Home to my thoughts
Hi, I'm Ibrahim Diallo. I write code and play with computers. Now let me tell you a story...
Deep dives into engineering, philosophy, and life.
I can only imagine what it's like learning the skill of programming in this day and age. What does an average college class look like? What is the CS professor teaching? And students, how do you reconcile what you are learning vs the current job market?
I didn't watch Star Wars when it was released. I wasn't even born. By the time we popped the cassette tape in the VCR, it was at least 15 years old. But I liked the movie all the same. It was not my favorite film by any means, but it was memorable. The first time you see Darth Vader appear on screen, you know this villain is not going to be easy to defeat. "Villain" because no one needs to tell you who the good guys and bad guys are in this movie. The visuals, the voices, the music, everything tells you that Darth Vader and the Empire are up to no good.
In my first interview for a developer position, I shared a link to my personal project with the interviewer. It was a website for learning how to program. I created it from the ground up. I built the PHP app, designed the database schema, made a nice design to tie it all together. I wrote down my process, and it became the first tutorial on the site. Then I collected tutorials from all over the web and displayed them on my website, which acted as a portal.
On one hand, I know a developer producing 30,000 lines of code a month. On the other, I know a developer who says AI is stupid. Each swears by their stance and has evidence to back it up. One has a working product and the other has a broken one.
I'm at home, sitting on the kitchen table. I just took my boys to school and I'm about to start my work. I'm writing this message directly to you. And you are reading it. Hello!
Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were designed as universal constraints for any thinking machine powerful enough to harm us:
Last week, a tweet went viral showing a guy claiming that a Cursor/Claude agent [deleted his company's production database](https://x.com/lifeof_jer/status/2048103471019434248). We watched from the sidelines as he tried to get a confession from the agent: "Why did you delete it when you were told never to perform this action?" Then he tried to parse the answer to either learn from his mistake or warn us about the dangers of AI agents.