sheriffderek

I have been thinking about this a lot. I think for a great many of engineers, the ones who did it because they loved it only to discover that money was in fact at the end of the rainbow found both the journey and the destination satisfying. In fact, I think I can argue with authority that the destination was only satisfying as the journey was difficult. The hard-fought evenings spent toiling away on an idea and codebase that slowly gives way to your vision was an incredible experience. The group of people that fell into this category of hard-fought journey and destination we will call them tinkerers. One thing tinkerers have always hated is the already known problems. The journey is clear as day. The obstacles minor inconveniences. Its purely a matter of typing the solution into the terminal. This is also why I think so many of this group goes out and does open source, or starts companies. Work largely falls into this category with few exceptions. From this reason is why I largely find UI work soul sucking. I know the solution, its a matter of just looking up the details and putting it into my editor. yawn. CSS, flex box this, grid that, put the tailwind classes in the bag. To me, the LLM software world is with little to no journey and discovery. Its more of simply taking my high level idea and just formulating it into testable, atomic chunks that can be verified. I have traded my favorite part, discovery and raw creation, with itemized list of TODOs and patience and "No Mistakes." To this, every morning from 6 to 9 I simply just hand code every thin. even UI things. It is because I want journey and discovery and raw creation. Maybe one day comes and its just so futile that I stop this. But for now, I still see such great value in this. I see such better thought through products. Because slowing down and truly thinking through everything. The architecture, the design, everything is an expression of discovery and creation. And I love it. I am sure there will come a day, maybe even in the next 6 months where I change my mind. For now, I pursue the love of the game intentionally. I do also believe that there exists people who get the same joy I got from building with tears and sweat by prompting LLMs. I am positive of it. I just don't understand how. But people love UI work. I also don't understand that.

Programming was deeply satisfying work to me. Work for hours/days before getting the payoff of the code working well on your machine. I’m feeling so much friction now to open the editor and do this kind of task by hand, but also increasingly depressed with the nature of work in an AI assisted dev workflow. Back and forth prompting seems to eat at my soul. Need to find a balance that brings back some of the toil.

DHH discovering that things run faster on linux without abstractions has to be one of the weirdest things that's happening on the timeline right now

I don’t believe that you need to love what you do in order to be good at it. Some of the best engineers I know are actually pretty anxious and paranoid (about job security) The issue is with a person having no employable skills thinking their personal time not building skills is worth something, and then complaining no one wants to hire them.

I've worked with more than 50 freelancers, it's amazing how low the bar is. And I'm not even talking about technical skills. Do those easy things and I'll guarantee you'll be in the top 5%: ‧ answer emails in < 48h ‧ deliver on time ‧ notify when having delay ‧ communicate clearly what you can and can't do : top 0.1% On the other hand, I’ve never once tried to negotiate rates with someone who does all of the above. And never considered hiring someone else.