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Pure and Impure Software Engineering


Why do solo game developers tend to get into fights with big tech engineers? Why do high-profile external hires to large companies often fizzle out? Why is AI…

I think it’s clear that Casey was right about the technical matter - as a competent game engine programmer, he understood the performance characteristics of the problem well enough to point out that Windows Terminal was doing it inefficiently. For what it’s worth, I think that’s not actually an unreasonable timeline for a team that had its own work to do and had to actually implement the feature (the GitHub comments have some fun details about supporting multi-glyph code points). Pure engineers - like the Twitter game devs in the previous section - are typically dismissive, saying that LLMs produce trash code and just aren’t useful for real work.

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