wulfstan

I’ve just started a new job and my first month has been coming to terms with a vibe coded codebase. Nobody really understands it. I think that people who have the skills to really know what is there and how it all fits together will be the most valuable workers in future.

My ex business partner said “AI won’t take your job, but the person who uses it will”. I don’t agree. The person who isn’t reliant on AI is the one you should really be afraid of.

I am currently wrestling a vibe-coded codebase into a shippable state and we should call these tools out for what they actually are - technical debt generators.

100% with you. I start a new job on Monday and I intend to keep building great young engineers who love their craft and their community. Enough of this vampiric unethical horse manure.

Extremely useful information - unfortunately I just assumed this didn't apply to me because I am in the UK and not the EU. Another mistake, though given it's not huge amounts of money I will chalk it up to experience.

Hopefully someone else will benefit from this helpful advice.

I've just shifted my SWE infrastructure from AWS to Hetzner (literally in the last month). My current analysis looks like it will be about 15-20% of the cost - £240 vs 40-50 euros.

Expect a significant exit expense, though, especially if you are shifting large volumes of S3 data. That's been our biggest expense. I've moved this to Wasabi at about 8 euros a month (vs about $70-80 a month on S3), but I've paid transit fees of about $180 - and it was more expensive because I used DataSync.

Retrospectively, I should have just DIYed the transfer, but maybe others can benefit from my error...

I think this is partly true. Raising the necessary funds, hiring enough of the right people and become sufficiently visible to get "mindshare" are all important factors in building a successful business. It is a lot harder to do these things if your ideology is out of step with what is considered mainstream.

It's not uncommon. My cousin sent out a Christmas card announcing her divorce - I think it stops a lot of 1-1 conversations with people which can be quite draining when you're already pretty raw.

These are all good arguments. Then do the opposite and block S3 access from VPCs by default. That would violate none of those.

“We have no idea what your intent is, so we’ll default to routing AWS-AWS traffic expensively” is way, way worse than forcing users to be explicit about their intent.

Minimal is a laudable goal - but if a footgun is the result then you violate the principle of least surprise.

I rather suspect the problem with issues like this is that they mainly catch the less experienced, who aren’t an AWS priority because they aren’t where the Big Money is.

Yes, this. You lock it into Terraform or some equivalent.

And ok, this is a mistake you will probably only make once - I know, because I too have made it on a much smaller scale, and thankfully in a cost-insensitive customer's account - but surely if you're an infrastructure provider you want to try to ensure that you are vigilantly removing footguns.

Right, I can appreciate that argument - but then the right thing to do is to block S3 access from AWS VPCs until you have explicitly confirmed that you want to pay the big $$$$ to do so, or turn on the VPC endpoint.

A parallel to this is how SES handles permission to send emails. There are checks and hoops to jump through to ensure you can't send out spam. But somehow, letting DevOps folk shoot themselves in the foot (credit card) is ok.

What has been done is the monetary equivalent of "fail unsafe" => "succeed expensively"

OPs experience working their way up the keyboard stack is very similar to my own. I settled on the Dygma Raise. I now own one of the Raise and Raise 2.

Yes, they are a lot of money. I don’t have time to game any more, and they clearly focus mainly on gamers. But if you’re a software / IT person your wrists are your livelihood, so for goodness sakes invest in them. There is no silver bullet and you will probably have to try a number of possible solutions if you suffer from wrist and forearm pain when working, but do not ignore it and take your workplace ergonomics seriously.

For younger engineers, learn to minimise your “travel” and learning editor shortcuts, terminal shortcuts and similar so that you can be smoothly productive with constantly shifting from mouse to keyboard and back again. And take regular breaks! Get up and walk around. If you are WFH get out for walk at lunch.

In general, care for your body so that you may write code into your 80s.

Such a relief! But it drives my wife completely crazy.

By narrow program of study I don’t mean “breadth within the discipline” I mean “credit for work outside the discipline”. My son is studying maths but has taken two semesters of biblical Greek, previously did a music subject and this term is doing Hebrew. Can’t do that at Oxbridge.