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jdc0589

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developer, devops, security stuff every now and then.

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how exactly did you jump to the conclusion that American ?citizen? taxpayes are propping these two people up financially? They are presumably both paying income tax in the United States as well, probably a lot of it based on his wife's profession.

some models do ok with instruction, some don't. You still have to review pretty thoroughly and make corrections or re-prompt.

For the most part I use claude code w/ opus plan mode + sonnet implementation mode, and it does pretty well. I go through the planning process for anything other than the most basic changes.

You go from formulating unique solutions to flagging things that look wrong and then just picking an alternative LLM generated one.

totally depends on how you use the tools. Plenty of people fall in to that scenario, but plenty of others explicitly tell the LLM tools what and how to build something.

A good generic terminal UI app for reviewing git diffs, making comments, etc...

Lots of these have started popping up, but almost every single one of them is a TUI interface for github, or gitlab. What I'm building is for local git by default, but has an extensible plugin system to support integrating with github/gitlab/azure ado/etc... for their PRs and approvals, but forced in to a single consistent UX and workflow.

Its good enough for basic diff reviews that it has become my daily driver for about a month for reviewing my own stuff before I push changes remotely.

I kind of disagree. You are describing a kind person who is extremely valuable, a person who is proficient in SWE but also has domain specific skills in some niche.

That's great, but its nowhere near the norm, and people have been doing generalist software engineering for decades. There has been a sufficient amount of work for a long time to be performed by generalists that it has been a very reasonable career.

IMO AI is the first thing that has ever actually challenged that.

I wish it made sense to do residential solar where I am. It probably does technically, but i hate the idea of spending a ton on a system and then STILL have to pay my power company; if you are connected to the grid at all where I am, you pay the power company $5/kw/month of solar capacity and your excess sell-back rates are insanely bad (0.03/kwh, vs billed usage rate at $0.17/kwh)

Gemini 3.1 Pro 5 months ago

I use it as my main platform right now both for work/swe stuff, and person stuff. It works pretty well, they have the full suite of tools I want from general LLM chat, to notebookLM, to antigravity.

My main use-cases outside of SWE generally involve the ability to compare detailed product specs and come up with answers/comparisons/etc... Gemini does really well for that, probably because of the deeper google search index integration.

Also I got a year of pro for free with my phone....so thats a big part.

the scaling and UI framework issues are by far my biggest pain point. I will inevitably end up with an app with tiny and/or blurry UI elements every few weeks and have to spend a ton of time figuring out the correct incantation to make it better.

This is on a pretty clean/fresh install of current ubuntu desktop

Linux from Scratch 6 months ago

agreed. I haven't done LFS, but ive done arch and plently of other distros for a good while and I definitely wouldn't say I have a rock solid understanding of the fundamentals.

this is what made me rage quit on Arduino IDE about 1 hour after starting any embedded dev (esp32) for the first time. I've got no clue what im doing with embedded stuff, but I am a SWE, and I expect to be able to test sweeping changes and have them be isolated in branches/git-stash/etc...

Having to remembering everything I played with tweaking in a UI is a hilarious no-go.

just thinking about this makes me itch. A lot of heat wrap for exhaust pipes is made of this stuff. Works pretty well though, just not a ton of fun to work with.

arduino ide is pretty terrible anyway. Swap to your normal ide of choice, and start using PlatformIO. way better experience, and you can actually have all your important config in normal text files on git/etc.. instead of having to tweak UI settings in Arduino studio.

you aren't a fan because some people never built anything advanced with it? thats a pretty wild take.

I agree. I don't, and never will, trust politicians (of any party) to actually represent their constituents accurately. I understand everything can't be a direct democracy, but we need some sort of a middle ground.

It's really weird to think about. I am a straight white CIS male, with no extreme political or social views, my family has been in the US for 150 years, im financially well off, and I don't feel like I have accurate trustworthy representation in government at any level. I am the person that everyone says is over represented