olzhasar

While that might be true, the more one equips LLMs for building the less one will be capable of keeping LLMs “on a shorter leash with focused goals” in the long run

A typical comment on Hackernews nowadays:

I used to think that there's a a room for better C -> Some unrelated complains about Rust and Go -> C has footguns, but they don't matter that much because I choose to not write my code myself anymore -> Therefore there's no room for better C.

Quit about a month ago after working at my last place for two years. It was a decent job before the agent psychosis became widespread, from that moment everyone in the company went insane and the pressure to use "advanced agentic engineering" became unbearable. Also, most engineers in the company supported and were enthusiastic about that trend, so I was in a minority.

I don't have much savings on me, but I'd rather go frugal and downshift than be producing slop for a living.

An online product that was brought into existence by processing all the open source software in the world and makes money by selling the resulting knowledge base, should be accessible free of charge by the producers of that open source software.

I was very excited about Rust prior to the LLM-era. I never managed to dive deep into it due to the lack of time, but was really planning to.

Nowadays when everyone and their dog are either vibe-coding with Rust or constantly shouting about it's superiority, I've lost any interest in the language. I'm learning Zig.

Defined structure does not constitute quality. A commit message can be loosely structured, but be very insightful and good at communicating the nature of the change. On the flip side, one can make a very structured but confusing or non-informative commit message. I generally tend to agree with the author, conventional commits do not solve the core issue of the poor commit messages problem.

The same thing happens to me all the time. One of the most annoying things on Apple Silicon for me as a long time Linux enthusiast.

- Write meaningful commit messages

- Make systems as observable as possible. Stuff will break, the easier it is to identify the cause, the better. Logging things at different program flow points helps immensely.

- Question every decision in the codebase you are working on, but thoroughly weigh any refactoring attempts

- Don’t fall in love with own code

- Prefer readability over performance (in most cases)

- Don’t follow trends blindly. More than likely your boring stack is the best way to go

- Allow room to recover from a malformed system state

- Don’t abstract prematurely. If you struggle with designing your abstractions, you are probably good with concrete case(s) for now

Yeah, your observation is correct, I was referring to a so-called generative AI or LLMs. I should’ve phrased that properly.

I transitioned to being a software engineer after 8 years in investment banking. Some people mention capitalizing on existing skillset and trying to find opportunities on your skills intersection. While this is certainly an attractive strategy, imo this only works if you still love at least some parts of your existing career.

In my case, I absolutely hated investment banking and this career and my Finance degree were wrong choices that I just didn’t want to admit to myself.

I started thinking what I used to enjoy doing before university and I realized that I always loved computers and even programmed a good amount of Visual Basic and Pascal back in days.

As for the transitioning process, I took the radical approach. I first combined learning to code (again) with my job but it was very difficult. So I saved 6 month living expenses, quit my job and locked myself in my apartment for studying. Ran out of funds before getting enough knowledge to land an actual job. Took side hustles from my previous career for about 2 years to continue learning. Eventually managed to land a job paying 25% of my past salary. But once I got into the industry, I grew rather quickly because of how motivated I was compared to my previous career.

The moral of the story is, if you feel like there’s something that is much better suited to your personality, it’s okay to start from scratch. It will be painful for sure, but the pain is temporary compared to a lifelong feeling of being miserable on a wrong path.