TravelerOfCode

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation). Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI. As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more. 2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire" 3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies. 4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money." I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here. Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success". Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

CODEX SKILL THAT FINDS COMPLEXITY HOTSPOTS IN YOUR CODEBASE! I made a Codex skill that analyzes your codebase and reports where performance can be improved safely. Scan your project while Codex checks loops, repeated lookups, render-heavy code, N+1 patterns, and places where complexity can potentially be reduced without breaking behavior. -> codebase complexity analysis -> O(n²), O(n*m), repeated scan detection -> before/after complexity estimates -> safe optimization suggestions -> risk level + tests needed -> report-only mode by default -> one-command install Install: npx --yes codex-complexity-optimizer 100% open source. Repo in Bio.

You remember how in 2022-2023, SaaS websites were absolutely soaked in social proof. FeedHive was too. We had star icons in the hero, tiny quotes saying how great the product was, G2 badges further down, a wall of love with links to reviews, more badges, and then another highlighted testimonial in the footer. When we launched the new FeedHive website, we decided to remove almost all of it. No more G2 badge parade and no giant wall of love. We kept a small section focused on outcome proof instead. More like: here is what the product actually helps you do, here is a tiny case-study style example, here is the result. Much less "look how many people like us." And the funny part is that conversions didn't hurt at all. Literally no impact. I think social proof on SaaS websites has been overplayed to death. People know you picked the best quotes. They know the badges are placed there because you want them to trust you. They know the wall of love is curated. If someone actually cares, they will go to Google and search "FeedHive review" themselves. They will check Reddit, G2, YouTube, X, whatever they trust. They do not need your homepage to tell them you are good. I still think proof matters a lot. But I think the old testimonial wall is dead. Show outcomes. Show the product. Show the result. Then let people verify you on their own.

Google just officially proved every 'AEO expert' wrong 🤣 they published a guide about optimizing for AI overviews and it confirms what I've been saying for months 🤷🏻 the guide literally says: "the best practices for SEO continue to be relevant because our generative AI features on Google Search are rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems" no secret "AEO" hacks or tricks, no special AI markup Google even has a mythbusting section where they tell you to ignore: - chunking content for AI - rewriting content just for AI systems - overfocusing on structured data basic SEO worked - still works - and will continue to work ✅ this is exactly what we've been building at Outrank - helping 2,500+ websites rank every day super bullish on it 🚀

I’m not trying to be that guy But GPT 5.5 feels significantly worse today. I don’t think I’m alone with that one.