What is this comment responding to? I don't think anybody in this thread, or the article itself, believes "emitting words" is what writing is?

That seems like a tough road. They've never been able to enforce that iPhone app makers build an iPad-compatible version or vice versa, and this looks exactly like that scenario.

It's mostly enforced, the only exception being apps with a legitimate iPhone-only hardware dependency.

iPhone apps must function on iPad in iPhone-compatibility mode, apps must support window resizability as of OS 27, and apps can't detect iPad and refuse to run. And I don't think this is new, but setting the target to iPhone-only doesn't prevent iPhone apps from running on iPad.

I'm not fangirling over it, but comparing it to Vision Pro is ridiculous.

But will you gain anything by building for it? Will you see noticeably more users or people choosing another alternative because you didn't specifically building the app for Duo? At least if it doesn't outright break.

I would get a little bit of joy if a duo user noticed the effort I put into making my app work well on their device. Why put effort into anything? Your take is bordering dangerously on cynicism. :)

You could say this about every QoL feature though. That’s not a reason to not do it though, it adds up and at some point other apps that do bother to make their apps as good as possible will become more popular than yours.

As a user, this attitude makes me sad.

As a professional programmer, it at least gratifies me to know this is the attitude I'm competing against.

Can two people use opposite sides while in tent mode? Because that makes for some fun in-person games.

Apparently the camera has to be active to render on both displays

It is exotic, and bring only a little to the table for a stiff price increase.

Not really. It's an iPad + iPhone. That's hardly exotic. Both of those product categories sell very well. People who own an iPad mini and an iPhone have every reason to consider this for the merged cost.

At an even more fundamental I tend to think about software as managing _risk_, where complexity is just one component. A large portion of my career has been about making difficult decisions around accepting particular sorts of software risk to reduce other types of risk, like my coworkers continuing to receive paychecks, for example.

Put even simpler: code is a liability, and understanding is an asset.

It's easy to add more code, but it also increases the risk, especially if you are the only one who understands how it works. As more people on the team understand it, the risk decreases. It becomes less likely that the code interacts in an unexpected way with other parts of the system, and it also becomes more likely that the existence of the code is justified because noone felt the need to replace it.

If you fire the team and replace it with another, you now have a lot of code and zero understanding. That understanding first has to be mined before you can close the asset/liability gap.

In the age of LLMs, it becomes easy to produce 10x as much code as before, but I don't think you can put the same multiplier on how fast you can increase the understanding. It may even be <1 if you are not being mindful about your LLM use.

I think a lot of people will tell you that now it's much easier because they can just ask their LLM how it works, but in practice I don't think people are able to absorb enough from these purely need-based interactions to arrive at understanding that translates into sustained long-term increases in productivity for large projects.

The thing I keep seeing is greenfield AI projects built by ill-conceived, self-styled software factories. They grow incredibly quickly, and then reality sets in and the pace slows. Demonstrating this is difficult. There are real productivity increases to be had here no doubt, but the long tail is still expensive.

Exactly. And LLMs will only accelerate your rate of understanding so far by helping you find and organize information, at the end of the day you are still limited by your own mental bandwidth.

I think a lot of workplaces would do well to ban LLM-based replies in certain spaces.

While I don't disagree with you, they shouldn't have to. This should be one of those things like covering your mouth when you cough in a crowd and not playing loud music in your cube that people with basic social skills should know not to do. Unfortunately, like much basic courtesy, we apparently now have to make rules.

I agree, but it seems that some people actually need to be told that copy/pasting a bunch of LLM slop into chat is like farting on an elevator.

I wouldn't even say that it comes down to "social skills" in a lot of cases, it's just people who seem to be performatively using AI. I'd classify them as corporate climber "yes, boss" types more than lacking in social skills.

Your analogy is better than mine. :-)

Blocked.

This is happening all over the place right now. There is a ton of greenfield happening, which further adds to the illusion of speed. Eventually you produce a big old pile of shit that even with the help of the LLM is weird to reason about, and it slows way down. Many such cases.

Let’s start with “what would happen” and run the experiment instead of starting with “they could probably”.

> Where it actually breaks

I had a sensible chuckle when I got to this part. This kind of article "____ is all you need" is like another case of Betteridge's Law of Headlines. The answer is "that's not true" every time.

"Latent" is another one, as in "latent bug" or in one particularly odd case "latent twin".