BRINE

A computer science professor's open letter to students regarding moral boundaries in an industry increasingly driven by profit and automation. The thread features high-quality, nuanced debate on whether ethical perfection is a luxury of the privileged or a necessary survival strategy for one's long-term professional identity.

I recently attended a talk where one of the presenters made some pretty…*astonishing* claims about what they had achieved by the pure, uncut power of vibe coding. Difficult engineering problems solved, backlogs cleared. Rewrites that would have aken a year or more in the beforetimes, now whipped out in a few short weeks of prompting.

I gave up blogging a long time ago (apart from an occasional thing about ArduPilot), I tend to just write code and hope people find it useful, so it feels a bit odd to be writing this, but given the volume of rage posts I’ve been on the receiving end of lately I thought maybe I should post something. Like many developers of open source packages I’ve been hit by a flood of security reports lately in my role as the rsync maintainer.