felix-the-cat

“Do you expect me to code?”

“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to prompt!”

You’d think that, right, but even cities that welcome businesses are having a hard time. Even Dallas is at like 30% empty office space.

I’m sure the factors are different for every city but I think remote work and companies preferring to build campuses outside of major cities is a big driver.

I totally agree on the healthcare thing, a few years ago I was working as an independent contractor and my health insurance premiums were almost $25k a year, for a plan with a $6.5k deductible. It’s bananas if you need to buy private health insurance.

I'm still in the prompt response loop of learning how to be more effective with it, but I've found that what works for me is to approach a project the same way I would if I was writing code by hand. I'll decompose the project into small discreet units of work and slowly build my way up, I find it makes less mistakes using that approach. I built a systems monitoring platform I had been wanting for a long time over the course of days instead of weeks or months, and I was really impressed with Claude's output.

Then I thought it would be fun to be able to monitor the status of all my workflows as buttons on my Stream Deck XL, and Claude was able to build the plugin with almost no issues at all. It's hilarious how much fun it is.

> I read somewhere that almost every very successful person’s results can be attributed to 2-3 tricks that they consistently apply to great effect.

This entirely. I've been CTO at a handful of startups, most recently one that sold for a very large sum of money — and the successful ones are almost always led by people who keep things dirt simple: focus on the customer, execute quickly, communicate clearly, keep costs low, and keep the technology simple. That's basically it. Just a few simple things, applied relentlessly.

The ones that failed were always the total opposite — not listening to their customers, poor communication across the org, blowing their runway on "we need Google-scale infrastructure," switching languages or frameworks halfway through the project, and so on.

It was more like some kind of credit thing, not tokens.

Within a few weeks of telling people at our company that if they don’t use AI they will be replaced by someone who does, they just announced that their allocation with ChatGPT has reset and are now panicking as they blew through their million token allocation for this month in under six hours - you can’t make this shit up.

Not to mention all the great deals on expresso machines, lmao.

I miss the whole dot-com boom era - that was the best. I was working in Austin at the time and would drive to work down a road that was lined with all the latest dot-com goodness like DrKoop.com, Living.com, et al. And who can forget reading f*ckdcompany.com every morning and marveling over the latest startups rumored to be hitting the skids.

I'm curious how they would know - can't someone just tell Claude not to use excessive comments and write code that matches the style and conventions of the codebase it's being used against?

I'm in that boat - my current employer recently announced that they are tracking AI usage across the company and if you're not using enough AI you will be "replaced by someone who does".

The weirdest insects I've seen in real life are these ones called Burying Beetles - they have chemoreceptors that allow them to detect the odor of a dead mouse from as far away as two miles. Then a male and female fly to it, dig a big hole, strip all the fur off of it to line the hole, then drag it down in there and raise their young together. They are also unusual in that outside of bees and ants, very few insects raise their young together from infancy to adulthood.