Denilson Nastacio

I summarized the most important lessons I learned after making over a dozen career moves, along with a simple framework to evaluate whether it is the time to stay in my current role or start looking for a new one. dnastacio.medium.com/hierarchy-of-c… 1/🧵

@Arsenovicandrej @IvarTalksBarca Yellow offense is yellow offense. There is an easy way to not get one in that situation.

@IvarTalksBarca The ref was just out of his mind. He didn’t even realise that Camavinga was on a yellow already. If he knew, do you actually believe he would given the second? Absolutely not! If this had happened to Bayern, we would be hearing about it for years!

Camavinga was on a yellow card, just made a tackle and instead of getting back into position, he first took the ball with his feet, before he took it with his hand. The concept is the same. You get a yellow card for kicking the ball away (time wasting). Sure, maybe he could have gotten away with it, but why risk it? Guler, who ended up receiving the ball from Camavinga, threw it right back to Bayern Munich because he knew what was going to happen.

@javarevisited From shell terminal, assuming no header line (trivial to handle) "sort $file | uniq"

Technical interview question: You have a huge CSV file (20 GB). You need to remove duplicate rows. Memory is limited. How would you approach this?

@OneFutureOfMany @ujjwalscript In that analogy, AI can write Assembly 10x faster. No one wants that.

I liken code to when compilers first arrived. Developers at the time were accustomed to writing machine code. The first period saw developers lamenting how hard it would be to read all the machine code made by compilers. They spent tons of time reading the machine code and tweaking it so it met certain development principles. They complained about losing a few cycles here or there and debated about time savings and complained about compiler bugs. But when was the last time you heard of someone reading the machine code after compilation? Why do you believe that “humans need to read and understand the output” is somehow a necessity?

Unpopular Opinion: We aren't building the future 10x faster with AI. We are just generating legacy code 10x faster. Everyone is currently bragging about developer velocity. "I built this entire backend in a weekend!" "AI wrote 80% of my codebase!" But here is the reality check we are ignoring: Code is a liability, not an asset. If an AI tool spits out 1,000 lines of functional boilerplate in five seconds, that is still 1,000 lines that a human being has to read, review, secure, and maintain when the dependencies inevitably break next year. We are treating code generation like a pure productivity win, but we are optimizing for the wrong metric. The bottleneck in software engineering was never how fast we could type. The bottleneck has always been comprehension, architecture, and maintenance. If we don't shift our focus from "generation speed" to "architectural sanity," the tech debt of the next five years is going to be an absolute, unmaintainable nightmare.

Everyone wants to contribute code. Fewer want to integrate into team operations, task coordination, testing, migration, maintenance, operations, on call. Writing the code is, by large, the fun part of the work. Volunteering only to do the fun part is ... a choice.

@robertgraham The reporting is correct: people in the Philippines are helping guide the cars. "But is not that much" is a weird counter-argument. The range of assist and conditions is behind a black box and can change at a moment's notice. The point is: there is a human-driver involved.

So many people have dunked on this malarky. It's worth repeating: if you agree with him, it's probably because you misunderstand like him. Remote navigators aren't "driving" the car. The AI is driving the car. Remote navigators just tell the car how to get unstuck, like "backup 20 feet and turn left". They aren't taking control with a remotely operated steering wheel. In fact, it's illegal to do so in California. If Waymo gives the remote navigators a wheel and pedal, they are in violation of the law. By law, the car is driving. Remote navigators are "backseat drivers", with no control over the wheel, brakes, or accelerator. There is no reason this needs to be done in California vs. the Philippines.

@jamesacowling We are quickly careening off towards gigantic code-bases that no one can hold in their brains anymore. I started seeing regular PRs with 10k line changes with 80% boilerplate code of redundant input sanitization and exception catches across 4-5 levels of nested calls.

The Software Crisis of the 60s/70s "ended" with the realization that abstractions matter more than cranking out code: languages with interfaces and information hiding, structured control flow instead of gotos, standard libraries instead of building everything from scratch, and a focus on architectural thinking. I'm obviously biased but I think we're at a risk of regressing without backend platforms that constrain complexity by default: functions, control structures, transactions, type safety, and end-to-end consistency.

@erenbali Can we add some basic controls to prompts? Nothing fancy, just some syntax for looping through instructions. Oh, and maybe a way to give a name to some of prompt sequences so it is easier to reuse them?

Yes. Software engineers will all go away. There will be a new profession of people whose only job is to tell the machines what they should do in a manner that’s efficient and precise.

@thebiryanidev Acting like an owner means thinking through consequences to the business, not working longer hours. I have seen people working long hours and executing bad direction as a matter of course. Being average on hours is healthy. Being average on ownership may become an identity.

I used to do this but A senior engineer’s advice i got which changed my quality of life completely is “Be an average at work” Honestly, it just worked.

@mmatthias @samswoora Isn't that like saying anyone can be a doctor without experience or skills but they need to know what to ask patients? The "but" part is the experience and skills.

@samswoora experience matters less, but you still need to know better before you even begin to prompt IMO attitude (I can do this and do it exceptionally well) and overall energy (I can focus and keep going for days, weeks and months on the same thing) is everything now

Experience no longer really matters in software engineering. Opus 4.5 basically levelled the playing field. Jesus - 10 years of my life were for nothing

Growth papers over a lot of bad business cases. Lack of growth highlights all that is wrong with broken business cases. That also works with society. That also works with life. The universe demands growth.

I wonder how much of the "programming is dead" discourse is the result of people who never worked on production system being able to create prototypes. I can ask ChatGPT for good medical opinions all day and still would not think I can handle a general population of patients.

@johnrushx Because language processing and encoding was never a bottleneck.

Why don’t we see any real impact of AI on the GDP and productivity? It’s been 3 full years since ChatGPT release. More than a trillion dollars invested so far, every smart human out there involved in AI, but we’re not seeing any documented impact yet, beyond the benchmarks?

Using "coding" and "engineering" interchangeably does not help the discourse. An AI writing code has no concern for engineering across the entire stack from requirements management to monitoring and supporting production code. Aligning all those processes remains unsolved.

Compound Engineering is what happens when agents write 100% of the code. At @every, engineers don’t type code anymore. They orchestrate agents. The shift: - Coding is no longer the bottleneck - Planning, review, and learning loops matter more than syntax - Each feature makes the next one easier to build The 4-step Compound Engineering loop: 1.Plan – Agents research the codebase + best practices and produce detailed plans 2.Work – Agents write code, tests, and iterate using real app simulations 3.Assess – Humans + AI review from multiple angles (security, performance, overbuild) 4.Compound – Lessons learned are stored so future agents never repeat mistakes Complexity still grows, but so does the AI’s understanding of the system. Result: - One developer can now do the work of ~5 - Products run by single engineers serve thousands of users - New hires instantly inherit years of institutional knowledge Engineering is no longer about writing code. It’s about designing learning systems that compound. — Thanks @danshipper and @kieranklaassen for sharing your approach. So much to learn and takeaway from this compound engineering approach.

@Wisdom_HQ If we are going to be precise: at least two. (You did not say the couple were the only people to attend.)

@plk669888 @burkov Chores. - "analyze code changes, create a commit message following project guidelines at this URL, create a pull request following project template" - "look at this PR from colleague, create feedback for disciplines X, Y, Z. Inspect adherence to project guidelines." ...

Genuine question - I have done a lot of programming, wrote and support an open source system with tens of thousands of users and fluent in perhaps about five or six programming languages. Every time I look at these posts about AI coding tools, I cannot see what the use of them is - I have never used one, have no desire to end up with a code base I don't know and have to read to know what it does specifically. Short of having really extensive regression tests, I wouldn't be confident it works after having some AI system change large parts of it. What, from an experienced developers point of view, actual *net* benefit do they bring?

I don't understand why Google trained Gemini 3.0 Pro this way. User: Fix this issue. Gemini: Here's the updated code. User: You removed all the comments and log commands, put them back. Gemini: Here's the code with everything back. User: The comments are still absent, and the log commands too. You must only modify the relevant part of the code and keep the rest of the existing code intact. Gemini: Here's the code with everything back. User: FUCK! YOU STILL REMOVED ALL THE COMMENTS AND LOGS! PUT THEM BACK, YOU LITTLE PIECE OF SHIT! Gemini prints the correct code. @GoogleAI , why? I mean, WHY?

@ALEngineered Don't discount the possibility that highest performers ask those questions as an artful way of pointing out problems they already noticed. They will not be asking the same questions everytime. Anyone could. They will be asking only those applying to the circumstance.

The highest-performing developers I worked with at Amazon asked better questions than everyone else. After 18 years in tech, here's what I learned: while average engineers jump to solutions, exceptional ones pause to ask the right questions first. The 6 questions that separated high performers: "What problem are we actually solving?" "What happens when this fails?" "How will we know if this is working?" "What's the simplest solution that could work?" "Who else has solved this?" "What are we NOT going to do?" The career-changing insight: The quality of your questions determines the quality of your solutions. These thinking patterns apply beyond engineering to any complex problem-solving role. More systematic approaches to advancing your tech career: go.alifeengineered.com/?utm_source=x&…

@HeckSpawn @ThrillaRilla369 That is just common sense.

@ThrillaRilla369 I pull them out so as to keep the weight of the carton balanced.

My girlfriend got on to me the other day because she doesn’t understand why I can’t just pick eggs out of the carton like a “normal” person. She’s standing there watching me and says, “Why can’t you just go row by row like everyone else?” I said, “Because no egg should ever know when its time is coming.” She stared at me for a second, shook her head, and said, “You’re a psycho,” then walked off. Little does she know…I’ve got a whole tournament system going on. I take two eggs, tap them together, and whichever one doesn’t crack moves on to the next round. Only the strongest survive. 🥚 💪 😂

The water doesn't go back upstream either. The right question is whether people in that community still have access to the water they need.

@dantypo Car & Driver (I think) shared the story of a dealer that charged a US$75 fee for "EV charge port cleaning".

My wife was at the dealership to get a tire rotation and balance. This was known to be a little over $100 and the oil change is about $100. So naturally we expected a bill of maybe $200-$220 when it was done. Wife texts and says it’s going to be $325. She said because they said I needed an air filter. So I called and asked them to itemize it for me before she drives off. The air filter was $75! I told them not to do it. He said “it’s already in” I said, “take it out, I just found a set of air and cabin filters for $20 as we talked. If I can get it for that, a Mazda dealer is getting it for less and it’s two thumb clips to change.” He said “I can’t do that” I said “you can and you will because if you don’t I’ll never buy there again and I’ll tell everyone and anyone not to. Is that worth the price of a $20 filter” He said, “ok, sir… but to be clear, she agreed to it” I said, “of course she did, but I didn’t set up an appointment for an air filter and I never would.” My point is this— people need to push back. This has all gotten incredibly ridiculous. Folks, I bought a filter set for a Maserati for $22 dollars and that was 2 air filters & a cabin filter, and all of 10 minutes TOTAL to replace. I truly believe that all of this has to do with us no longer teaching kids (or wives) that certain things in life are absolutely easy to do. *END RANT*