If you can possibly believe it, there are millions of programmers who have never and will never touch <your favorite tool>

Python, cmake, bash, perl, every conceivable tool or language, there's millions of people in the industry who will never touch them.

This might be a wild concept, so make sure you're sitting down: the field of software engineering is unfathomably larger than your personal, extremely narrow, viewpoint.

The correct answer is far too often the most boring answer.

But yeah, this is basically it. We could detect the signal, but they simply aren't emitting a signal in the right direction for us to detect.

In my career, I've had to write many code generation tools for many different reasons. Sometimes it's expanding C# generic boilerplate to cover between 1 and N generic parameters. Sometimes I'm porting code between languages. Sometimes it's a loop unroller or something more esoteric.

If I had to describe the way I feel about these tools, well, I don't. They're tools. They exist, briefly, to perform a function and then ascend to whatever plane lost and forgotten programs go to when they leave your hard drive.

I feel exactly the same way about AI agents. It's a tool. I put text in, computering happens, and code comes out. The amount of effort and complexity involved is different, but fundamentally I view it as the same boring codegen we've been doing for decades.

I highly suspect that because I treat AI agents this way, I get actually good, well-engineered results. I've seen extremely low rates of bad code, inappropriate solutions, or the general slop we see in vibecoded projects. I put in a great deal of engineering effort up front, and I get engineering out.

That some people find this loop addictive is... incredibly disturbing. I only foresee very bad things coming from this.

So you can only get good results if you engage with agents with apathy and skepticism? Can't you enjoy the dev loop and also care about code quality you submit upstream?

My coding refinement sessions with codex has been just as much interesting as the implementation sessions. I get to go over the code with the agent, learn a lot of interesting techniques along the way, and we end up with nice tame code.

I think that's a clear and unambiguous point in favor of the argument. There are so many hellishly complex things in C++ that the community can't settle on even a small subset to be the worst contender.

Half Life 3 rules apply. Every time someone complains about complexity in C++, the committee adds a new overly complex feature. It remains a problem because complexity keeps getting shoveled on top of the already complex language.

You'd be shocked to find out how old and weak the CPU in your current router is. Typically they're on par with low end desktop CPUs from 10-15 years ago.

Except actual routers don't handle the traffic on the CPU, they have dedicated hardware to actually handle the packets. The CPU basically runs the OS, configures the hardware router, and does housekeeping tasks (e.g. ARP or FDB expirations, NAT cleanup, etc). The only packets that ever reach it are "trap to CPU" situations that don't require acceleration as those are rare or expensive to implement in hardware (e.g. better suited to a CPU). Those usually include management protocols (ICMP, ARP, NDP, STP, etc) or packets with unknown destination (e.g. the first packet to an IP that requires ARP resolution).

That's how you can have multi-Gbps on a router with a 200MHz MIPS CPU. Or Tbps on a router with a quad-core Xeon.

I assume the real router OS is extremely neutered to basically only route traffic and filter inbound with everything else being removed? But yeah I can definitely see that.

What happens if one node on your network is downloading at 1Gbit and another is uploading at 1Gbit?

Both get 500Mbit.

Bottleneck.

> The actual cases would need to be quite contrived...

As someone who works a programming job from home, I can tell you that the cases are not at all contrived.

I've also heard from folks who have lots of roommates (whether or not those roommates are their swarm of children) that heavy simultaneous upload and download traffic is very common.

You can get away with a router that has a single physical port. It's generally just easier and better to have more than one physical port... and even 10gbit-capable ethernet ports are pretty damn cheap. (I can get two 10gbit ports for about the same price as two 1gbit ports... ~30 USD.)

Which of your devices weren't made in China?

Thus defeating the purpose of a custom "rm"