sdevonoes

My existence has as substrate: shelter, food and healthcare. Money provides these via jobs. Once that’s covered, sure, pleasure comes.

I don’t like it, but that’s how im playing the game of life

> Far more worry about being expected to do more for the same pay (51%), getting trapped in an unsustainable pace (46%)

This is a feature, not a bug. Not for us (engineers), but for our bosses, ofc

Are you earning 10x too? You are just cheaper to your employer… and you seem proud of that. But naive

We should rephrase the multipliers. We are not 10x whatever, we are x/10 cheaper now to the companies that hire us. That’s the correct frame. AI is not here to make the life of engineers better; AI is here for the delight of companies

But there are two types of “programming”: 1) programming per se (just you writing code for fun and perhaps building your own tools) and 2) a team of people with real-world constraints writing software for others for revenue

It’s clear why it feels so good to use something like Lisp for personal projects. It’s also clear why the vast majority of companies don’t use it

I would say it was a joke. Cannot take it seriously

The companies I have worked for before all have used open source software like postgres, mysql, go, python, k8s, etc. 99% of the time we relied on free work; never contributed to these projects nor forked them for our own needs. I don’t think this behaviour is the unusual path tbh

Don’t understand these rewrites.

- typically they are behind a single person. That’s usually bad because of spf

- typically they are achieved in a very short amount of time, so the author hasn’t acquired any discipline in creating the project. That means it’s unlikely the author is going to stick to the project in the mid and long term

- anyone that wants to contribute to the project needs to pay. Needs to pay tokens because it’s increasingly difficult to maintain these projects without AI

So, who wants to put something like this in production? Doesn’t make much sense

No. Because I will know it’s fake.

I find it painful as well. I actually find agentic coding counterproductive. I typically use LLMs the “old way”: web chat interface, asking questions and searching. I write the code by hand. This makes me 2-3x more productive than before (I guess with agents I could be 5-10x more productive but the price to pay is not worth it)

> Good specs should be grounded (complete and not ambiguous), they don't need to be formal

IMHO, this is a mistake. I guess we play with it because there’s isn’t anything better nowadays. Writing and maintaining “specs” in plain english is painful.

I want to use Pi, but I don’t trust the npm ecosystem at all. I could use a VMs, but I guess it’s just not worth it

Certainly I have never been in such a situation, but just for me to understand: if the sender has enough decision power to move forward with a default action without confirmation, then the email is simply a polite notice to someone above in the command chain, isn’t it?

Why the email then? Wouldn’t a record of the decision (not via email , but in some confluence-like space) be enough? If the confirmation is really needed then a default action wouldn’t be possible, ofc

I started with js and php. Moved to Java. Then node. Then php again. Then Go. Then Kotlin. Then TS. Then Python. Then Go again. In between a bunch of sql, html, css, and many different tools, libraries and frameworks. The most important things Ive learned are around architecture/databases/distributed-systems, tho.

I don’t think i could have survived in this industry if I knew only 1 or 2 “stacks”.

> Our hypothesis is simple: session logs are now the most important artifact in software development, and should be stored alongside the code itself in the repository.

I don’t think this scales. We recently have been doing “spec driven development” and we are committing the specs and prompts to our repo, alongside the generated code. At the beginning it seems fine: you wanna change something, you update the spec and ask the machine to regenerate the code. Easy. Over time, though, you have hundreds if not thousands if spec files in MD. It’s all English prose. There is duplication and subtle inconsistencies. It’s difficult to search for sections of a spec. Do you create a new file for this new requirement or update an existing one? What level of detail is enough here? Should I hint the machine about using the “saga” pattern or just let it know that we are dealing with non atomic transactions distributed across services? Etc. When a colleague opens a PR updating a spec, it’s hard to suggest objective changes (at least with code, you can demonstrate the presence of bugs… not so much with English prose. Sometimes I feel like a lawyer)

All in all, it seems as if maintenance of english prose is way worse than maintenance of actual code in big enough systems. You not only need to review the spec but also review the generated code. It’s painful

Nah. You got it wrong. Don’t think too much of yourself, pal

Even if cloning a saas is one click away (it isn’t now, but let’s imagine), you would still need to run it in production. If you care a bit about it, you probably want to keep it secure and up to date, and keep backups, and add monitoring/alerting. While AI can help with all of this, is still some work to be done by a (knowledgeable) human.

I doubt a large percentage of any user base is willing to do all of that

For me, reading used to be a way to enjoy part of my free time.

Nowadays is still that but it’s also a way to relax. Even though I don’t have accounts in the main social media networks (instagram, fb, twitter, youtube, etc) I still consume them indirectly on a weekly basis (e.g., i like to watch videoclips in YT, a friend sends me a twitter link, etc). It makes me anxious. I’ve realised that consuming in tiny bits (short videos, ads, stories, tweets, private messages, even going to those stores where everything is under $5) doesn’t suit me well, therefore reading regular books for at least 1-2h per day (plus other activities like working out alone, or going for a walk to a park) is becoming essential for my wellbeing.

Not just that, but for example, working as a software engineer in Germany for an English speaking company means your salary is gonna be p90 among the population.

Compare that to someone who doesn’t work in IT and needs to master the language to get a decent job. All in all, it’s better to speak English in Germany

Doesn’t really match my experience. If you are non white and you go and look for an apartment in any big german city (because you shouldn’t move a small town if you are non white) then you have 2 options: you have money and can afford a slightly higher rent than average or you don’t have extra money and have to compete with the locals. You have very little chance to find something decent if you compete against the locals.

Aren’t they the biggest scammers on earth, though?

Wheres the joy in cleaning public toilets? Should all of those workers leave?

There are non technical people building and shipping software. That’s fine, but not all software is equal: the software you release and it’s behind an ecommerce platform (or a bank, or a hospital, or the train system) is not like the software behind your custom-made productivity app. I think for the former software we still need people with the title “software engineer”

And as systems become more complex with time, we will need more people with the title “software engineer”

I understand you mean “data” model instead? Perhaps for simple cruds, there’s no much point in differentiating between the data model and the domain model. For more complex scenarios, having orm concerns leak into the domain model is not nice

What YT is now:

- ads every now and then

- addictive shorts no one needs

- suggested videos nobody asked for

- geo ban of videos

> I'm finding AI increasingly harder to like.

That summarises pretty well the whole situation. AI is cool and all, but not worth it considering all the disadvantages

> I would recommend anyone starting in fintech to take some time to understand accounting principles and the ledger in a bit more depth than just debits vs credits

Any good resources you would recommend to learn more about this?

I didn’t know modern (2015-2026) software engineers were making such a strong distinction between “writing code” and “designing solutions”. It’s not the majority of engineers “design” and then hand over the implementation to others (at least Ive never seen that before).

From my experience, a typical software engineer needs to understand the business (e.g., knowing who your users are), design a solution (e.g., we probably need an event-driven arch right here) and write the code (e.g., we should use select for update skip locked to avoid over claiming). They all are equally challenging imho

> What seems clear to me is that expectations around velocity and throughput will increase (are increasing).

This is why I don’t understand why folks around here (that are employed) feel so enthusiastic about AI. We are going to be working more in a rush to produce stuff that we won’t be feeling as proud of as we did before AI. Unless you were in the profession for the money, the delights of crafting software simply go away and AI is pushing us closer to be just… well, I don’t know, but I don’t like it. Sure thing, if you are a CEO, this new state of things must be wonderful

Lucky you.