jakewindle47

Honestly agreed on chat agents missing the ideal UX. At the very least, I think we've all been forced into a chat like UX. I feel like we should have other options too. I love the idea of having the AI be shaped by the human written code as you are writing.

> If I can get a solution that is “close enough” in a fraction of the time and effort, it is irrational not to take the AI route. And that is the real problem: I cannot simply turn off my pragmatism.

I've not seen this take yet, but this is exactly how I feel. I do not yet know what I want to do, and my parts of my personality are no longer satisfied by coding. I'm thinking we need some kind of community of people like us where we can discuss these things.

I bring these up with others, and I find that most people around me are just builders.

Because I can't justify it. While I do love the craft, and I can do this, I work with other people and I can't convince other people to not use LLMs to do their daily work. So, while I'll be writing things by hand and using the LLM to suggest which way to go, they'll be submitting PR after PR of AI-generated code, which takes much more of my time to review.

I have, and it's entirely my own fault, but the way my brain works is I can't justify doing something slower than I possibly could with other tools. I'm not one to completely give in to vibe coding. I do still very manually drive the LLM when I work, but I don't even feel like learning tech anymore.

I can't help but ask myself, what's the point when learning another programming language, or another library, or another paradigm, when a lot of this information and knowledge is encoded in the model weights of the LLM

Yes and no, I'm looking for something that's deeply people-oriented now. I mentioned it in a different comment, being a teacher. Also thinking about being a nurse. My wife was a nurse, maybe we could work together.

I'm sure they did, and this analogy comes up every time I bring this up. Usually, there's mention of calculators as well.

That's currently my plan. I have kids, so I need to squeeze software dry.

For me, it was the craft that was fun, less the building. It was nice to have a really good result that customers were happy about, that other engineers were happy about, but it was also nice to have such intimate knowledge of a codebase because I and my team built it.

I miss that level of mastery. I feel that in the LLM-assisted coding age, that's now gone. You can read every section of code that an LLM generates, but there's no comparison to writing it by hand to me in terms of really internalizing and mastering a codebase.

Honestly? I'm not sure. I've looked at a few different paths.

I'm lucky to live in the Research Triangle area of the United States, so I've got really good options for schooling around me. My sister graduated with an aerospace engineering degree, and I've always been interested in space. Thinking about hardware as a possible path as well.

But in a complete twist, I've also always wanted to be an educator. A high school math or computer science teacher would fit me well. I remember a lot of my male teachers very fondly in terms of the impact they had on my life, and I'd love to give that back.

Many reasons

Everyone else is using LLMs to assist their development, which makes it a lot harder to work without them, especially in just building enterprise apps. It doesn't feel like I'm creating something anymore. Rather, it feels like a fuzzy amalgamation of all developers in the training data are. Working with LLMs sometimes feels like information overload. When I see so much code scrolling past as the agent makes its changes, this can be exhausting. Reading this massive volume of code is exhausting. I don't like that the new "power tools" of software engineering mean that my career, our career, is now monetizable. I liked feeling like a craftsman, and that is lost.

LLMs have sucked all of the joy out of software engineering for me, and I've been doing it for 12 years.

As others have pointed out, I'm looking at a career shift now. I'm essentially burning out on doing the whole LLM-assisted coding stuff while I still can, earning money on contracts, and then going to step away from the field. I'm lucky that I'm in a position to do so, but I really don't know what the rest of my career looks like.

I too am feeling this way. I liked the deep engagement and flow state that came at least to me through actually typing out my program and having to deeply think about things.

Location: Durham, North Carolina

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Java, C++, Go, JavaScript/React, AI/ML (LLMs, RAG, Embeddings, Fine-tuning), AWS (ECS, Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB), Terraform, Docker, Spring Boot, Django, PostgreSQL, Redis, spaCy, scikit-learn

Résumé/CV: https://github.com/jaketothepast/resume/blob/main/resume.pdf

Email: jacob.windle@hey.com

I'm a full-stack engineer with 10+ years building production systems at Amazon, Instructure, and various startups. I take on contract work where I can deliver results: architecting systems from scratch, optimizing infrastructure to cut costs 70-80%, building AI/ML applications with LLMs and embeddings, or improving performance by orders of magnitude. I've led technical development that's helped companies secure millions in funding and built systems serving thousands of users in production.

I work across the entire stack and can jump in at any stage of a project. Whether you need someone to architect scalable AWS infrastructure, build AI-powered features, integrate complex third-party systems, or optimize existing codebases, I focus on shipping solutions that work. Happy to discuss short-term or ongoing contract opportunities where technical experience and execution speed matter.

  Location: Durham, NC
  Remote: Preferred
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, Django, LLMs, Agentic Frameworks, Ruby on Rails, Prompt Engineering, C, C++, Java, Clojure, DevOps, Terraform, ECS, Cloud Run
  Résumé/CV: https://github.com/jaketothepast/resume/blob/main/resume.pdf
  Email: jacob.windle@hey.com

Looking for contract work. I have 10+ years experience shipping production systems and proven AI/LLM expertise. I've recently built AI agents (featured in Forbes/AWS) that save millions of educator hours. I am a part-time CTO at neuroscience startup. Ex-Amazon SDE II. Previous contracts I've worked on have secured $500k funding, gained 200x performance improvements, and I've built everything from embedded C to cloud-scale AI applications. I can lead teams, or deliver applications independently.