Mabusto

This is where I’m at as well. A friend recently showed me what opus 5.5 is capable of and it was both awe inspiring and disturbing.

I’ve been using AI as a great pair programming partner for about a year now, but every time I prompt it to write code agentically, it just makes a pile of crap that I end up spending more time fixing. This is so very quickly becoming not the case anymore.

I think core engineering skills are never going away (I’ve been doing this for 25 years and come from a background doing C++ for video games), that you will always need to have a mental model of the code and if you’re going to call yourself “professional” you need to be able to go in and fix/build by hand. But you’re going to get left behind if you aren’t at least willing to eat some humble pie and re-evaluate your views on agentic coding every few months as these tools get better.

Grieve, I know I have, but there is joy on the other side. I used to love getting lost in flow state with Soma.fm playing and the phone unplugged, that is still there, but what that looks like is changing fast and table stakes in this industry has been “adapt or die” for as long as I’ve been in it.

I thought the same thing. I started working full time in Rust back in March and the first few weeks I thought “this is ridiculous, it’s so ugly and hard to read”. My background is in C++ for game development (10y) followed by CTO of a web startup (JS/Python/TypeScript), so I know ugly code!

You absolutely do get used to it and I really like the built in formatters. I would write everything in Rust going forward if I could, it really is a different way of thinking about how to write code. I don’t agree it’s the right tool for every job though.

This is kinda where I’ve landed as well. I find the chat super helpful as a solo dev almost just as a sounding board for ideas and it is good at pointing out things I’m missing or not thinking through completely. I write almost all the code myself, I like the actual physical activity of writing code and find it keeps me engaged mentally for longer stretches.

I’ve also tried the agentic thing, but I find it so draining laying out in such explicit detail exactly what I want and then cleaning up what it’s messed up, like it’s easier to clean it up than just keep prompting and pulling the magic “Do This” lever.

I probably will never code without AI again. I’ve been doing this for 30 years since I was a teenager, was very fortunate in my career and don’t have to work anymore, but I still code and build because I love it, maybe even more so now with AI, but I would absolute hate my life if I was forced to just run agents all day long and never actually write or be the primary thinking driver for code.

This has happened to me with Rust. I read the book, did the interactive tutorials and then started on a small project and couldn’t really code anything!

This is familiar territory for me as I prefer to do a breadth first survey of something I’m trying to learn before digging in to an actual project with depth to make all the mistakes and blunders that make you actually good at something.

AI can still be a huge help here. I don’t really use AI to write the actual code. I will be tooting along, in the flow state, and then bang off a question or request like “how would you write this block of code” “how does this API work?”, and then just take what it says under advisement.

I find as soon as I start accepting what the AI says without critical thinking or just hitting the “apply block” button, it’s time to take a break. I use CoPilot and I barely touch 40% token spend per month and to me it’s the best way to work, I am always engaged, have a full mental model of what I’m working on, and have someone pushing back and criticizing what I’m writing. This gets you out of tutorial hell, but keeps you motivated because you’re not always staring at a blank code window wondering where to start.

I’ve been using Kagi for about a year now and I genuinely get worried that there are no alternatives if it goes out of business. The results are extremely good, especially in the last 4 months. I like their opt in AI summary as well, just add a question mark at the end.

I pay for a lot of things that are free from google/big tech, I’m happy to watch the advertisement driven web implode on itself so we can go back to the idea of a consumer paying a company for a quality product, monetizing peoples attention has been a huge detriment to society.

I think you first need to make an assumption of good faith on the submitter’s part. Yes, someone actively hostile to a repo and trying to sneak in changes will be successful, they can just prompt around the challenge.

I think the bigger picture is there won’t be one catch-all solution and we’ll need to embrace the Swiss cheese model from the world of aviation safety, this is just a suggestion for one layer.

It raises the stakes though. Getting challenged for an AI slop PR isn’t great, but ok, try and redeem yourself. Getting caught trying to cheat that challenge, you might as well just close down your account, like what is the point of even spending tokens to do this? These slop PRs are just people trying to pad their GitHub profiles.

I’m teasing a bit, yes your point is well made, you could just prompt around it. I think the bigger picture is there isn’t going to be some magical panacea that fixes this, we’ll just have to accept some sort of Swiss cheese model, like in the world of aviation safety. This “test” could be just be another layer in the stack.

You’re absolutely right - AI is not just capable, it’s on the leading edge. It’s not about vibes, it’s about results.

(It’s famously not well capable of sounding human)

The foundation points out something that has always been true, but AI has really brought to the forefront, that any contributor, including AI, could potentially not be relied on to maintain this patch in the future.

This is the core of the issue, not that someone uses AI, but that it’s just one of many smells a patch can have that indicates someone doesn’t understand what they’re submitting. You could be breaking variable naming conventions, changing APIs you shouldn’t, making amateur language mistakes, all indicate that yes, maybe the patch does work, but that there are other good reasons to reject it.

A way around this might be to mark a PR as rejected because of AI and then ask the author to point out some part of it they’re particularly proud of and explain in their own words, not a wall of AI text, what this does and why they like it. Just something where the author has to show that they have something an AI can’t, namely taste and an opinion.

As long as I can connect my 3D TV, I can't wait to sip some Juicero and watch Quibi on it.

I love these simple games that take 2 seconds to understand the rules.

Off by 6 on my iPad by mis-clicking. Very satisfying!

Literally installing Arch right now as I read this. Same deal, been using windows as my daily driver all my life but have been running Linux servers since late 90s (and did daily drive RedHat back in the day).

My work env was just VS Code + WSL and I realized the most pain points came from using Explorer and trying to admin the machine with the fractured landscape of sys admin tools. For me it became very obvious that windows is only going to get more bloated and less “my” machine going forward, why stay on this platform if I’m already spending most of my day in a Linux environment (that I’m already familiar with).

Surprised this is apparently the less popular stack. IDE (VS Code) on windows working out of WSL has been so good for a long time now.

Can definitely relate.

Last "job" was a startup with two other people and it was so great having others to bounce ideas off of and share the ups and downs. Building something together is a fundamental human joy IMO. We sold that and I've been working solo for the last 4 years.

It's lonely, and these have helped me.

- Making a point to physically get out of the house and ideally meet up with someone for a coffee or lunch or something.

- Being part of an active group chat.

- Podcasts

- Working out of a library or bustling cafe, just physically being around other people.

- Working out and maintaining a good wake/sleep cycle.

I also have some great hobbies (flying, scuba, rock climbing) with great communities that keep me socialized.

For anyone about to quit their job and try the solo dev thing, I always say mental well being has to be a "remembered priority". You're never going to have work/life balance like you did at an office job and the first few years are incredibly tough, so you need to plan for that. Marathon, not a race etc etc.

I think we'll start to see AI as any other tool that can atrophy your natural faculties. You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither, but a wheeled vehicle for going longer distances is a genuinely useful tool.

Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your brain in the driver's seat or the chat bot.

Design is one of those things that succeeds or fails in subtlety and both are difficult to quantify and back propagate through any sort of process, let alone training a model. The same way we figured out that the microwave can make approximations to good food quickly, so too shall we see that AI can do the same with tasks that rely heavily on a connection to people's aesthetics.

I've been using AI like this as well. The code-complete / 'randomly pop up a block of code while typing' feature was cool for a bit but soon became annoying. I just use it to generate a block of boilerplate code or to ask it questions, I do 90% of the 'typing the code' bit myself, but that's not where most programmers time is spent.

Hey what was the book out of curiosity?

Other than putting screen timers on all my apps, I've found that physically leaving my phone in other rooms to be helpful. Also recognizing it as a problem and acknowledging "Agh, I'm doing it again" when I get caught in a doom scroll hole at least puts some counterweight to the problem.

I also keep my laptop by my couch so I reach for it vs my phone. I hate typing on my phone so I end up just clicking on a dopamine drip app rather than actual reading / work which I tend to do more readily on a laptop or desktop.

It is a behavioural problem at the end of the day. Which means it will take discipline and accepting some feelings of discomfort up front to change for the long term.

There seems to be an army of people on Twitter making $100k MRR from AI Tinder photo enhancer apps and they have a course to sell you.

This is the same brand of person that was excited to get rich off NFTs and has now just moved on to slapps (AI slop apps).

Vibe coding is fun and great for personal projects or bootstrapping, but the specificity of the prompts needed to effect the change you want grows exponentially with the code base size to the point where you do just need to code it yourself and use the AI as a helper.

I've noticed a huge uptick in this brand of "entrepreneur". I think everyone who was inspired by devs like LevelsIO, limped their way through some code academy tutorials and was discouraged that you actually needed to have _some_ technical skills back in the mid 2010s is now encouraged to try again with vibe coding. It's always a combo of vibe coding + automation tools like n8n/zapier that does some simple data plumbing or just calls an API.

Just like you said, they all claim to make $xk per month and have a course to sign up for. I really hate this as places like product hunt are just gummed up now with Slapps (AI slop apps). The courses they sell seem to be how to quickly make Slapps, get people's email addresses and then use the authors email list management software (for a monthly fee) to endlessly send spam.

I have a Plex/Radarr/Sonarr setup on my home server. I've made a landing page so it's extra easy for my parents and friends to add media.

It's been really wonderful, everyone knows everyone by one degree of separation (me) and are adding to the library like a sort of group project. You can just hop on and see a somewhat currated library in the sense that someone you'll probably run into IRL thought this was worth watching.

So just to add to your point, you can't get this with a streaming service.

You gotta do the classic bouncing logo from The Office.

Damn, got me :(

I think the goal of minimizing hallucinations needs to be adjusted. When a human "lies", there is a familiarity to it - "I think the restaurant is here." "Wasn't he in Inception?", like humans are good at conveying which information they're certain of and what they're uncertain of, either with vocal tone, body language or signals in the writing style. I've been trying to use Gemini to just ask simple questions and it's hallucinations really put me off. It will confidently tell me lies and now my lizard brain just sees it as unreliable and I'm less likely to ask it things, only because it's not at all able to indicate which information it's certain of. We're never going to get rid of hallucinations because of the probabilistic nature in which LLMs work, but we can get better at adjusting how these are presented to humans.

Of course they were high, it's British Columbia.

I haven't worked on games in about 10 years, but I wrote core tech for AAA games during the 2000's. Stuff like async I/O, reflection, memory allocation, low level networking, and especially containers were all written in-house. Quite a bit of it was utilitarian, but I agree, a lot was a case of NIH syndrome. Some studios had these insane container libraries that just archived whatever weird data structure someone had as a toy project in university. Math libraries were the same. Scripting languages were all half-baked toy projects by the lead engineer etc.

For consoles, it wasn't that the STL was slow, it was that not all of it was fast, and some parts really were just trash written by whatever the compiler vendor had put together. RTTI was also generally not allowed as it was "slow", and virtual functions weren't allowed at one place because the vtable took up "a ton of extra space". So some of it was cultural, some of it was advice that was ok-ish maybe 15 years before the project began, and a lot of it was just not understanding what was happening under the hood.