the risez of whateverz

https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/

i am annoyed by this article for a lot of reasons, but most of them are ones where i can agree to disagree. the actual real problem is that it’s a boomer rant, a “why aren’t things fun anymore” post written out of anger. i can enjoy rants when they are funny and no one gives the guy power, but this isn’t one of those cases.

to illustrate what i mean:

Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one? You type “ and the result is “|”? Yeah, that drives me up the wall. It saves no time whatsoever, and it’s wrong often enough that I waste time having to correct for it.

And that’s a predictable operation that inserts a single character! What we’ve invented is an entire fake persona that will waste your time entire paragraphs at once.

her preferences of not having autopair is interesting to me. most programmers do have autopair enabled, and it’s especially powerful with auto indent. if your IDE is good enough, you don’t even need a formatter for properly formatted code. but i can relate to cases where i wanted to type a singular ( to make a frowny face, and i have a similar reaction to most of Microsoft Word’s QOL features that was added and enabled without my knowledge. stuff like auto capitalize, auto grammar fixing, etc. i think these things should be clearly informed to the user when enabled.

do you see the difference between a rant and talking normally? it’s the ability to agree to disagree. it’s open mindedness. it’s normal to be frustrated as a user but if you let that anger take over you, you become unreasonable. there’s nothing wrong with people who do prefer auto capitalize, autopair, or llm autocomplete, but you don’t have time to stop and think in a rant.

also, the thing is, eevee talked about “asking chatgpt and getting a hallucination” as a one-time experience. she has only used llms a few times if you’re being generous. probably years ago, unaware of recent advancements in tooling and model capabilities.

“Ah!” the Hacker News commenters cry. “But have you tried it?” […] But yes, thanks: I was once offered this challenge when faced with a Ren’Py problem, so I grit my teeth and posed my question to some LLM. It confidently listed several related formatting tags that would solve my problem.

One teeny tiny issue: those tags did not and had never existed. I typed this additional context into the computer, and it generated a profuse apology followed by a different set of fictional tags. That was the end of that grand experiment.

i, as someone who has only used react once, can bullshit an article titled “why react is cancer and ruined webdev forever”, using points i don’t understand parroted from reddit and by asking chatgpt to write it. would you get mad at me for that article? would you waste time refuting boomer rant slop written by someone who knows nothing about the subject? would you debate a brick wall?

granted, a chatgpt generated slop wouldn’t have the passion and entertainment value as human slop, but you get the point.