Punch yourself in the face with reality

As someone who used to have an incredibly hard time putting my app in front of users, or asking for feedback, or getting rejected, etc:

Posts like this one always made me feel like I was a coward. Like there was.. unvirtuousness.. in not killing one’s darlings, not validating ideas, not quitting things in time, not looking for product-market fit.

I can report that looking for product-market fit, and everything else from the list above, became easier once I started taking antidepressants and adhd meds.

For example, it turns out deciding to punch yourself in the face with reality is much easier when you don’t feel, for example, like abandoning a project would be a giant betrayal and a thing one might in theory do but you must never do ever under any circumstances.

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There are likely many people who have more capacity for self control, and who are genuinely helped by hearing moderately harsh truths because they can (1) take a look at their behavior, (2) realize it hurts them and their chances of success, (3) realize where they’ve been blind to reality, and (4) change.

I suspect that such people assume — maybe correctly in most cases — that if someone hasn’t done (4), it’s because they haven’t done enough (1-3), and this is the appropriate lever to push.

I don’t know how to finish this comment.

I wouldn't phrase it as cowardice or virtue.. it's just a skill you have to learn. I'm struggling with getting my project in front of users for a bit of a different reason, which is just that it's a bit of a specialty writing tool, and asking people to test it would also be asking them to do work with it (it's really the only way to know if it works for them or not), which is kind of a lift. My hope here is just that because I myself am a consumer of this and have worked in this space, my judgement will be similar to other's judgement. I hope!

What even motivates you to write something like this? In what universe is a software engineer a "rank"? You sound absurdly bitter that people want to keep their livelihood?

This doesn't even match with reality. I got laid off in January because of "ai" (scare quotes because it was really about the salaries of the US based teams being more expensive than the overseas teams, I think). I got hired at a new job with better pay within two months, and my team is still hiring software engineers, and we work on cutting edge stuff. And yes we use AI (tastefully), but nobody here expects it to replace them. Hacker News and twitter are a fricking echo chamber of the most obnoxious people trying to be "thought leaders", but it doesn't match my reality at all.

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I think ultimately you still have to pay down tech debt eventually. Either through bankruptcy (throwaway the project) or servicing the debt (refactoring, rearchitecting etc).

It's not different than when coding by hand, often we take shortcuts by hand that we then have to pay for later. It really just becomes a judgement call on when to stop prompting new features and start service what you have.

I think with AI and vibecoding its tempting to assume the output is good and chase the dopamine hits of more features, more features, more features, but eventually you get stuck.

That being said AI is also a great tool at paying down tech debt. It's great at helping you read a codebase and can be great at making the mechanical changes you want. And I think there is some truth to the story that newer models will be able to pay down debt (fix the slop) of older models. But its all shades of grey, newer models are better than older ones, but can I emit slop with 5.6 faster than 5.7 will be able to fix it in the future? Nobody knows.

It's not like human projects are devoid of bad code, its all tradeoffs and shades of gray. But to be honest I haven't written a line of code by hand in a while.