ativzzz

I've literally never found flow state with programming. Is it even possible when working as a full stack web dev? I am constantly context switching between backend/frontend, reading documentation, looking at/modifying data, refreshing & interacting with the browser, checking/double checking feature requirements, asking people about things.

I've had some great conversations with uber drivers. Most don't talk, but I've had some memorable ones for sure.

It is hard because this product will likely be obsolete next year based on how quickly AI is changing and evolving. Speed is king when you're on the frontier

What's everyone's hate with uber and lyft rides? Over the past 10 years, I've had maybe one ride that was a 1/5. Most drivers either don't talk or are actually very pleasant conversations

I will take whichever one is cheaper. Just like now I open up both uber and lyft to see which costs less, I'll open up waymo as well

For greenfield apps you can vibecode it. For existing complex apps, where existing products where customers pay us a lot of money for working software, understanding the changes and context surrounding them in the code is critical or else nobody knows how the system works anymore and maintenance and support becomes impossible.

Uber and Lyft operated partially or outright illegally in many places while negotiating with governments. They also had a far superior product. Just like they fought the existing taxi companies, Waymo will have to fight against Uber and Lyft's lawyers, who are probably better funded and have learned to become better entrenched in governments.

> special government LLM to implement direct democracy

I like your optimism, but I think realistically a special government LLM to implement authoritarianism is much more likely.

In the end, someone has to enforce the things an LLM spits out. Who does that? The people in charge. If you read any history, the most likely scenario will be the people in charge guiding the LLM to secure more power & wealth.

Now maybe it'll work for a while, depending on how good the safeguards are. Every empire only works for a while. It's a fun experiment

> That they will know when to do abstractions

The only way to learn when abstractions are needed is to write code, hit a dead end, then try and abstract it. Over and over. With time, you will be able to start seeing these before you write code.

AI does not do abstractions well. From my experience, it completely fails to abstract anything unless you tell it to. Even when similar abstractions are already present. If you never learn when an abstraction is needed, how can you guide an AI to do the same well?

Great, then we can use AI to solve the problems given a set of requirements, and spend more time thinking about what the requirements are by understanding the users.

PM and software development will converge more and more as AI gets better.

The best PMs will be the ones who can understand customers and create low-fidelity prototypes or even "good enough" vibe coded solutions to customers

The best engineers will be the ones who use their fleet of subagents to work on the "correct" requirements, by understanding their customers

At the end of the day, we are using software to solve people's problems. Those who understand that, and have skills around diving in and navigating people's problems will come out ahead

The best way to get an idea is to do something for 5-10+ years, learn the limitations, learn what's missing.

2nd best way is to meet those people and talk to them. The more of them from different backgrounds you talk to, the more ideas you can get

Sure, but when I've spent 30 mins talking to you and you look the same on paper as the other 5 competent candidates and I need to make a choice on who to hire, any data point that portrays you negatively is an easy way to narrow my decision.

100% untrue. Hiring is a social game. You want to put your best foot forward, and then slowly let out your truer self over time. Much like dating - you don't want to air all your dirty laundry on the first date. Don't lie about who you are but at the same time people are more tolerant of your quirks once they get to know you better

A good reason to have an anonymous account to post negative things on. Never post honest negativity under your real name. Unless you work for yourself or your vulnerability is a sort of marketing, you're only hurting yourself. Make an anon account, vent as much as you want.

If I'm hiring someone, I want to like working with them, and if I find them ranting online, I just mark them as negative and pessimistic. I can't help it - that's human nature

In any job I've had (all remote), just message any person with some experience with the thing you're working on. They're always more than happy to bounce ideas or hop on a call and chat about it

> Hey, I'm working on feature A that needs X, Y, Z solutions. I see you worked on something similar, I'm trying to figure out the right way forward. Can I bounce some ideas off you?

Works with people without the experience

> Hey I'm working thru a problem and having trouble coming to a solution, any chance I could bounce some ideas off you?

Basically I've never had a "mentor" and I just ask people questions

> working at a remote startup since

This was my first job too. The upside was the freedom to explore on my own. The downside was lack of experienced coworkers. So I quit after a few years to get more of those.

AI is also decent at answering these kinds of questions, but less rewarding since it's not a human you can chat with

Totally agreed, which is why I'm sticking with my editor (neovim) regardless of whatever AI thing is hot and using tools outside/analogous to it, currently claude code

> Which means you should need fewer of them, no?

I've never worked at a company that didn't have an endless backlog of work that needs to be done. In theory, AI should enable devs to churn through that work slightly faster, but at the same time, AI will also allow PMs/work creators to create even more work to do.

I don't think AI fundamentally changes companies hiring strategies for knowledge workers. If a company wants to cheap out and do the same amount of work with less workers, then they're leaving space for their competitors to come and edge them out

> I make stupid decisions reacting to those feelings.

Yea it seems like the right thing to do is to step away and take a sabbatical to cool down, and then remember that we like money, and that it's just part of the game to get paid.

It goes beyond this. Reading is a form of entertainment. There has been an explosion of new and different forms of personal entertainment, so books now have to compete not just with old books, but movies, video games, social media, etc etc etc

While the AI is running, go work on something else. Go write a doc, or write a test, answer an email, work on another part of your feature that won't interfere with the AI, etc

I know some people have trouble with the context switching but I've been full stack at small companies my whole career so I context switch constantly every day so I'm used to it.

This is very cool. I think the primary innovation here is twofold:

1. Remote agent - it's a containerized environment where the agent can run loose and do whatever - it doesn't need approval for user tasks because it's in an isolated environment (though it could still accidentally do destructive actions like edit git history). I think this alone is a separate service that needs to be productionized. When I run claude code in my terminal, automatically spin up the agent in an isolated environment (locally or remotely) and have it go wild. Easy to run things in parallel

2. Deep integration with fly. Everyone will be trying to embed AI deep into their product. Instead of having to talk to chatgpt and copy paste output, I should be able to directly interact with whatever product I'm using and interact with my data in the product using tools. In this case, it's deploying my web app

Because summarizing is one of the few things LLMs are generally pretty good at. Plus you should use the summary to determine if you want to read the full source, kind of like reading an abstract for a research paper before deciding if you want to read the whole thing.

Bonus: the high quality source is going to be mostly AI written anyway

I think that the future of local LLMs is delegation. You give it a prompt and it very quickly identifies what should be used to solve the prompt.

Can it be solved locally with locally running MCPs? Or maybe it's a system API - like reading your calendar or checking your email. Otherwise it identifies the best cloud model and sends the prompt there.

Basically Siri if it was good

Yes and other engineering disciplines have certifications and organizations that require you to pass exams to prove you have the knowledge

They also tend to pay less

Preparing for interviews is a small price to pay

8 is becoming a law in more places already

9 & 10 can be applied to any non-game software service as well

11 is impossible because there's too much variation in consumer hardware, but some kind of formal performance standard would be nice

everything else is solved by "don't buy this game", but gamers don't like hearing they can just not play a game and instead they play and complain

The problem is the same. It still costs money to support crypto payments via taxes, payment fees, customer support etc that it's not worth to collect crypto from these countries. It's much more lucrative to just target US markets

Probably because it's one of those industries where legalizing it still attracts a large enough black market (human trafficking is a huge thing) that it's easier to just blanket ban it than try to separate the legal from the illegal

War is simultaneously the best and worst thing humanity can do. Killing each other is a pointless activity, yet the imminent threat of death and the idea of destroying your enemy is the strongest motivator to work together and accomplish innovative and seemingly impossible tasks.

I've found it useful for doing simple things in parallel. For instance, I'm working on a large typescript project and one file doesn't have types yet. So I tell the AI to add typing to it with a description while I go work on other things. I check back in 5-10 mins later and either commit the changes or correct it.

Or if I'm working on a full stack feature, and I need some boilerplate to process a new endpoint or new resource type on the frontend, I have the AI build the api call that's similar to the other calls and process the data while I work on business logic in the backend. Then when I'm done, the frontend API call is mostly set up already

I found this works rather well, because it's a list of things in my head that are "todo, in progress" but parallelizable so I can easily verify what its doing

Tried to read antifragile but his writing came off as too egotistic for me to take seriously at the time

Wealth is freedom. One of the core tenets of Americanism is "freedom", in quotes because most of us are far from free, just different from "freedom" in monarchical/feudalistic societies. We are bound to the accumulation of wealth. However, some of us are able to break free. Software engineering for instance is a profession that allows this. It doesn't require the full commitment of your life to attain wealth, like finance or law or medicine for someone who has some intelligence and drive.