I gave you the up vote because it's a good take, but this really has nothing to do with the article, so I can tell that you and a bunch of your 58 up voters didn't read it
I'm not really interested in trying to burn anyone and despite my nuanced understanding of the Luddites, I do think dismissing a Luddite take in the context of technological progress is legitimate
I care about ethics and governance too but I live in a capitalist society and I'm here to discuss the merits of a technology
This dev is analytical enough to understand basic incentive modeling and game theory. Capitalism is a race to the bottom no less now than it always was.
Agreed. It creates a new normal for what the engineer needs to actually know. In another comment I claimed that the same was true at the advent of stack overflow
I hear you, and there’s merit to the concerns. My counter is
The same was true at the Advent of books, the Internet, and stack overflow
It’s Luddite to refuse progress and tools based on an argument about long term societal impact. The reality is that capitalism will choose the path of least resistance
This library (including the schema documentation) was largely written with the help of Claude, the AI model by Anthropic. Claude's output was thoroughly reviewed by Cloudflare engineers with careful attention paid to security and compliance with standards. Many improvements were made on the initial output, mostly again by prompting Claude (and reviewing the results). Check out the commit history to see how Claude was prompted and what code it produced.
"NOOOOOOOO!!!! You can't just use an LLM to write an auth library!"
"haha gpus go brrr"
In all seriousness, two months ago (January 2025), I (@kentonv) would have agreed. I was an AI skeptic. I thoughts LLMs were glorified Markov chain generators that didn't actually understand code and couldn't produce anything novel. I started this project on a lark, fully expecting the AI to produce terrible code for me to laugh at. And then, uh... the code actually looked pretty good. Not perfect, but I just told the AI to fix things, and it did. I was shocked.
To emphasize, this is not "vibe coded". Every line was thoroughly reviewed and cross-referenced with relevant RFCs, by security experts with previous experience with those RFCs. I was trying to validate my skepticism. I ended up proving myself wrong.
Again, please check out the commit history -- especially early commits -- to understand how this went.
If I'm reading this right, you would basically say that any company that helps government institutions spy on people is awful, is that right?