Software developer.
Austin, TX
Joined August 2009
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I wish I had the ability to feel a lack of meaning from having AI code for me.
yesterday i signed up again for claude max $200 plan and had it change the whole visual metaphor of the productivity app i’ve been working on intermittently over the past year: instead of a traditional UI with tables, lists, tools, etc, i told Fable to use a desktop OS metaphor instead for displaying the various built-in mini apps (tasks, chat, notes, etc). all with a functioning dock and animated wallpaper and multiple window support etc.
fable was able to solve the problem but really i’m beyond the point of being impressed by an LLM doing some upfront task. everything worked, it “made no mistakes”, all tests passed (it even fixed old tests), but i was like ok whatever thanks. i blew past my $200 limit in 2 hours.
and now i’m sitting here like, ok, now what? do i ship this? hear me be a whiny bitch for a second: that it was too easy killed the whole part of the journey of making an app where you become a new person through the creation process, and you earn such pride in your work which in the past gave you the energy and courage to ship things.
and i’m like, i can ship this. i can try to make a buck. the app is done. but i just don’t feel a bond with the work. now if you were a somewhat savvy operator, the business type that would happily sell refrigerator coolant if you sensed an opportunity, AI will be a godsend for you. but i don’t wanna sell refrigerator coolant.
and now because everything is so easy, i hardly ever feel like i’m solving a real problem anymore. it’s like how deep of a problem am i really solving if someone can one shot my app in 2 hours?
i will say that in those 2 hours yesterday, i really enjoyed being back near the code. there’s nothing funner than making shit.
it’s just that the new way of doing things kills a lot of the creative and spiritual juices you used to get before, that many times lead to commercially beneficial outcomes.
now, i just don’t know what’s worth building anymore.
I wish every company would do this but the risk of getting flamed on Reddit is too high.
It’s better to know what you need to improve than to get an opaque “We’re moving on with another candidate” or whatever gibberish they say now.
Our rejection email went viral on Reddit yesterday.
People are shocked a company would tell a candidate exactly why they got rejected.
We're shocked that's shocking.
We asked for 3 sentences about a hard bug.
We got four paragraphs about "holistic approaches to software craftsmanship."
The take-home used temp1, temp2, temp3 as variable names.
Our company name was misspelled twice in the paragraph about attention to detail.
We told them all of that. Directly.
And we told them the door is open if they come back with work that shows they wrote it and read it before sending.
We review code the same way.
Direct. Specific. No hand-waving.
That's just how we build.
ALT https://limestonedigital.com - AI-native engineering
Engineers suck at building product.
This could change but your average engineer tends to miss the boat on what makes a good app good.
Listing off a bunch of features is not what why people will download an app.
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One of my favorite tech presentations ever. I remember watching this at my first job and had the aha moment about what git was.
A DEVELOPER TAUGHT GIT WITH A BOX OF CHILDREN'S TOYS AND ENGINEERS WITH TEN YEARS IN SAY IT'S THE FIRST TIME THE THING EVER ACTUALLY MADE SENSE
90 minutes, one table, a pile of Tinkertoys. No wall of jargon -- he builds a real Git repo out of plastic rods right in front of you.
-> The moment he snaps the first pieces together, Git stops being scary command-line magic and becomes what it really is: a chain of tiny objects pointing at each other.
Branches, merges, rebase, the staging area -- every concept that's ever burned you at 2am -- he rebuilds with toys until a four year old could follow. He calls Git a two-trick pony. After this you'll see exactly why.
Memorizing commands was never the skill -> holding the graph in your head is. And with an AI agent now committing and rebasing on your machine all day, that mental model is the only thing between you and a history you can't read.
Scroll the comments and you'll see the same thing over and over: this is the talk that finally made Git click and made people the one their whole team comes to when it breaks.
Bookmark & watch it today. It's the 1.5 hours that pays you back for the rest of your career ↓
This is the exact problem I’m trying to solve at work.
The problem is multi-faceted but the easy thing to do is just start storing in markdown files in a folder called “knowledge-base” and tell your agents how to read from and update.
Beyond that I find the rabbit hole can go deep.
This may be a dumb question but I’ll ask it here anyways:
I can’t find a good way for my various AI chats to automatically sync its conversation history into a structured knowledge base. So that as I update various chats from time to time and refine context, my knowledge base automatically grows with this new info.
Andy Sterkowitz retweeted
The latest GLM imagery (1301Z) does suggest that the boom was a result of a meteor.
My favorite unexpected benefit of letting agents write your code is how much mental bandwidth is opened up to higher level thinking. Most of my day is reading code and thinking about problems from a much higher level.
I know this is an unpopular take on x dot com but you have time to learn AI. You’re not becoming part of the permanent underclass if you’re not texting your clawdbot 10 times a day.
Software companies are not some monolith where they are all nimble and cutting edge. It’s taking time to learn basic agentic practices, how to convert domain data into something the agents can use (ie RAG), implementing new workflows with AI AND keeping up with the normal day to day feature requests and bug fixes.
That’s not to say you should rest on your laurels. Just don’t listen to the FOMO crowd saying your life is over.
The full context of the the job of software engineering is *in the code*. What?
Been using claude code for a few weeks and loved it. Tried Codex today and I'm liking it quite a bit. This feels like a crazy time to be a developer. Tool quality changes constantly.
In honor of my guy returning
USA, I’m BACK!!
With special guests @LilJon and DJ Laz
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Andy Sterkowitz retweeted
Claude opus 4 .5 has been around for months, it hasn’t changed.
But in the past 2 weeks, rafts of coders, some very experienced, are suddenly claiming that coding is solved.
Is this a form of AI psychosis? Where the belief that Opus 4.5 is a miracle coder is being reinforced, not just by the AI, but by numerous social media confirmations by other coders who may also be falling into AI psychosis?
To me, that this recent tend is erupting so suddenly, when we’ve had Opus 4.5 for months, is interesting and potentially a red flag.
As for my own experiments with 4.5 and other models, AI in coding can be very amazing and useful, but I still have to be the architect, and it still blows up and fails a lot.
Psychosis can be induced by multiple people each confirming each others beliefs. This is how tribal bubbles work, and how hype gets generated by marketing and social trends.
It’s worth noting that and thinking through it.
I wasn’t as bad as OP but my chronic illness was helped dramatically with high dose nattokinase.
Not a single doctor I’ve told about it had ever heard of it.
