Dysfunctional Programming account #1. Senior SWE. I still write C++ for money. ex-Haskell, ex-OCaml. All opinions are my own.
London, UK
Joined October 2013
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It's time to git gud. #ad
I just spent 2 hours doing a manual task instead of automating it in 3 days.
They’re going to revoke my SWE license now.
*bong rip* If you leave your comfort zone too often, then leaving the comfort zone becomes your comfort zone. And so to truly live your new comfort zone, you must stay inside your comfort zone which is for you is leaving your comfort zone.
I just realised that my autistic persistence of retrying a failed attempt at least 4 times until it works could be really dangerous in wrong hands
I run tests on CI. They fail.
Claude suggests retrying because they might be flaky.
I retry. They fail. Again.
Claude thinks they’re deterministic. Starts investigating.
My paranoid ass thinks they’re actually flaky. I’m just unlucky.
I retry for 3rd time. They fail again.
Claude is now adamant there’s a genuine issue. Spends 2 hours and millions of tokens. Otherwise three flaky tests in a row have the probability of 0.0037% which is impossible.
Are my Senior SWE instincts a joke to you??? You shouldn’t underestimate my autistic stubbornness.
I retry again. 4th time.
They pass.
They were indeed flaky.
As always, the best security model is:
"Don't be important enough for anyone to spend resources on hacking you."
I notified a friend working at a big tech corporate about the PHP vulnerability as their entire infrastructure runs on PHP
He answered
"Thanks, I'll try patch it in a few days as I'm Out of Office (OOO) now"
And this is a modern tech company, imagine the traditional companies running PHP
People won't update fast enough and the vulnerability will be out in the wild once the patch hits as anyone can reverse engineer it based on the patch
Considering this, there's gonna be so many sites hacked and so much user data exposed I think
🤯
If your life gets temporarily worse and then back to normal, you feel happy.
If your life gets temporarily better and then back exactly how it was, you feel unhappy.
I run tests on CI. They fail.
Claude suggests retrying because they might be flaky.
I retry. They fail. Again.
Claude thinks they’re deterministic. Starts investigating.
My paranoid ass thinks they’re actually flaky. I’m just unlucky.
I retry for 3rd time. They fail again.
Claude is now adamant there’s a genuine issue. Spends 2 hours and millions of tokens. Otherwise three flaky tests in a row have the probability of 0.0037% which is impossible.
Are my Senior SWE instincts a joke to you??? You shouldn’t underestimate my autistic stubbornness.
I retry again. 4th time.
They pass.
They were indeed flaky.
Turns out, this was an agent token saving tip
I alias every Linux CLI command I use to a single letter.
a: awk
b: bc
c: cat
d: date
e: echo
f: find
g: grep
h: head
i: git
j: jq
k: kill
l: ls
m: mv
n: env
o: sort
p: ps
q: cp
r: rm
s: sed
t: cut
u: uniq
v: vim
w: wc
x: xargs
y: yes
z: tar
This saves me ~4 hours/year.
I spend these 4 hours telling others about my optimised setup.
The good news about AI agents is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do.
Related
Why are people scared AI will take their job?
You pay $200/month for Opus 5.5 and it literally sits there doing nothing until you tell it what to do.
It’s ironic that the best agents have zero agency.
I’ve been thinking about the same for months.
You doomscroll on social media for hours a day, or maybe even just 20-30 minutes.
Our ancestors didn’t have social media, so instead:
1. They followed their hobbies
2. Met other people and socialised irl
3. Improved their skills
4. Read books
5. Simply enjoyed being bored and rested
Those hours per day compound rapidly. Years go by and you realise you spent most of your time arguing with strangers instead of enjoying your life or making the world a better place.
Most people today treat multi-hour daily social media scrolling as a normal, low-cost way to unwind or stay connected. By 2050 it may look as reckless as mid-20th-century doctors endorsing cigarettes: a habit that eroded attention, sleep, and real relationships while being sold as harmless entertainment.
I’m terrified to think how many people will adopt the AI-speak and start talking like machines. AI is load-bearing for many lives.
Too much exposure to AI talking can permanently damage your brain. It’s accessibility is a red herring.
I guess only time will settle it.
It’s impressive that agents still mostly run on C tools written in 70’s
grep
sed
head
tail
cut
find
ls
xargs
They don’t build software like this anymore.
Why are people scared AI will take their job?
You pay $200/month for Opus 5.5 and it literally sits there doing nothing until you tell it what to do.
It’s ironic that the best agents have zero agency.
I believe I would be happier on my SWE job if I had a really crappy job first.
I’m talking 12 hours of tedious manual almost unpaid labour.
It didn’t help me that my first job was the best one and it took 11 years to find something better.
It’s crazy how I can make a silly post here and it 24 hours it’s viewed by 5000x more people than I ever had a meaningful conversation irl
I don't understand how people use VS Code for programming.
The editing window is so small.
Are you supposed to use only AI now?
It’s funny to see people in replies jumping to conclusions from this post without having any extra context
How long it took me to find each SWE job:
2014: 1 job applied, 0 interviews, 1 day (nepotism)
2015: 1 job applied, 2 interviews, 1 week
2016: 1 job applied, 4 interviews, 1 week
2016: 1 job applied, 0 interviews, 1 day (friend is a CEO)
2018: 1 job applied, 2 interviews, 1 week
2019: 1 job applied, 5 interviews, 1 week
2021: 1 job applied, 0 interviews, 1 day (invited)
2022: 7 jobs applied, 16 interviews, 3 months
2026: 167 jobs applied, 54 interviews, 1 year 4 months
How long it took me to find each SWE job:
2014: 1 job applied, 0 interviews, 1 day (nepotism)
2015: 1 job applied, 2 interviews, 1 week
2016: 1 job applied, 4 interviews, 1 week
2016: 1 job applied, 0 interviews, 1 day (friend is a CEO)
2018: 1 job applied, 2 interviews, 1 week
2019: 1 job applied, 5 interviews, 1 week
2021: 1 job applied, 0 interviews, 1 day (invited)
2022: 7 jobs applied, 16 interviews, 3 months
2026: 167 jobs applied, 54 interviews, 1 year 4 months