Now is the best time to be a duct tape engineer

https://derwiki.medium.com/now-is-the-best-time-to-be-a-duct-tape-engineer-eefc1d141c23

by derwiki • 2 months ago

77 89 2 months ago

derwiki.medium.com

cevn• 2 months ago

I didn’t build Twilio. I didn’t build the Realtime API. I didn’t build Claude Code or MCP.

I didn't write a blog post.

RealityVoid• 2 months ago

Thank you, this quip really cracked me up. :))

boomlinde• 2 months ago

That time in the car could have been spent thinking of something worthwhile enough to write about.

cloche3• 2 months ago

Most innovation is just connecting the works of others together with a touch of individual creativity.

derwiki5• 2 months ago

Mea culpa. But I _did_ record a video!

infogulch4• 2 months ago

I guess you can try again when you post the video.

satvikpendem3• 2 months ago

So, you knowingly submitted AI generated content to HN? No wonder it's flagged.

zahlman• 2 months ago

The best time to solve personal problems with those techniques, perhaps. That is not the same as (and might be opposed to) the best time to seek employment or go into business using those techniques; there isn't going to be much of a market for things that your (employer's) potential customers could trivially do themselves.

Daishiman2• 2 months ago

It is never sufficiently trivial if you don't have the technical know-how or the ability to do it in a time-efficient manner.

Otek• 2 months ago

What I wanted was to say “hey Siri, call Claw Phone” and have the audio system in my Toyota become an IDE. So I build it.

Or just focus on driving? Why we are doing it to ourselves? It seems so toxic to fill every possible little moment with… productivity? Is it even productive?

This comment is too emotional but i just felt so sad while reading this

knollimar• 2 months ago

Driving is a good time to decompress or hammock based engineer imo

Avicebron• 2 months ago

Being a hammock-deployed engineer is really the career goal.

singpolyma3• 2 months ago

I assumed they meant the 15 minutes waiting in between kind of slots. Not... Actually while driving I hope

godelski• 2 months ago

I wonder if these people just need to talk.

I wonder if these people are just avoiding thinking about the tough things in their lives.

I wonder if these people are just scared of being human, so reaching for any distraction they can get.

I've tried to stop taking my phone with me when I go to the bathroom. When I shower. When I go to bed. Because I think we all have these same addictions. There's things that suck in life. But maybe if we put our phones down we can work together to solve these things.

- Written on godelski's iPhone while pooping

pavel_lishin• 2 months ago

I do know a lot of people who love to talk. I don't think it's a character flaw. It's certainly not what I want, and I would die if I had to talk all day, but it's just the way they prefer to communicate. Same way that some people are introverts and some are extroverts, some people like reading paper books and some people like audiobooks.

jetbalsa• 2 months ago

I have not very well treated AuADHD and being alone with my thoughts very long is generally not very productive, At least Coding LLMs have helped me get things I wouldn't of had the attention span to make in the past come to life. and a good bit of vibe coding is just yelling at the LLM that what its doing sounds good on paper so keep going, please do the needful, make no mistakes :V

doright• 2 months ago

The author says he has two kids, which would likely constrain what he is able to accomplish in his free time.

Children are financially dependent on the parents to provide for them. There's not really much way around that. It makes sense that if you can do more things within the time that is left that people will try to figure out how to cram those things in. What we would have resigned to give up in the past now seems possible to attain with enough AI credits and tools.

andai• 2 months ago

Excrementalist Philosophy

lucumo• 2 months ago

I wonder if these people just need to talk.

No. I need to create. That energizes me, and I have far too little time for it.

analogpixel2• 2 months ago

on your drive you could:

a) listen to a useless podcast of two people blathering on about nothing.

b) come up with an idea, and have a coding agent start implementing it; maybe go back and forth on how to improve it.

seems like b is a better use of time.

or c) just stare into the void and let your thoughts consume you; this is my favorite, I don't like listening to stuff when I drive.

supern0va• 2 months ago

I like how in spite of the author explaining why (father of two small children that occupy his free time), you jumped to the most negative set of possibilities. Instead, it sounds like when he's with his children, he is focusing on them instead of on productivity, which is the opposite of what you're suggesting.

Also, if he instead chose to occupy his drive time with listening to a comedy podcast, or NPR, or even a technical podcast, I can't help but imagine you wouldn't give it a second thought, in spite of that being just as "productive" and "avoiding thinking about the tough things".

catgary• 2 months ago

I think you should just focus on the road because most of us are just trying to get home safely to our families. Some of us are even biking beside the road on a lightly-protected bike lane.

gobdovan• 2 months ago

I started reading the first part of your comment before opening the article and thought you were mocking AI bros. I then read the rest of your comment and was sure you're misrepresenting TFA. I clicked on the article and started at it in disbelief.

don-code2• 2 months ago

I find driving to be one of the most useless ways of spending my time, and if it's for more than half an hour, I do try to figure out some way to increase the value of that time.

I have a weekly commitment that leaves me driving home (~40min) at 9pm, and I usually eat dinner (just a sandwich) while I drive. That also has the advantage of making it so that I'm not eating an hour before bed.

If I know that I need to call someone, I'll usually try to schedule that call while I'm driving. I used to take meetings while driving as well, though I stopped because it was perceived poorly by others.

What's sort of sad is that I can take public transit to all of my regular commitments, and that lets me keep doing something (reading, working, whatever). The schedules are poor, though, and they blow my commute times completely out of the water. For example, I've got a 5-7pm commitment that is a 15-minute drive one way, but if I wanted to go by bus, I'd have to leave at 3:30pm (latest it comes before I need to be there), and get back on it at 8pm (the earliest it comes after I'm done).

appplication• 2 months ago

It’s not useless though. It allows you to engage your default mode network, which is otherwise insanely suppressed in the barrage of constant stimulation that is modern life.

louthy2• 2 months ago

take meetings while driving as well, though I stopped because it was perceived poorly by others.

The lack of self awareness here is astounding. You’re in control of a two ton bullet, please concentrate on the road. Killing somebody because you’re not paying full attention is not a good look.

cj• 2 months ago

I was a workaholic from 18-26. 12+ hour days for months/years on end. It absolutely was not healthy. Toxic is not an inaccurate label.

But I don't regret it. Those years are the foundation of the career I have in my 30's.

Back in those days, when I wasn't at a computer, I was listening to non-fiction audiobooks on business and software. I don't know how I had such motivation bvack then, but I'm glad I capitalized on it while I had it.

In other words, to people reading questioning if they're working too much: it's okay to work hard as long as you're doing it for the right reasons. (I'll purposely leave "right reasons" undefined, that's on you to evaluate)

I'm just generally not a fan of people putting other people down for wanting to be productive. It's okay to work hard, and it's okay if your identity is your work at least for a short time in your life.

bluefirebrand2• 2 months ago

I was a workaholic from 18-26. 12+ hour days for months/years on end. It absolutely was not healthy. Toxic is not an inaccurate label. But I don't regret it. Those years are the foundation of the career I have in my 30's.

I'm glad this worked out for you

As a small counter anecdote I guess, I was this person in my 20s too. I arranged my whole life around work, constantly trying to get that next rung. Then I burned out, quit my job, moved to a new city and was unemployed for a year. My career has been pretty decent since then, but it almost had nothing to do with the hard work in my 20s. It's just that where I was working before didn't reward the hard work and where I am now rewards the work I do even though I don't work nearly as hard as I used to

Anyways. All I'm really saying is if you're going to work yourself to the bone trying to get ahead, make sure to take a breath once in a while and look around. Check in with yourself to ensure that the hard work is actually paying off, building the life you want. Otherwise it's just trading your youth and getting nothing in return

j453• 2 months ago

I learned a lot during those years too, and in some ways had to learn those things no matter what role or opportunity I chose.

I received some advice to simply add 15 minute of additional "work" a week, and not any more until I could handle it to my baseline... and then be sure to add 15 minutes of "balance" a week as well. Where my work days would go long, I found I was able to tie in habits to go for a walk, eat, etc. This did let me stretch quite far for a longer time, and burn out was a much lower risk.

How efficiently or effectively I learned those lessons could be debatable, but putting in sheer hours on learning and learning to apply things has compounded in some areas very strongly.

At the same time it must be acknowledged that doing this in a way that is not balanced can naturally lead to under development in other areas and it's worth trying to stay mindful of.

Hard work isn't a bad thing, it's the gap of not learning, not improving, not reflecting. There's no shortcut to putting in the work or learning the learnings.

gedy2• 2 months ago

In other words, to people reading questioning if they're working too much: it's okay to work hard as long as you're doing it for the right reasons.

I personally feel that working reasonable hours even when junior is just as productive for learning, etc. The only thing I learned from being a workaholic is, to not be a workaholic.

apsurd• 2 months ago

There is a subtle "misery loves company" at play even in one's own trusted circles. Criticizing someone for working too much tip-toes into that realm. It can be well intentioned: everything in moderation, life is about more than work.

But also it can be alienating and dismissive. I have the habit of working every single day. Weekends, holidays, on vacation. Over the years more than one roommate and family member would eventually call me on it. I felt judged. I took it harder than they intended.

I think to them it was a sacrifice. My work ethic was a cost. I could have been out with friends, on the beach takin in the sun. But instead I felt it necessary to toil away toward some Capitalistic superficial goal.

But it's not a toiling cost to me. It's a healthy habit in the way that a morning workout is a healthy habit. It's lucky that enjoying one's work can also "pay off" in the traditional sense. I think that's the key: only you know why you're working. If it's toil toward some Capitalistic superficial goal, just make sure you're aware of your tradeoff.

If it's your morning coffee, I see you buddy! Enjoy your day.

micromacrofoot• 2 months ago

Yeah but what if I do this so I have the time in my workday to drive to the beach.

infogulch4• 2 months ago

In my experience the driving-behavior part of my brain can run virtually autonomously, like how you don't really have to spend 100% of your brain to walk down the street. This means that the words-thinking part of my brain is almost completely free, with the exception of short high-attention spikes for risky maneuvers like onramp merging. This is why listening to music or podcasts is a very popular driving activity. In many places even handsfree phone calls are allowed as long as both hands are available and your vision isn't obstructed.

I would contend that listening to a podcast or being on a handsfree phone call would be on par with the Claw Phone.

robinsonb5• 2 months ago

In my experience the driving-behavior part of my brain can run virtually autonomously

It can, but I've heard quite plausible claims in the past [1] that you shouldn't let it - because that's one of the things that kills motorcyclists. Your autopilot brain is looking out for other cars quite effectively - but a motorcycle isn't a car, and can slip through un-noticed if you're mind is engaged elsewhere.

[1] Citation needed, but lacking I'm afraid!

Terr_• 2 months ago

I find there's an asymmetry between listening and speaking. It's fine for someone else to tell me about their week, but I can't reciprocate with the same level of detail.

I suspect when driving demands attention, it's easier to buffer incoming words to handle a second later, or to simply miss portions and recover.

In contrast, a buffer of outgoing words between mind and mouth is harder to manage, and people prefer not to fall silent in awkward socially-unacceptable ways, especially if the other person might not see what diverted you.

Rumudiez• 2 months ago

Daydreaming or zoning out while driving is reckless behavior. You should be fully occupied by the task at hand. If you aren't, find a parking lot to doze off in instead please, or call an Uber

satvikpendem3• 2 months ago

People like different things than you do, not sure why you have to get sad about it.

j453• 2 months ago

Some folks might be trying to empty what's on their mind.

Very well could be a productivity habit bordering on obsession too.

derwiki5• 2 months ago

My main use case is that I'm driving and think of something I want to remember, and want to record it hands-free without taking my eyes off of the road

olyjohn• 2 months ago

How important is it really if you can't remember it when you get home?

brcmthrowaway• 2 months ago

So a lot of slop out there is just undiagnosed ADHD.

Forgeties79• 2 months ago

Always relevant https://youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U&pp=iggUQAFKEDlhR21Pa...

andybak2• 2 months ago

Aw jeez. Just take it in the spirit it was intended and stop trying to score "more spiritual than thou" points. We are all deep one day and shallow the next. We are all workaholics and also smelling the roses. You know nothing about the author - you're hijacking a thread to grandstand.

corndoge• 2 months ago

I agree with this sentiment. So much of human discourse sort of assumes that people are consistent day to day, even hour to hour. It just ain't so!

tamimio• 2 months ago

It’s a mix of virtue signaling and the inability to have own thoughts for few minutes without having existential crisis, no wonder mental illness is off the charts. There’s actually nothing more therapeutic than a night drive on a long road with your own thoughts to process certain events that happened throughout the day/week.

Schiendelman• 2 months ago

This is just an advertisement, it's not about being a "duct tape engineer", and the various coding agents are already great duct tape engineers, so I can't imagine someone writing a compelling blog post about it anyway.

hylaride• 2 months ago

Agreed. I was expecting something more along the lines of "now is the best time to be somebody capable of glueing together and fixing all the messes that AI agents have created, on top of being aware enough of security issues.

This was the exact opposite.

npodbielski• 2 months ago

Exactly what I thought! And then I read that some guy is working while driving. Jesus Christ... Next time it will be post: I am talking to my phone about my code while I shower and I never felt more productive!

Hugsbox• 2 months ago

And when you get home to check out the results, you won't understand any of the code :)

bluefirebrand2• 2 months ago

I tend to call this sort of "I glued a bunch of external services together to make a useful tool" Software Plumbing, not Engineering.

Anyways I think what you've demonstrated that it's actually a really bad time to be a "Duct Tape Engineer" because anyone with a bit of knowhow can coax the AI to build them some pile of loose data pipes and leaky abstractions that appears useful. The market for this sort of software builder is about to get very crowded

jupr• 2 months ago

This is a completely insane way to check how many emails I have in my inbox I love it.

f311a• 2 months ago

I hope he does not use it and just wanted to advertise his project to get some Github stars...

derwiki5• 2 months ago

Why do you hope that?

MeetingsBrowser3• 2 months ago

I see this sentiment constantly. AI tooling is better than ever and its making building things easier than ever. I have respected coworkers who say that are maxing out multiple $200/month subscriptions.

But I have yet to see any results? Where is the useful stuff?

bityard2• 2 months ago

I don't know what those people are doing, but I built a personal day-to-day notes manager at work, for work, for under $20 in credits. Yes, I could have just used text files but this is less friction which means I'll actually stick to it. Nothing exactly like this already existed. It was built in under a week in small portions of spare time, and it probably would have been more like a month if I had to choose all the libraries and write the whole thing myself.

skydhash• 2 months ago

You have build "a stuff". But no one knows what the "stuff" is, and your comment is not exactly describing it.

That's why it's so hard to converse with the AI proponents. They don't want to talk about what they've built and why it's awesome (at least for them). They just want you to take it at face value.

If you're sharing something, just give enough details so that others can contrast to their own experience and learn something from it.

satvikpendem3• 2 months ago

Search Ask HN threads, there are lots asking the same question and it looks like people do make useful stuff, it's just personal software not distributed to the public. I find that nice actually, because it's nice to make something just for yourself and is essentially what software is good for, solving your own problem.

derwiki5• 2 months ago

Yup, that's a sentiment I wrote about last year: building software for personal use that doesn't need to scale

z3ugma• 2 months ago

It's the 3d printing of software:

https://nichecraft.substack.com/p/3d-printed-software

boron1006• 2 months ago

I do think people are seeing useful results, but it’s at least several orders of magnitude less than what is claimed.

My metric is: how much code that I create today do I depend on in 3 months (incl learnings and one off data pulls etc.) and its waaay less than what I generate. A lot of it is frankly noise.

Daishiman2• 2 months ago

The results are in existing products being built out faster, in more internal tooling that would have previously not been cost-effective. Almost every software engineering shop is just doing the same thing as before but faster, as AI doesn't really give you an edge in the product side of things.

peab2• 2 months ago

I keep seeing this question asked, and I don't understand. Have you tried it? It's so easy to build useful things for myself now.

I've been able to build things that I otherwise would not have been able to build, in the free time that I have: - a VST audio plugin

- a wedding website with RSVP functionality

- a relaxing game for my wife

At work, I've been able to build much more than I would have been capable of in the past. I'm a backend eng, and it allows me to build much much nicer frontends than I've ever been able to do in the past.

And before you tell me that the code is crap - it doesn't matter! It may or may not be good code, but it works and serves it's purpose very well. Anyways, I'm I'm not launching a rocket, or putting software into cars.

gedy2• 2 months ago

I think he's talking about professionally, not various hobby ideas.

MeetingsBrowser3• 2 months ago

Have you tried it?

I've used agentic tooling at work for almost a year now, to great affect.

Tools are helpful, but in my experience they are not to a point where building things useful software is easy or simple.

Most of the things I have seen or heard described are neat demos that someone might play with a few times before forgetting about.

Of the projects you mentioned above, how long did you spend building them relative to how long they've been regularly used? Are you using them on a regular basis? If so, are they published somewhere for other people to use as well?

kstenerud• 2 months ago

Oh, we're building it. It's already out there.

tired_and_awake• 2 months ago

I feel as if a lot of this what Google home (or other "home like" products) could have been and they have failed miserably. As a Google home user I find it can't answer the simplest questions that would require even the hint of an integration within Google's own ecosystem.

heohk• 2 months ago

All modern SaaS is just other SaaS glued together

j453• 2 months ago

It's the spaghetti code years all over again but with ai. :)

axegon_2• 2 months ago

The good times are yet to come though: when all the slop held together by spaghetti, duct tape, chewing gum and hairballs starts falling apart and someone needs to fix it. If the slop bubble doesn't start popping soon, in 10 years a handful of people will end up being better paid than COBOL developers are now cause they'd be the only one that know what a compiler is. Personally I'm not too enthusiastic about the prospect so if I'm lucky, I'll be enjoying early retirement and watching all hell break loose from a camper van near the sea somewhere.

cloche3• 2 months ago

Have you used AI lately? Yes, this was the case a year ago but I've been using Claude daily for the past month and the quality is on par with what a senior engineer would be producing - often times better as it's more thorough and can think through all logical edge cases much more reliably. I do review all the code it writes. There are some suggestions I have but I'd say overall, 99% of it is solid.

axegon_2• 2 months ago

If that were the case I'd be getting a lot less "Hey, can you check this, something isn't working, here's what the AI did: ..." in complex systems but, alas, I hear those exact words 10+ times a day if I'm lucky (up from 3-4 a year ago).

mrbonner• 2 months ago

This has been the the case all the time: most of our work are connecting pipes using glue code/duct tape so to speak. But now, we are delegating this to AI. Nothing new for me.

cloche3• 2 months ago

I get that many people are tired of too many AI posts and there's an influx of negative comments but I think this is genuinely amazing. Think about watching Star Trek in the 60s and seeing people talk to computers and them understanding and being able to communicate back. We're literally living in the future!

locallost• 2 months ago

"Understanding"

andybak2• 2 months ago

"quotation marks"

analogpixel2• 2 months ago

I'm sick of "AI posts" that just talk about AI the tool.

I like posts about, because of AI, I built this cool idea I was thinking about. (or not even saying AI, just show us the cool things you made, that are hopefully not just "a tool written by ai to do ai")

infogulch4• 2 months ago

This week I built https://github.com/infogulch/caddy-zone-manager, "A Caddy app that performs desired-state synchronization of DNS records to a target zone using Caddy’s existing libdns DNS-provider ecosystem."

I thought that since caddy is already managing dns records anyway to pass DNS-01 ACME validations and update HTTPS records, wouldn't it be nice if I could just have it manage all of them and keep my desired DNS state checked into git?

This is exactly the duct tape scenario. There are a bunch of systems that bound the problem: Caddy's app lifecycle, the Caddyfile configuration system, libdns interfaces, DNS semantics, the Go language. Sure, there are a lot of little decisions that need to be made that fall into the "taste" category (no promises), and the sync engine itself is a new brand component, but by and large once the idea was formulated the problem domain is narrow enough for an LLM to stitch the systems together.

It was done in about two days of personal time. I read through all the code and rewrote a good portion of it manually. I probably could have written it from scratch myself with two weeks of full time effort (honestly I would have stumbled a bit on DNS recordset semantics which I was not very familiar). Instead it cost me $100. (I will reconsider my LLM usage patterns for the next project...)

zygology• 2 months ago

have you considered the ethical implications of vibe coding while controlling a 2 ton projectile around living humans?

Now is the best time to be a duct tape engineer

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