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Now is the best time to be a duct tape engineer

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41–50 of 94 posts

Re: Now is the best time to be a duct tape engineer

#41
post #5

> What I wanted was to say “hey Siri, call Claw Phone” and have the audio system in my Toyota become an IDE. So I build it. Or just focus on driving? Why we are doing it to ourselves? It seems so toxic to fill every possible little moment with… productivity? Is it even productive? This comment is too emotional but i just felt so sad while reading this

My main use case is that I'm driving and think of something I want to remember, and want to record it hands-free without taking my eyes off of the road

Re: Now is the best time to be a duct tape engineer

#42
post #5

> What I wanted was to say “hey Siri, call Claw Phone” and have the audio system in my Toyota become an IDE. So I build it. Or just focus on driving? Why we are doing it to ourselves? It seems so toxic to fill every possible little moment with… productivity? Is it even productive? This comment is too emotional but i just felt so sad while reading this

I wonder if these people just need to talk. I wonder if these people are just avoiding thinking about the tough things in their lives. I wonder if these people are just scared of being human, so reaching for any distraction they can get. I've tried to stop taking my phone with me when I go to the bathroom. When I shower. When I go to bed. Because I think we all have these same addictions. There's things that suck in…

Excrementalist Philosophy

Re: Now is the best time to be a duct tape engineer

#44
I get that many people are tired of too many AI posts and there's an influx of negative comments but I think this is genuinely amazing. Think about watching Star Trek in the 60s and seeing people talk to computers and them understanding and being able to communicate back. We're literally living in the future!

Re: Now is the best time to be a duct tape engineer

#45
post #23
post #5

> What I wanted was to say “hey Siri, call Claw Phone” and have the audio system in my Toyota become an IDE. So I build it. Or just focus on driving? Why we are doing it to ourselves? It seems so toxic to fill every possible little moment with… productivity? Is it even productive? This comment is too emotional but i just felt so sad while reading this

I was a workaholic from 18-26. 12+ hour days for months/years on end. It absolutely was not healthy. Toxic is not an inaccurate label. But I don't regret it. Those years are the foundation of the career I have in my 30's. Back in those days, when I wasn't at a computer, I was listening to non-fiction audiobooks on business and software. I don't know how I had such motivation bvack then, but I'm glad I capitalized on…

I learned a lot during those years too, and in some ways had to learn those things no matter what role or opportunity I chose.

I received some advice to simply add 15 minute of additional "work" a week, and not any more until I could handle it to my baseline... and then be sure to add 15 minutes of "balance" a week as well. Where my work days would go long, I found I was able to tie in habits to go for a walk, eat, etc. This did let me stretch quite far for a longer time, and burn out was a much lower risk.

How efficiently or effectively I learned those lessons could be debatable, but putting in sheer hours on learning and learning to apply things has compounded in some areas very strongly.

At the same time it must be acknowledged that doing this in a way that is not balanced can naturally lead to under development in other areas and it's worth trying to stay mindful of.

Hard work isn't a bad thing, it's the gap of not learning, not improving, not reflecting. There's no shortcut to putting in the work or learning the learnings.

Re: Now is the best time to be a duct tape engineer

#46
post #3

The best time to solve personal problems with those techniques, perhaps. That is not the same as (and might be opposed to) the best time to seek employment or go into business using those techniques; there isn't going to be much of a market for things that your (employer's) potential customers could trivially do themselves.

It is never sufficiently trivial if you don't have the technical know-how or the ability to do it in a time-efficient manner.

Re: Now is the best time to be a duct tape engineer

#47

I see this sentiment constantly. AI tooling is better than ever and its making building things easier than ever. I have respected coworkers who say that are maxing out multiple $200/month subscriptions. But I have yet to see any results? Where is the useful stuff?

Search Ask HN threads, there are lots asking the same question and it looks like people do make useful stuff, it's just personal software not distributed to the public. I find that nice actually, because it's nice to make something just for yourself and is essentially what software is good for, solving your own problem.

Yup, that's a sentiment I wrote about last year: building software for personal use that doesn't need to scale

Re: Now is the best time to be a duct tape engineer

#48

I see this sentiment constantly. AI tooling is better than ever and its making building things easier than ever. I have respected coworkers who say that are maxing out multiple $200/month subscriptions. But I have yet to see any results? Where is the useful stuff?

I do think people are seeing useful results, but it’s at least several orders of magnitude less than what is claimed.

My metric is: how much code that I create today do I depend on in 3 months (incl learnings and one off data pulls etc.) and its waaay less than what I generate. A lot of it is frankly noise.

Re: Now is the best time to be a duct tape engineer

#49
post #39

The good times are yet to come though: when all the slop held together by spaghetti, duct tape, chewing gum and hairballs starts falling apart and someone needs to fix it. If the slop bubble doesn't start popping soon, in 10 years a handful of people will end up being better paid than COBOL developers are now cause they'd be the only one that know what a compiler is. Personally I'm not too enthusiastic about the pros…

Have you used AI lately? Yes, this was the case a year ago but I've been using Claude daily for the past month and the quality is on par with what a senior engineer would be producing - often times better as it's more thorough and can think through all logical edge cases much more reliably. I do review all the code it writes. There are some suggestions I have but I'd say overall, 99% of it is solid.

Re: Now is the best time to be a duct tape engineer

#50
post #5

> What I wanted was to say “hey Siri, call Claw Phone” and have the audio system in my Toyota become an IDE. So I build it. Or just focus on driving? Why we are doing it to ourselves? It seems so toxic to fill every possible little moment with… productivity? Is it even productive? This comment is too emotional but i just felt so sad while reading this

So a lot of slop out there is just undiagnosed ADHD.
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