Peace of mind. We have a light that lights up red when a door is open. At the end of the night we get an announcement “all doors closed” - last night I got an announcement telling me one door was open - I went there and sure enough: the magnet side of the sensor had fallen off, door was closed.

some girl who shares a huge collection of games that don’t require connectivity

Dunno her, https://www.mensxp.com/technology/gaming/171080-best-offline-games-without-internet.html

I had about a dozen WeMo devices controlling various stuff around the house, they just accumulated over the years. About a year ago, I “got serious” and ripped out all the cloud connected stuff and setup a Zigbee based Home Assistant system. It’s about 5x more capable than the old hodge podge of cloud devices, much lower lag, much better management capabilities, and when the internet connection goes down, it still works. The cloud devices would take long coffee breaks about twice a year.

Dream on, meanwhile the world will be buying $8 cloud connected “smart switches” because they’re the cheapest, easiest to install things out there and even grandma is able to say “hey Alexa, turn on the coffee maker” and make it work.

Resist the temptation, hundreds of hours will be lost down that rabbithole after you start.

Though, it is kinda cool stuff, when it’s working.

Kodi is pretty reliable…

I sense my IT career is over.

The IT grunt work is going to get 10x easier (need 1/10th the head count for grunt work).

If you do more than grunt work, as most “computer” people actually do, your job should be safe from AI for a while.

Ideally, there are requirements before anything, and some TDD types argue that the tests should come before the code as well.

Ideally, the customer is well represented during requirements development - ideally, not by the code developer.

Ideally, the code developer is not the same person that develops the unit tests.

Ideally, someone other than the test developer reviews the tests to assure that the tests do in-fact provide requirements coverage.

Ideally, the modules that come together to make the system function have similarly tight requirements and unit-tests and reviews, and the whole thing runs CI/CD to notify developers of any regressions/bugs within minutes of code check in.

In reality, some portion of that process (often, most of it) is short-cut for one or many reasons. Replacing the missing bits with AI is better than not having them at all.