fbrncci

Sure if you want to bake a cake you also need to invent the universe first…

As long open weight models get released; no moats are going to exist. Both windows and Linux are weak comparisons.

Due to all their fumbling I decided to not even try Fable. Why get used to a model with limited shelve life when I can just use the older models that do well for me? Well then 5.6 came out, now Kimi came out and I’m just letting my Anthropic subscription expire. Anthropic will need to do a whole lot better because this just ain’t it.

Safe to say there is no moat.

Azure should have those.

Instead the same workers would be unemployed if they stopped doing these kind of jobs all together. There are few options in the Philippines, and BPO is actually a well respected career and skillset that is worthwhile to refine. There is very little “etc. etc”; especially if you’ve relied on this skillset for years.

Don’t be naive. Every model provider does this.

Have you tried accepting less than 200k? Sub 100k maybe. Works for me (at 40+). And then just work several clients as contractor. Beats flipping burgers, comes out at more than 200k.

AI still can’t fake a 50$ background check and verifiable references from past employers or clients you worked for. So I wouldn’t worry about juniors masquerading as seniors. Doing due diligence now is more important than ever.

That does make it sound like there are only 2 types of software. The “serious” and the “unserious”. There’s probably a few dozen types rather, it’s much less black and white. At a client we have non-technical people ship “serious” software based on their 20+ years of experience in their respective field that definitely doesn’t need the same approach as a banking or health care application, but it would also be an insult to group that with productivity apps. No juniors or coding knowledge needed; LLMs fill that gap.

I as a senior am still called in to consult and shoot down attempts to actually integrate it into the wider system without triggering a full technical review.

Sounds like a ragequit to me.

Anyone that has played civ long enough has done something like that too. I just start pillaging farm land as well, but of course a nuclear strike when you can no longer win would also be my favorite way to rage quit the round. Of course, this piece is going to probably make its round in the news cycles and people’s mind who never played civ. Hopefully they never allow it to play LoL and interact with other players at the same level of salt and toxicity; that would deeply trouble me.

The tokens/salary ratio is not relevant at all. Because while 200-500$ is a lot of money, it’s still a fraction of the salary you’d pay any dev in the world. It just comes out as a tooling expense. It also matters how those devs use the tools; you can’t assume everyone gets the same out of it. So that amount can last a day or it can last a month. I would say a dev in a developing nation would be more budget aware than someone being used to everything being priced in NYC rates.

For example I build other AI products and I have been hyper aware of the token spend of our users. I was going crazy seeing that some users were having 5$ conversations. So that was optimized and I found ways to use sub agents to get it down to 1-2$. Just for management asking me why I was worrying to begin with? The users using these are consultants being paid 120$ per hour. They have a daily 10-20$ token expense, no problem. “But amazing job on the cost reduction.”.. well 5$ for me is what I spend on food daily. While the consultant is slamming: “yes” 10 times in a chat , for whatever reason for the same cost. Would the NYC dev care as much natively? No.

You can still hire three devs in India for the price of a dev in NYC. Now you give them AI and you might only need 1-2. That makes offshoring even more appealing, not less. And the dev in India now having tooling to out compete local talent. Well that’s my reality (I am not in India though).

My costs are 0$ as any token or subscription spend on agents is invoiced as an expense to my clients.

You made me realize something. I routinely spend upwards of 500$ per month on LLMs for coding (expensed towards clients). However I live in a place where 500$ is around the avg. salary. I’m lucky that I know my way around western clients. Clients who pay these expenses and are happy to work with me because I am still about 50% cheaper than local talent in EU/US, while my salary at home converts to an upper class income at the highest tax bracket.

Which of course causes some unfairness on both ends. Nobody here can compete with me. I often use left over tokens on local client projects; which despite lower pay, still pays off because they now take hours not days or weeks to complete. And nobody in the local clients talent pool can compete with me; unless they charge about half the market rate.

Take away my 500$ monthly grant; and I’d be more or less screwed. Better open models will more or less start to reduce this advantage. It’s not like I positioned myself here on purpose. But it’s definitely a „right place, right time“ situation.

Are you actually seeing any signs that we’re going back to how software was written before, and needing those skills in the same way? Because I sure am not seeing that right now. As someone who vibe codes 100% and has become managements favorite, while being more or less allowed to break the platform every other release I know my skills are atrophying. But it’s taking me different places in my career entirely. There’s a path to managing other engineers now that opened years before it would have previously. Even writing this makes it sound ridiculous, but that’s what’s infront of me right now. There is an entirely other set of skills that I’m interested in sharpening now. Definitely no more sitting down several hours per day and meeting about system design and integrations with others.

I am still trying to find a replacement for cursor. But in the past 30D my automations and my own coding has consumed well above 10 billion tokens for less than 300$ with auto and composer 2.5; while building a fairly stable product with 20-30 daily active users. It feels like it’s too good to be true, because I’ve tried with Claude and codex and it just feels so much more expensive.

Well to a lot of people this is still a foreign concept.

Why Python? Because I have written it for 10+ years, know how to debug it and I can smell it within 10 seconds of the agent writing code if it does something that is going to end in a huge foot gun. With any other language, not so much; I would need to relearn a lot. So I am going to be preferring python; where even with the speed that AI crams out code, I still feel somewhat in control. If I did this with Go or Rust, then it would feel more like "vibecoding" than AI assisted programming, just yolo the whole product.

I had sworn to never use VSCode until Pycharm fell behind on integrating LLMs. And I was a loyal JB user for 10+ years. Then Zed and Cursor came out and I never touched another JB product since then.

Take that Anthropic and your shenanigans.

It works. You’re just not doing it right if it doesn’t work for you. It’s hard to convince me otherwise at this point.

It’s a little hard to believe when I remember game dev jobs already being a mess in 2019.

Feel free to contact me through my profile if you need help with this.

You’ll be shocked to see how many job postings for only fans chatters are up on Reddit when you search for them (several are posted every hour). Some ads are looking for 10-20 chatters at once.

But the people taking on these jobs are applying for them still. Somehow I find it hard to be sympathetic? Ok I get it the job opportunities in the Philippines aren’t great, but it’s not like you’re being forced to be an OF chatter; you can simply stop being one.

Do you mean the creatives? I do outsource the creatives. For ads, I largely automate setting up and maintaining them; like rebalancing and demand generation scripts. But here we are talking good old spreadsheet magic not AI.

I do use some AI but its minimal; most scripts are still just algorithmic, but its easy to build them with Claude; while they are super expensive (couple of hundreds to thousands) if you bought them from some established marketeers (like Mike Rhodes demand gen script).

I come from a few years experience in Marktech, but I am also now training a partner of mine to run and maintain ads with zero to no experience. The best way to go about it is using something like Gemini guided-learning, asking it to explain the differences between Google, Meta, Tiktok, Microsoft and LinkedIn ads; deciding which ones to run for which type of audience; how to target intent, rather than keywords; explaining what retargeting is, landing page conversion optimization as well as how PMAX works; and how to optimize for it over a longer period of time. You can make a "Gem" in gemini about this, and continuously advance learning. I wouldn't throw any money at it until you understand those basics, and while I mostly run Google ads, its quite important to understand all the differences and nuances between other advertisers.

Google and Meta. I did work for a Marketing agency for years handling automations development for them. So I have been exposed to hundreds of campaigns across different industries and have seen what works well and what doesn't. Not saying that you need this experience, but once you see stable results from others; and how to protect them, its hard not to chase after them as well!

I consistently launch small vibe codes products. Slap ads on them and after a few weeks decide what to do with them without launching them anywhere else and am seeing good results. I see little to no reason to even launch them any other way at this point.

Understanding how to run paid advertising well beyond throwing money and a budget at a campaign and calling it a day. It’s generally not covered by most solo or bootstrapped founder guides, but in 2026 it can make all the difference. And it may take WEEKS before a campaign can mature before it shows results; depending on the chosen advertiser… which is a little counter to what people want (immediate results, first 10 users, 100 waitlist signups, etc).

You can still pay someone else to spam your product on social media at a fraction of the cost of paid ad campaigns (and a fraction of the results).

Marketing for founders in 2026: just buy ads and invest into actual marketing. Because everyone else is busy spamming SaaS directories, subreddits and twitter (often with sock puppets) and wasting everyone’s time.