protos

Signed-off-by: Xe Iaso <me@xeiaso.net>

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+---
+title: Protos
+date: 2023-03-29
+tags:
+ - ai
+ - fiction
+---
+
+<xeblog-conv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">On July 13, 2020, I was
+inspired to write out the outline for a short science fiction / horror
+story about a generative AI being able to write entire features in
+code and how the market reacted to that. I recently rediscovered it
+and I feel that now is the time to write it for real.<br /><br />This
+is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and
+incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any
+resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is
+purely coincidental.</xeblog-conv>
+
+One day, Jeff stretched at his desk while he was puzzling out the
+problem his product manager had thrust upon him. It was an emergency,
+as usual. The login form had the wrong color at the wrong place, and
+it was causing people to look at the login form then run away in
+terror.
+
+<xeblog-hero ai="Anything V3" file="jeff-protos" prompt="1guy, laptop, open office"></xeblog-hero>
+
+Or something like that, they just wanted the position of the login
+button changed so it was under the password box instead of next to it.
+That should be easy, right?
+
+No. That login form was created by Palima, the person that Jeff had
+signed off on hiring [in the last
+episode](https://xeiaso.net/blog/sleeping-the-technical-interview). Ae
+was absolute force of nature that had single-handedly written half of
+the missing code in the monolith, and wrote code that was an absolute
+work of art, but was absolutely impenetrable to anyone trying to
+modify it. As always, Palima was busy doing god-knows-what and
+couldn't help with this task that ae felt was beneath aer.
+
+Hiring more people to help with this? Impossible. Headcount was hard
+to come by due to the recent fad of pointless layoffs. Even E100, the
+former bastion of refusing to lay anyone off finally succumbed to the
+investor class pressure to "cut costs". Techaro management had
+followed suit. So he was left with this problem.
+
+While Jeff was puzzling through the dense block of tokens, he took a
+look at his favorite news aggregator: Hacker Moose. While scrolling
+through the links, he saw something called "Protos". It claimed to be
+a tool that he could install in BS Code and then it could rewrite code
+to his needs.
+
+Jeff was skeptical. _This looks too easy_, he thought to himself. But,
+it had a free trial. He hit "install" and then the commands were
+available. He pointed it at a personal file he used to learn Palima's
+HypeScript style, then asked it to refactor a function to take an
+attribute set instead of normal arguments. Kinda like this:
+
+```javascript
+const fooBar = (bar: number, baz: number) => {
+  return bar + baz;
+};
+```
+
+To something like this:
+
+```javascript
+interface fooBarArgs {
+  bar: string;
+  baz: string;
+}
+
+const fooBar = ({bar, baz}) => {
+  return bar + baz;
+};
+```
+
+And then it automatically fixed the rest of the code to match that.
+Protos was the real deal. Jeff stopped in his tracks and really looked
+at what was going on. He just did something that he'd spent hours
+doing manually in seconds.
+
+Jeff immediately pointed Protos at the login form issue, described the
+change to make, and it started auto-completing the solution. All of
+the things that Jeff had struggled on for months started to fade away
+and the solution basically wrote itself.
+
+Jeff was flabbergasted. Just in time for his calendar to fire a
+reminder that his standup meeting was about to start. He walked over
+to the lunch area and asked the barista to make him his usual: a
+double shot latte a-le sirop d'érable. With his cup in hand, he walked
+over to where his team was standing and started small talk.
+
+Palima was present in the office today, she had her keyboard mounted
+to her hips and was obviously writing into some smart glasses of some
+kind. Jeff waved to aer and ae looked up and yawned. "'morning"
+
+"Good afternoon Palima, what're you working on today?"
+
+"Fixing the database. There were problems. It's all better now."
+
+Jeff shuddered at the idea of what the "fix" entailed, but time hit
+and the manager Ariel spoke up: "Good afternoon everyone! What are you
+working on, and what did you get done? I've got a lot of 1:1 meetings
+with many wonderful people today, but I'm happy with our progress in
+the sprint. Palima, you go next."
+
+"There was an issue with corrupt data being written to the database
+due to an off-by-one error in encoding JSON. I fixed it, and all the
+data. We don't have to worry, and this fixes the whyOS app without
+having to wait for an update to be rejected. Jeff, how're you doing?"
+
+Jeff took a moment to process that and cleared his throat. "I figured
+out what was wrong with the login form, and I have a PR open for
+review. Today I'm gonna refactor that code so it's less of a nightmare
+to deal with in the future."
+
+The standup meeting continued, and nothing of note was really brought
+up. Jeff walked back to his desk and his manager stopped him on the
+way back.
+
+"Hey, you really got it done? I thought you estimated a whole week for
+that."
+
+"I figured it out, estimates are just estimates. This code is really
+complicated."
+
+Ariel seemed to accept that and started to walk back to his desk.
+"Congrats though, I've got some more things on the backlog if you want
+to pick up a few more tickets."
+
+Jeff nodded and walked to his desk. The OurWork that Techaro rented
+was bubbling with activity like it usually did around lunchtime, but
+Jeff wasn't hungry today. He was curious.
+
+He made it back to his laptop and opened up BS Code again. The Protos
+extension had installed a button in the lower right hand of the
+screen. It was pulsing slightly, beckoning his attention.
+
+He opened up one of the tickets Ariel had talked about and found the
+bit of code. He described the problem and the changes that needed to
+be made to Protos, and the logo spun around a bit, then the changes
+wrote themselves. This was the real deal.
+
+Jeff suddenly became terrified when he realized the power of this
+technology. He had to be careful with this. He couldn't tell anyone
+about this and went over to flag the story on Hacker Moose as spam.
+
+This could put him out of a job. He was shaking at his desk when
+Palima walked over and clicked happily. Jeff looked over at aer and
+thought he saw something funny but stopped thinking about it. "What's
+up?"
+
+"Your code change was perfect. It's approved. Feel free to deploy it
+when you're ready."
+
+Jeff nodded and thanked Palima, then put on his noise-cancelling
+headphones and hit the merge button. The login form was deployed,
+peace was brought to the land and product was finally happy for about
+20 minutes.
+
+Protos had claimed its first victim. Jeff was supercharged by Protos.
+It was almost so easy that it wasn't fun. Jeff worked on a few tickets
+and decided to keep the branches locally so he could release one or
+two changes per day. Just enough to look like he was working, not
+enough that it would look suspicious.
+
+Ariel was suspicious though. He also read Hacker Moose and was
+skeptical that Jeff could have figured out Palima's code so quickly.
+He was a bit of a developer himself, so he took a look at one of the
+backlog tickets and fired up Protos to implement a fix.
+
+It took seconds.
+
+Ariel put it up for code review and Jeff was on alert instantly. He
+didn't know what to do.
+
+Ariel shrugged and continued over to his meeting with the product
+team. He wanted to show them this neat tool he had found.
+
+The product team was shocked by this discovery. If the product team
+could just implement things themselves, they wouldn't need any
+developers at all! Product started using Protos and was able to submit
+PRs for code review. Jeff was mortified when he saw this get brought
+up in a meeting.
+
+Eventually, the product team managed to replace everyone but Palima
+and Jeff on the developer team with Protos. Features kept coming
+faster and faster, and they were left to pilot a ship that was growing
+more and more complicated without any way to stop it.
+
+Then Techaro acquired Protos and made it a proprietary internal tool.
+
+Techaro was unstoppable, sending people to Mars, finally solving the
+secret to self-driving cars, and eventually curing cancer. All without
+paying more than 150 developers world-wide to review the mad
+hallucinations of a machine. They were taking over the world,
+disrupting the government industry, and then
+
+---
+
+Jeff woke up at his desk. He must have dozed off. The calendar
+reminder popped up on his screen, reminding him of his standup. The
+login form wasn't fixed yet. Hacker Moose didn't have a product named
+Protos on the frontpage. The domain he remembered from his dream
+didn't resolve.
+
+Jeff sleepily walked over to his standup and grabbed a coffee. The
+standup was uneventful but at the end Palima spoke up. Ae said "By the
+way, has anyone tried using ChatGPT yet? It's pretty cool, and it can
+write code for you. You just have to describe what you want."
+
+Jeff screamed.