28th of Sep - 2nd of Oct. This year. Varberg, Sweden.

The legends were true. A second coming of goat. Those who dare speak will find our Call for Talks. It is open! Yet Welcoming! Onward!

Seriously though. We want speakers of all experience levels from all parts of the world. Take a look. The previous conference was a blast.

There will be so much stuff

As I have clients that have adopted LLMs a fair bit I have given them a solid whirl and at this point I am confident I'm getting more done, I'm doing things I could not practically have done before and much like always I must be diligent against being lazy.

From my experience the idea that LLMs don't make coding work faster for some developers doesn't hold. I wanted to reject the potential because I don't like the companies, I don't like how the models were made, I'm concerned about the pressures this will put on workers.

The luddites to my knowledge did not succeed. I think they were useful counter-pressure to the threat of a technology against a livelihood but I think we have a similar situation here. We tend to adopt the awful technology because it is useful and enables new stuff. We only know the overt bad effects, comparing to the car, we can already see the noise and we can already tell the speed is a danger.

We have no idea about the second-order effects. They hadn't quite figured out the problems with leaded gasoline at the time either.

Maybe I'm just being lazy to use it at all and trying to cope with the cognitive dissonance of enjoying using the thing and the massive friction against what I believe in. At this point I do believe that unless they price hike these things to oblivion this will warp the industry immensely.

I've made TUIs in 5 minutes that would take me a day. I've fixed bugs in 2 minutes that would take 1 hour usually. I care about craft in some things. However, I am way more interested in outcomes. And lordy do these let me lean into outcomes.

I'm 90% talking about code work. I don't let them write for me. I don't want them to do artistic things for me. I've had them help with a tool for the Goatmire website, a better dev server, but spent a bunch of time yesterday hand-cranking CSS for how we will present speakers. Making Goatmire not smell like an AI production is very important to me.

It is of course coming for many fields. In code we can still verify results to a large extent. Practices that are completely infeasible in "sending email", "planning flights" and whatever else people want agents to do for them.

The thing I really don't think I have good enough answers for right now is the inherent risk of prompt injection. A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4,000 Developer Machines.  lol, what

How will orgs handle this? Security gates will be around everything. You will 2FA auth every button press. Systems will be slower and worse for everything destructive. Even read access will be a mess of what individual fields you can access easily because it is trivial to make an agent exfiltrate information it has been allowed to read.

And if what I've seen of the explosions of new things people are building is anything to go by there will be so much stuff to sift through that people won't do it the human way. They'll do it with these machines that are susceptible to .. hostile persuasion.

It is occasionally tempting to put one of these in some automated job. But then you'd need to pass --yolo and all bets are off from then on. I definitely don't enjoy the confirmation prompts for doing every little shell thing. But also that is your only line of protection and it barely exists at all.

So in summary. I'm not enthusiastic in the positive sense. I am very much using and exploring these things. I think they'll stick around. I think we'll try and fix the inherent problems they have ineptly for decades. I think we'll see the real effects of them both soon and way later. What I am enjoying is to get to do more things, explore things I wasn't capable of doing previously and the mix of learning and doing.

How conflicted are you? What lines are you holding? Are you angry, exasperated, worried, excited or indifferent? Honestly I'd like to talk about something else but this was on my mind.

I'm here on email or on Bluesky and the Fediverse if you want to reach me :)

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.