large areas with a very small number of people. It's not a race to build bigger missiles that go longer distances and are harder to shoot down, it's largely a coordination, communication, logistics, and information management problem.
I don't quite follow, can you explain a little bit about how drone waves allow for defense of large areas? I can see how they help in offensive attacks, but as far as I can tell they don't seem to have helped defend Iran from the US and Israel; they're just helping Iran lash out after taking a beating.
(Not trying to be smarmy, just genuinely curious.)
well two things: 1) Iran doesn't have much in terms of drones, but they are not using them nearly as much as even Russia, much less Ukraine. Look at US bases in the area: there's been a few flyovers by drones but no serious attacks, but US bases haven't even put up nets or anything to protect resources, they still have radar and high value targets just sitting out in the open unattacked. 2) Iran still hasn't lost any territory, that's the defense I'm talking about. The US and Israel can expend all their bombs, but that doesn't bring down Iran's government or lose them any land. At most it loses them economic power. So I don't think Iran demonstrates much at all about the modern use of drones.
> The problem with American culture specifically is that it treats "happiness" as a goal, rather than a fleeting feeling that is probably better described with a more specific word (joy, accomplishment, excitement, satisfaction, contentment).
Does it really? The sentiment of your post is pretty widespread at this point. It's kind of like saying "our culture is so commercialized" but everyone will tell you they're sick of commercialism.
> (I preface that this is primarily relevant for orgs and enterprises; it really has no relevance for individual vibe-coders)
The thing about tools that "democratize" software development, whether it is Visual Studio/Delphi/QT or LLMs, is that you wind up with people in organizations building internal tools on which business processes will depend who do not understand that centralization is key. They will build these tools in ignorance of the necessity of centralization-centric approaches (APIs, MCP, etc.) and create Byzantine architectures revolving around file transfers, with increasing epicycles to try to overcome the pitfalls of such an approach.
There's a distinction between individual devs and organizations like Amazons or even a medium sized startup.
Once you have 10-20 people using agents in wildly different ways getting wildly different results, the question of "how do I baseline the capabilities across my team?" becomes very real.
In our team, we want to let every dev use the agent harness that they are comfortable with and that means we need a standard mechanism of delivering standard capabilities, config, and content across the org.
I don't see it as democratization versus corporate facism in so much as it is "can we get consistent output from developers of varying degrees of skill using these agents in different ways?"
reply