489 karma · joined March 21, 2017
I’ve been fully remote for 12+ years now, and I’ve had a very successful career in engineering and engineering leadership. I also have eight kids that I get to spend a ton of time with. There’s a remote tax on career growth, but my RE side hustles have more than compensated for it.
Every now and then I wonder what might have been if I had stayed at Apple. No way to know for sure, but I probably couldn’t have afforded the family and lifestyle that I enjoy now.
So if there was a way to enable the productivity (or even multiply it, let’s be real) without the doomscrolling, a lot of people would go for that.
Not to mention the endless fiddling we’ve had to resort to with phones. We’ve gotten used to it, but apps for everything is such a cognitive burden on people. A screen-less AI assistant is the perfect solution for this. I can’t wait.
What a PR nightmare, on top of an already bad week. I’ve seen 20+ people on X complaining about this and the related confusion.
The reality is that a lot of people put ideas forward solely for the purpose of getting attention and trying to get promoted. A lot of those ideas are full of hope and enthusiasm and lacking in fundamentals. But to shoot it down makes you come across as a nay-sayer, or a Debbie-downer. Even though you are sure it’s going nowhere, the reality is that it’s a lot easier to let the market prove you right.
Less hurt feelings and interpersonal drama that way. Seems wasteful, but at the end of the day you got data and learnings that you didn’t have otherwise. So hey, silver linings.
- at that price - in the Bay Area
But certainly they don’t have grounds to say they can’t find citizens to write JS or make apps.
It generated a thousand line file with a robust breakdown of everything that needed to be done and at my command it did it. We went module by module and I made sure that each module Had comprehensive unit test coverage and that the repo built well as we went. After a few hours of back and forth we made 9 modules, 60+ APIs across 10 different tables, and hundreds of unit tests that all are passing.
Does that mean that I’m all done and ready to deploy to prod? Unlikely. But it does mean that I got a ton of boilerplate stuff put into place really quickly and that I’m eight hours into a project that would have taken at least a month before.
Once the BE was done I had it generate extensive documentation for the agent that would handle the FE integration as a sort of instruction guide - in case we need it. As issues and bugs arise during integration (they will!) the model has everything it needs to keep on track and finish the job it set out to do.
What a time to be alive!
4.1 is 26.6% better at coding than 4.5. Got it. Also…see the em dash
Then I went home and watched a documentary explaining all the stuff that happened after their success at Kittyhawk. Pretty sad that they took the patent/scarcity approach and stopped innovating. It was a cautionary tale to me to never let your foot off the gas once you’ve found something that works.
What they released as Apple Intelligence wasn’t a well-planned, cohesive product as much as the only thing they could possibly do, given the timelines they were up against. Maybe they’ll catch up, but they’re definitely behind and it’s a shocking thing to behold.
So many corners were cut in the name of speed. So much pressure from my cofounder/investor to get things out way too fast. So many months of endless suffering and never-ending bugs due to poor architecture that doesn’t scale on the BE.
I know how to push back. I do it for a living at my day job and I’m really good at it. For some reason I decided that I couldn’t ever push back against the guy who put in some money. How horribly wrong I was.
I know so many amazing people that were doing the work of their lives that quit or were laid off because of the RTO mandate. I can’t believe that they are doubling down on this, despite the human and financial costs associated with it.
Ultimately it highlights an important fact about working at WM (and lots of other companies, I am sure): you aren’t as special or irreplaceable as you think you are. Look out for yourselves and do what makes sense for you, always!