01284a7e

"Ride the wave."

Or don't.

Most LLMs people are using to code are paywalled, and controlled by private, for-profit entities.

This is fundamentally different than the past, and diametrically opposed to the hacker.

If you're a hacker, which most of you are not (things have changed here over time), you will reject this.

The web stuff is well done. Now, with this newly created momentum, you should re-record the songs now, without AI. Hell, you could probably afford an awesome studio and equipment too. You could easily blow the AI out of the water.

So Pelé is just a handle then, eh?

People at Apple are not left-handed, they don't drive, they don't work out, and they don't seem to go out in the cold very much. Oh, and they definitely don't play video games.

"Any company that does this kind of stuff as a routine will not continue the routine of employing people for long."

"On contracts" is explicitly mentioned. While bouncing your W-2 employees' paychecks is a big no-no, there are plenty of organizations that stiff contractors for decades.

Been doing this since my early 30's, and doing it currently.

I guess all the "rock stars" are dead at 27 so the point stands.

I stopped caring about the (ab)use of the word Zen in "tech" when that scummy startup Zenefits got in trouble.

I'll remove the FOUC. The front-end isn't in tip-top shape yet!

I am working on a human-only community called Island. You can request an invite now over at https://island0.com.

Becoming a professional software engineer without a Comp Sci (or overlapping engineering degree) was a bad idea for the reasons you mention.

I made it 15 years on mostly willpower earning millions of dollars, but never worked for a FAANG in any capacity, was unemployed (and even homeless) for different stints starting out, and to this day still get asked why I don't have a CS or engineering degree.

And a Haiku-powered Claude Code could now probably one-shot most of the stuff I have ever banged my head on as hard as I could to figure out.

I am just reflecting on the past though. What will make you "successful" then won't be what makes you that now.

In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell: https://ia801002.us.archive.org/27/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.4...

My whole career (15+ year) is built on orgs (Fortune 500s, academia, government, and even startups) hiring me to actually get something done that an employee spent months "working on" that ended up useless and scrapped. It's everywhere, all the time.

Additionally, you can be productive from a development sense, ship functional software that is to spec, and everybody is happy - and it still never gets used, or gets canceled, and does nothing for anyone. This too, could also be considered performative.

The money does put food on the family dinner table, so be it.

Thales Bad Bot Report categorizes the traffic between "good" and "bad" bots.

I would add that AI dramatically blurs the line between legitimate and malicious, and the intent generally speaking.

In regards to social bots, there's a 2024 study of over 1 million accounts on X and over 60% were found likely to be bots. Curiously, when Musk took over Twitter, the "Blue Checkmark" became something that can be bought for several bucks a month (with crypto, even), without any sort of verification.

I mean, just for a reference point, 2013. 2013 was the first year they did the report.

According to the Thales Bad Bot Report, in 2025 >53% of traffic came from bots. 2024 was 50 - 50, and in 2013, it was measured at 43%.

AI-driven* bot activity has increased more than tenfold however in the past 12 months so I'm confident this will grow to a very solid majority.

Zero. I have also taken all my blogs offline. Building a human-only community at https://island0.com where no AI-generated content is tolerated.

I think a lot of these execs have equity in Anthropic... and the dumb ones that don't are just "keeping up with the Joneses" so to speak.

Screw Cloudflare. I went through a bizarre 3+ months hiring process where I would have a disconnected, vague 30 minute interview with someone every couple weeks. Then, suddenly rejected for no real reason given.

How would one build an online community free of LLM agents commenters and links to "slop" content?

Strict invitation trees? Small signup fees? No SEO incentives?

No, it's not at all. Bizarre analogy.

I pulled all the websites I had - some existed for a decade plus and made me hundreds of thousands of dollars. All that is left is bots that theft the value of my work. Until something changes, goodbye.

Can we reach out directly to Reid Hoffman? Or is he too wrapped up doing damage control from being all over the Epstein Files?

Your business is getting the money. Your business is not to fly around the world trying to engineer-mog the client. The OP has a bad ego.

"They don't even use version control..." Yeah? Get the money. The client are "carpetbaggers", yeah okay... get the money.

It's implied that they hired you because they need the help. But they also may have hired you because they need the help and you seem like a sucker they can stiff.

Seems like the logical conclusion, no matter what.

I don't think it's a scam at all. Will it be around in a week? Probably not. But it's not a scam.

The opposite is true in my case - though 1 organization that had a small budget for things like AWS certs. I remember almost everyone who would get those certificates would never really learn anything from it either. They would just take the exams.

The right thing to be said here. Oracle is trash. Would you expect rude idiots to be nice smart people all of a sudden?

I'm sorry but you work at Oracle. Terrible people. Very rude people. You should expect it.

All (not some) of the most successful devs I've known in the sense of building something that found market fit and making money off it were terrible engineers. They were fairly productive at building features. That's it. And they were productive - until they weren't. Their work ultimately led to outages, lost data, and sensitive data being leaked (to what extent, I don't even know).

The ones who got acquired - never really had to stand up to any due diligence scrutiny on the technical side. Other sides of the businesses did for sure, but not that side.

Many of you here work for "real" tech companies with the budget and proper skin in the game to actually have real engineers and sane practices. But many of you do not, and I am sure many have seen what I have seen and can attest to this. If someone like the person I mentioned above asks you to join them to help fix their problems, make sure the compensation is tremendous. Slop clean-up is a real profession, but beware.

I'm cool with blogging about your mess-ups, sort of. Is "I'm incompetent" a good content strategy though? Yeah, you're going to get a lot of traffic to that post, but what are you signaling? Your product is a thousand bucks a year. I would not go near it.