The SWE people I know at SW companies now heavily using these agents complain to me how their workday is nothing but code-reviews of the agents output and tedious prompting to prod it back into line; they say they don’t get to actually write code until they get home to work on their personal projects.

3 years ago I never would have believed this capability was possible; I’ve since adjusted my expectations to now assume that in another 3 years the models/agents will have improved enough to reduce the amount of code-review required, leaving us with precious little else to do for our shareholders, or the opposite: they don’t improve and we’re stuck doing thankless PR reviews until the end.

Please tell me where and how in this future I’m supposed to find satisfaction and pride in my work when what-gets-produced isn’t my own work anymore?

This is such a common problem with highly technical managers because they can't seem to understand how to change focus or scope and do their jobs better. Instead they fall back on trying to ship features thinking that this is productive and to pat themselves on the back for staying technical.

Isn't that a good thing?

Honestly, I struggle to think about what has actually changed between Office 2013 and Office 2024 (and their Office 365 equivalents); I know the LAMBDA function was a big deal, but they made the UI objectively worse by wasting screen-space with ever-increasingly phatter non-touch UI elements; and the Python announcement was huge... before deflating like a popped party balloon when we learned how horribly compromised it was.

...but other than that, Excel remains exactly as frustrating to use for even simple tasks - like parsing a date string - today just as it was 15 years ago[1].

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4896116/parsing-an-iso86...

Real-talk: those consultants are absolutely essential - and are the unsung heroes of so many "organic" database projects that would have gotten started as an Excel spreadsheet on a nontechnical middle-manager's workgroup-networked desktop, which grew over time into a dBase file, then MSAccess/JET, then MSDE or MSSQL Express if they (think) they knew what they're doing, and then if it's the mid-2000s then maybe it'll be moved onto dedicated on-prem Oracle or MSSQL box - but still an RDBMS; I remember in 2014 all the talk was about moving data out of on-prem RDBMS siloes and onto Cloud(TM)-y OLAP clusters (trying to hide the fact they're running stock Postgres) which acted as a source for a Hadoop cluster - all to produce dashboards and visualizations made with the $100k Tableau license your company purchased after their sales guys showed your org's procurement people a good time in Cancun.

None of the evolution and progress described above could have happened if not for the awful DB designs in that initial Access DB - the anti-patterns would be carried through the DB whenever it ascended to the next tier of serious-business-ness, and each and every design-decision made out of innocent ignorance gets gradually massaged-out of the model by the regular and recurring visits by DBA consultants - because (and goddamnit it's true): a depressingly tiny proportion of software people (let alone computer-people) know anything about DB design+theory - nor all the vendor-specific gotchas.

What I still don't understand is how in 2026 - after 30 years of scolding beginners online - that we've successfully gotten greenhorn software-dev people to move away from VBA/VB6's dead-end, PHP's unintentional fractal of bad design, and MySQL's meh-ness - and onto sane and capable platforms like TypeScript, Node, and Postgres - all good stuff; and yet on my home-turf on StackOverflow, I still see people writing SQL-92 style JOINs and CREATE TABLE statements covered in more backticks than my late grandmother's labrador. I honestly have no idea where/when/how all those people somehow learned SQL-92's obsolete JOIN syntax today.

So in conclusion: the evidence suggests that not enough people today truly understand databases well-enough to render expensive DBA consultants irrelevant.

I share your ideal, but there exists a slight problem: no RDBMS I'm aware of really facilitates 6NF or DKNF (or even Codd's full relational concept; or newfound essentials like relational-division, and so on...).

There are also genuine ergonomic issues to contend with: pretty-much every RDBMS design and/or administration tool I've used in the past 20 years (SSMS, SSDT, DBeaver, MSAccess (lol), phpMyAdmin, etc) will present the database as a long, flat list of tables - often only in alphabetical order (if you're lucky, the tooling might let you group the tables into logical subfolders based on some kind of 2-part name scheme baked into the RDBMS (e.g. "schemas" in MSSQL).

...which starts being counterproductive when 6NF means you have a large number of tables that absolutely need to exist - but aren't really that significant alone by themselves; but they always need to remain accessible to the user of the tool (so they can't be completely hidden). So you'll turn to the Diagramming feature in your DB GUI, which gives you a broader 2D view of your DB where you can proximally group related objects together - instead of endlessly scrolling a long alphabetical list; and you can actually see FKs represented by physical connections which aids intuitive groking when you're mentally onboarding onto a huge, legacy production DB design.

...but DB diagrams are just too slow to load (as the tooling needs to read the entire DB's schema, design; all objects first before it can give you a useful view of everything - it's just so incredibly grating; whereas that alphabetical list loads instantly.

Sorry I'm just rambling now but anyway, my point is, 6NF is great, but our tooling sucks, and the RDBMS they connect to suck even more (e.g. SQL-92 defined the 4 main CONSTRAINT types seen in practically all RDBMS today (CHECK, FOREIGN KEY, UNIQUE, and DEFAULT); over 30 years later we still have the same anaemic set of primitive constraints; only Postgres went further (with its `EXCEPT` constraint). As of 2026, and almost 40 years since it was defined, no RDBMS supports ASSERTION constraints; wither DOMAIN constraints and a unified type-system that elegantly mediates between named scalars, relations (unordered sets of tuples), queries, and DOMAINs and the rest.

...this situation is maddening to me because so many data-modelling problems exist _because_ of how unevolved our RDBMS are.

What would your ideal RDBMS / tooling look like, that facilitates 6nf effectively? Do you think it's more a limitation of the query/storage engine, or the query language (SQL), or the user interface? Do you think founding on Datalog (or similar), which kinda lends itself to "narrow" relations, instead of SQL which kinda lends itself to "wide" relations, would help here?

(I ask as one of my personal hobby-horses is trying to design better query languages and tooling, and 6nf/datalog maintains a kinda special place in my heart)

https://dbeaver.com/docs/dbeaver/ER-Diagrams/

[1] At least, I hope it's a bug.

Anyways, the end result has been I don't use reddit at all on the phone, so kind of ended up being good for me anyways.

On my phone? Yes, absolutely, impossible to hit the links correctly even if I zoom in. Both old reddit and HN is "Fully functional" on desktop, agree, but far cry from "fully functional" on my arguably tiny iPhone.

it's dead, per official comment from reddit.

You and I are very different Reddit users. I don't think I've even seen r/all for at least a decade. I exclusively view Reddit via the old.reddit.com URL in desktop mode with the Reddit Enhancement Suite add-on + uBO + a custom CSS theme. I'm automatically redirected to my 'Subscribed' page showing only the dozen or so niche subreddits I care about, none of which have more than 100k subscribers (most are under 25k). It's glorious... like a time machine to before Reddit enshittified itself and spammers, astro-turfers, shills and influencers took over.

Safari iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. The Back button should be grayed out and isn’t, and clicking it closes the tab. (???)

Chrome iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. Back button correctly grayed out as the tab has nowhere to go back to.