schmookeeg

Thank you for expounding, but man, I have so many "wait, what? who?" reactions to that narrative.

I'm addicted to coding, not work. I know this because I've tried other jobs, even in late career, and they sucked in comparison and brought me no joy.

"The company" is mine, so yeah, probably it doesn't care about me, but it's definitely not dropping me without consent. :)

48, soon 49, heart still going. Not even sure what that's referring to. I don't feel stressed in these crunches, I feel excited! I build cool shit! They pay me to build cool shit! They pay me way too much to build cool shit!

I guess I don't know what I would balance that excitement with. I have cool hobbies too, and those have their place, but... I just don't resonate with your take and view on the industry.

IF someone hated coding, creating, or the tech industry itself -- then I could squint and get behind your balance suggestions. For them. :)

Thanks for sharing the perspective though. If nothing else, you're fanning my gratitude flame.

> you have the problem that you are never able to do coder.Health++ for bank.Money-- afterwards.

Can you expound on this for me? This rule is not at all obvious to me. I'm curious what perspective this hails from :)

For example, most of my career, I will take 6+ months off between particularly intense work crunches for contracts/startups/jobs. I find the time off restorative to the point where I get restless for the next crunch.

I am thinking of that quotation that said [paraphrasing] "90% of my skills went to $0, but the other 10% are now worth 1000x"

This LLM-fuelled rant/departure is a thought-provoking expression of frustration from someone who focused on the 90%, not the 10% -- namely someone willing to handcraft software like an artisan.

I think we're in the mass-production era for code and nobody wants a hand-crafted anything anymore. Automated and mass-produced please. "Quantity has a quality all its own"

We have owned 4 EVs and each allow you to configure the regen braking strength. You'll need another reason to not buy one.

AI solving the too-much-AI complaint is heart-warming. We're at the point where we will start demanding organic and free-range software, not this sweatshop LLM one-shot vibery.

Love it. :D

I would enjoy an LLM that had to suffer and mope over its prior poor choices. Particularly if these life lessons got baked into context somehow. Particularly Claude on one specific project where I've dubbed him Clod due to some breathtaking over-engineering that I am undoing today.

If your comment was autobiographical, though, uh... some soul-searching might be in order :/

...until it's time to fight over the same scarce holiday gift item that your bucketeers all crave also? :D

Bold strategy given how most vesting cliffs work. He was betting on not being caught for a year.

Yeahhhhhh I've been to enough code reviews / PR reviews to know this will result in 100 opinions about what color the drapes should be and what a catastrophe we've vibe coded for ourselves. If I shoot something to GH I'll highlight it for others, but nothing yet. I can appreciate this makes me look like I'm shilling.

It makes usable code for my projects. It often gets into the weeds and makes weird tesseracts of nonsense that I need to discover, tear down, and re-prompt it to not do that again.

It's cheap or free to try. It saves me time, particularly in languages I am not used to daily driving. Funnily enough, I get madder when I have it write ts/py/sql code since I'm most conversant in those, but for fringe stuff that I find tedious like AWS config and tests -- it mostly just works.

Will it rot my brain? Maybe? If this thing turns me from an engineer to a PM, well, I'll have nobody to blame but myself as I irritate other engineers and demand they fibonacci-size underdefined jira tix. :D

I think there's going to be a lot of momentum in this direction in the coming year. I'm fortunate that my clients embrace this stuff and we all look for the same hallucinations in the codebase and shut them down and laugh together, but I worry that I'm not exactly justifying my rate by being an LLM babysitter.

I use Zen MCP and OpenRouter. Every once in awhile, my instance of claude code will "phone a friend" and use Gemini for a code review. Often unprompted, sometimes me asking for "analysis" or "ultrathink" about a thorny feature when I doubt the proposed implementation will work out or cause footguns.

It's wild to see in action when it's unprompted.

For planning, I usually do a trip out to Gemini to check our work, offer ideas, research, and ratings of completeness. The iterations seem to be helpful, at least to me.

Everyone in these sorta threads asks for "proofs" and I don't really know what to offer. It's like 4 cents for a second opinion on what claude's planning has cooked up, and the detailed response has been interesting.

I loaded 10 bucks onto OpenRouter last month and I think I've pulled it down by like 50 cents. Meanwhile I'm on Claude Max @ $200/mo and GPT Plus for another $20. The OpenRouter stuff seems like less than couch change.

$0.02 :D

You have a homelab.

If this colloquialism continues bothering you, seek help. Of the psychiatric variety.

I will answer this question for only slightly less than $600/hr. :)

Kindly revert back to me if you discover the needful solution.

haha, it's getting dystopian isn't it? At some point you end up letting your guard down just to be a human again -- it's all so exhausting.

While I've been an Econ subscriber in the past when magazines were a thing, the podcast didn't con me into subscribing. _this time_ But I enjoyed their free eps all the same.

The Economist has an interesting podcast about this phenomenon called Scam Inc. You need to be a subscriber to hear more than the first few eps, but they were interesting and went into this situation in detail. Worth a listen to understand this crime and its nuance a little better.

Yeso, Exactlyo :D

I am 100% road warrior like you describe. I'll do a coast-to-coast in 29ish hours of driving.

I recently moved to an EV for my road-tripper vehicle. Yes, I need to stop and recharge every 4-5 hours for 20-40mn.

I find that I like it. A stretch, a coffee, snacks and replenishment. My favorite chargers are at a supermarket and a cafe' nearby.

I agree the pro-EV types try to whitewash this a lot, and I agree it is dishonest.

...but I find that I am okay with the cross-country EV reality anyway.

$0.02

I have trouble with a worldview that does not include "the Dakotas" in "bumfucklandia"

I'm not as allergic to AI content as some (although I'm sure I'll get there) -- but I admire this analogy to low-background steel. Brilliant.

which is why it's hard for me to take these "yay kids are awesome" posts seriously.

I would enjoy seeing your virtuous corporations list. "The devil you see in social media constantly and relentlessly" vs "the devil you never knew existed" seem... not all that different to me.

I suppose it's another way of saying "I'm exhausted trying to find the sucks-less providers of my everyday existence" which I grant is my own failing.

Thanks. I already retired once at 39 with this exact view in mind. I'm frankly amazed I'm still overemployed at 48. But yes, I've been super bearish on the remaining chapters in my career. I've hedged by paying off a (argh, low-interest) mortgage, stacking the bank, and I have a very well developed and near-tech-money side hustle that is ageism resistant.

I keep waiting for this shoe to drop. It hasn't yet. Now the pendulum has swung far enough that I want to preserve my time more than I want to stack more bricks. Amusingly, it's a source of tension with my wife who plans to work for another 15 years and will not be excited to see me out playing without her. (her people live into 100 on the regular. My people die in their 40s and 50s with alarming frequency -- our horizon perspectives are very different :D )

All good problems. If I lose all my tech jobs tomorrow, I will be grateful for the run and not be going hungry. I half expect I'd be relieved.

That sounds fascinating, and I worry it will be "humor that is way more documentary than I am at all comfortable with", like, say, Office Space or Idiocracy. :)

Great timing, though, I've been in need of a new read and I'm a Ricky Gervais fan. Thanks!

Sadly my experience has been that "Perhaps" there is doing more work than it can bear :)

I have traded within a quite tight comp band for my entire 30 year tech career. I am useful in general. I have been valued by being offered "promotions" and "strategic instead of tactical" positions, but I always chafe.

I enjoy the work. I enjoy solving specific problems in tech.

I do not enjoy the "business" of tech and have no interest in any of it.

I definitely have inadequate drive to grow a business and make others wealthy, even if I get a few crumbs.

For me, contracting is the perfect match. I don't need to get involved in your politics, I just need to eat jira tickets. Realiably and well. When there are none to eat, I can go do my own things.

I would need to care a LOT more about the business and dollars to excel at it, and lately I lean in the opposite direction. I see nothing wrong with simply being comfortable and useful. We have it good that we can make this choice.

$0.02 :)

We're an AWS shop, so for lightweight or one-off stuff, it's a typescript lambda. Everything else ends up in a python script to output glue-friendly stuff to S3.

Assume at some point, the data will bork up.

If you ingest Excel (ugh), treat it like free range data. I have a typescript lambda that just shreds spreadsheets in a "ok scan for this string, then assume the thing to the right of it is this value we want" style -- it's goofy AF but it's one of my favorite tools in the toolbox, since I look magical when I use it. It allows me to express-pass janky spreadsheets into Athena in minutes, not days.

It is based on the convert-excel-to-json library and once you grok how it wants to work (excel -> giant freaky JSON object with keys that correspond to cell values, so object.A, object.B, object.C etc for columns. array index for row number), you can use it as a real blunt-force chainsaw approach to unstructured data LARPing as an excel doc :D

I'll take a crack -- I think America's puritanical roots are STILL in play today, and mentioning the very idea that people have sex, even married people, instantly triggers pearl clutching.

I don't think it's rational either, but it is pervasive. If I described the lunch I had with my lover in a work setting, I'd expect to get tutted or an email from HR. It would probably be nonspecific and merely say that I am making others uncomfortable without mentioning the actual problem -- because to put it into words exposes the ridiculousness.

$0.02 :)

> When I was growing up in the 90s my hand writing was so bad it was assumed I would never amount to anything.

I'm curious where you grew up? I am high school class of 1992. I skipped third grade, where a lot of penmanship is taught. We had a computer lab in Junior High (so late 1980s), I had a PC Clone at home that we bought in 1985. I'd turn in writing assignments printed on my epson dot matrix printer. To my knowledge, my appalling handwriting was never considered by anyone.

One of my favorite JS libs. I assume it's part of the validator sequence in LLMs that write JS code :D

Here I assumed I just fat-fingered something when doing an Uber. I never sign up for the recurring charge stuff and recently saw the UberOne subby and canceled it.

I guess now I'll be a party to the class action and get a gift card in 10-12 years from this BS. Neat!