localghost3000

Musk sounds like such a nightmare to work for. I legitimately don't understand why anyone would put up with him. What's the appeal?

Nice name you got there localghost ;p

The POV of the author I understand quite well because it was mine. Its really only in the last 6 months or so that my perspective has changed. The author still sounds like they are in the "black box that I toss wishes into and is dumb as fuck" phase. It also sounds like they are resistant to learning how to make the most of it which is a shame. If you take the time to learn the techniques that make this stuff tick you'll be amazed at what it can do. I mean maybe I am a total idiot and this stuff will get good enough that I am no longer necessary. Right now though? I see it as an augmentation. An amplification of me and what I am capable of.

Theres always exceptions. Congrats!

Maybe? I wasn't just speaking of myself however.

This perspective was mine 6 months ago. And god damn, I do miss the feeling of crafting something truly beautiful in code sometimes. But then, as I've been pushed into this new world we're living in, I've come to realize a couple things:

Nothing I've ever built has lasted more than a few years. Either the company went under, or I left and someone else showed up and rewrote it to suit their ideals. Most of us are doing sand art. The tide comes in and its gone.

Code in and of itself should never have been the goal. I realized that I was thinking of the things I build and the problems I selected to work on from the angle of code quality nearly always. Code quality is important! But so is solving actual problems with it. I personally realized that I was motivated more by the shape of the code I was writing than the actual problems it was written to solve.

Basically the entire way I think about things has changed now. I'm building systems to build systems. Thats really fun. Do I sometimes miss the feeling of looking at a piece of code and feeling a sense of satisfaction of how well made it is? Sure. That era of software is done now sadly. We've exited the craftsman era and entered into the Ikea era of software development.

I’ve been building a lot of agent workflows at my day job. Something that I’ve found a lot of success with when deciding on an orchestration strategy is to ask the agent what they recommend as part of the planning for phase. This technique of using the agent to help you improve its performance has been a game changer for me in leveraging this tech effectively. YMMV of course. I mostly use Claude code so who knows with the others.

Official according to who?

“Don’t let your work self, be your best self.” Is a turn of phrase my boss said to me one time. He was describing his own father’s total inability to be present at home while over achieving at work. That really stuck with me. And is a mantra I repeat to myself quite often.

The struggle is real. Therapy helps. Meds might be worth checking out too as this sounds like ADHD.

I worked in health care tech for about 5 years. AI driven before it was cool. Took processes that normally took years down to a couple hours. Cutting edge stuff.

What struck me over the years was the open hostility we faced from the staff. The admins would buy our product, then have us come do trainings. The clinicians seemed to resent every second of it and would just never use the tool.

Towards the end of my tenure there, a PM said to me “the last thing these people want is to have to learn yet another workflow”. Which is when the penny dropped for me that our tool was just one of a bazillion being force fed to these poor people. They want to spend their time with patients not a screen.

Despite it being the most mission driven I have ever felt about a product (we were literally trying to help cure cancer lol). I’ll never work in health care again. Like education, it’s a quagmire.

I've developed the following methodology with LLM's and "agentic" (what a dumb fucking word...) workflows:

I will use an LLM/agent if

- I need to get a bunch of coding done and I keep getting booked into meetings. I'll give it a task on my todo list and see how it did when I get done with said meeting(s). Maybe 40% of the time it will have done something I'll keep or just need to do a few tweaks to. YMMV though.

- I need to write up a bunch of dumb boilerplatey code. I've got my rules tuned so that it generally gets this kind of thing right.

- I need a stupid one off script or a little application to help me with a specific problem and I don't care about code quality or maintainability.

- Stack overflow replacement.

- I need to do something annoying but well understood. An XML serializer in Java for example.

- Unit tests. I'm questioning if this ones a good idea though outside of maybe doing some of the setup work though. I find I generally come to understand my code better through the exercise of writing up tests. Sometimes you're in a hurry though so...<shrug>

With any of the above, if it doesn't get me close to what I want within 2 or 3 tries, I just back off and do the work. I also avoid building things I don't fully understand. I'm not going to waste 3 hours to save 1 hour of coding.

I will not use an LLM if I need to do anything involving business logic and/or need to solve a novel problem. I also don't bother if I am working with novel tech. You'll get way more usable answers asking about Python then you will asking about Elm.

TL;DR - use your brain. Understand how this tech works, its limitations, AND its strengths.

I live in LA and have been here for almost 30 years now. This stunt is a provocation designed to get a reaction. He wants an excuse to crack heads in a city he hates and that hates him back. He probably also wants us to forget about Musk outing him on the Epstein files.

Watching this unfold here is reminding me strongly of the Ghorman plotline in Andor S2: "You need a resistance you can count on to do the wrong thing at the right time."

Having passed through the “gateway to God” opened by psychedelic drugs, the German tech billionaire wanted to

I closed the article right about there.

Maybe I’m not reading the post right but the dude sounds like a dick? What am I missing here?

I’ve warmed to this tech a bit, but christ would I like to hear more takes from dudes who aren’t running a fucking AI company. It’s impossible to take anything they say as anything other than a god damn ad.

I wonder how long before someone figures out how to use this for tech interviews

“Let them fight”

Because nothing matters. Just wait out the outrage cycle. In a week or two the general public will have moved on. Signalgate, the president being convicted of numerous felonies, etc being a few examples that pop into my head. None of this should be status quo but we live in interesting times as they say.

I started writing python professionally a few years ago. Coming from Kotlin and TypeScript, I found the language approachable but I was struggling to build things in an idiomatic fashion that achieved the loose coupling and testability that I was used to. I bought this book after a colleague recommended it and read it cover to cover. It really helped me get my head around ways to manage complexity in non trivial Python codebases. I don’t follow every pattern it recommends, but it opened my eyes to what’s possible and how to apply my experience in other paradigms to Python without it becoming “Java guy does Python”.

I cannot recommend it enough. Worth every penny.

I was speaking specifically about FE devs.

This...doesn't seem to support your case at all?

Hm ok well I am not sure what you mean but its the internet so... <shrug>

What I am saying here is that you would be shocked at how far you can get with a simpler architecture. Distributed systems have massive trade offs and are the kind of thing you shouldn't do unless you are FORCED to.

It took me a bit to realize the author is selling me something. I guess good job there sir.

I’ve built a bunch of distributed architectures. In every case I did, we would have been better served with a monolith architecture and a single relational DB like Postgres. In fact I’ve only worked on one system that had the kind of scale that would justify the additional complexity of a distributed architecture. Ironically that system was a monolith with Postgres.

Ha! All good. Been there myself.

Can you help me understand how this relates to my comment? We’re talking about what skills make you more marketable.

And if you’re an engineer, you will be able to retain much higher market value over time if you dig into and understand core web technologies

Been working in FE for nearly 20 years and lived through several major paradigm shifts. I think I am qualified to have an opinion here:

I definitely think that you will be a more well-rounded engineer if you know all the core web tech. So strongly agree there. I am skeptical, however, that it will make you more attractive on the job market. It's not that knowing this stuff doesn't matter, it's that folks that make hiring decisions tend to pattern match. The fact is that if you want to maximize your "market value", you still need to be _very_ good at React. This is table stakes. Everything else is great, but if you don't have that foundation, you're limiting your options.

Maybe that is what the author meant and I am just misreading.

I’ve worked in healthcare tech and this is pretty bad. You get fined per patient record and it’s not cheap. You also get put on a “wall of shame” where anyone who might do business with you in the future can look and see. You can also be held personally liable if you mess up. It’s really intense.

At my old job we didn’t even allow PII to pass through our API so we couldn’t accidentally log it and kept all of it in its own VPS totally isolated from the rest of our system. When we needed a record we’d put it into an S3 bucket and hand back temp link that only the caller could access (and expired within a short period of time) Total pain but you could sleep at night.

Something that kind of got understated in here IMO is the improved refactoring and code intelligence that this will unlock. Very exciting! I am looking forward to all the new tooling and frameworks that come out of this change. TS is already an amazing language and just keeps getting better!

The president was convicted of fraud and that doesn’t seem to matter. Let’s maybe stop acting like the rule of law is getting applied evenly in these times.

Eh. There's a right way and a wrong way to do what you’re talking about IMO. Being direct and honest is important and good. Attacking peoples character is not. Emotional safety is essential because if you don't have it, then folks are afraid to speak up because they might get their heads chopped off.

A) don’t be rude please. B) yes. I get how it works. It’s not too advanced for me. It’s too clever. There’s a difference. In my experience something more readable and verbose would do in nearly every case I’ve ever seen someone try to use it.

It’s an opinion though so.. <shrug>

Every now and again one of these come up in a PR and I hard reject it every time. Its clever. Its neat. Its elegant. And it takes a giant ass white paper to explain it to people. Please please please don't use stuff like this when other people have to read your code.