GenAI hot takes and bad use cases (Practical AI #304)

Vibe coding is the new vibe, AI engineers are all taking about MCP, Tom Usher wants you to kill your algorithmic feeds, Curiositry shares his troubleshooting expertise, Nikola Ðuza thinks we should keep blogging for the LLMs & James Stanier answers the question, should managers still code?

Our award-winning JS Party game show is back with a new name, a new channel, and the same ol' survey-response-guessing fun! The JS Party crew join us to see who knows y'all best. Survey says!

Antirez has returned to Redis! Yes, Salvatore Sanfilippo (aka Antirez), the creator of Redis has returned to Redis and he joined us to share the backstory on Redis, what's going on with the tech and the company, the possible (likely) move back to open source via the AGPL license, the new possibilities of AI and vector embeddings in Redis, and some good 'ol LLM inference discussions.

Allen Pike on the JavaScript ecosystem after a decade away, Lars Wirzenius was there at the birth of Linux, Piotr Migdał archives things in Markdown, Jacob Stopak is gamifying Git with Devlands & Juan Diego Rodríguez runs down how CSS functions (will) work.

It's Kaizen 18! Can you believe it? We discuss the recent Fly.io outage, some little features we've added since our last Kaizen, our new video-first production, and of course, catch up on all things Pipely! Oh, and Gerhard surprises us (once again). BAM!

Anurag Goel, Founder/CEO of Render, joins Adam to discuss what they're doing to solve cloud problems for application developers. They just raised $80M they don't even need and they're poised to solve boring problems like object storage, and less boring things like building for the AI era.

Kane Narraway thinks through the radical change AI tools have brought to the technical interview process, Rhys Kentish built an app that makes him touch grass, Microsoft announced their progress on quantum computing, Chris Horsley learns about software estimations by yak shaving a washing machine install & Andreas Gohr built StumbleUpon for the IndieWeb.

It seems like all we hear about are the great use cases for GenAI, but where should you NOT be using the technology? On this episode Chris and Daniel share their hot takes and bad use cases. Some may surprise you!

Jerod and Adam use Chris Kiehl's post on development topics he's changed his mind on (over the last 10 years) as a proxy for discussion on dev things they HAVE and HAVE NOT changed their minds on.

For the past year, David Crawshaw has intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming, in order to learn about them. He now regularly use LLMs while working and considers their benefits a net-positive on his productivity. David wrote down his experience, which we found both practical and insightful. Hopefully you will too!