Ah, I actually did flip burgers. So I know. I also did dry cleaning, cleaning service, deli, delivery guy, etc. Yup I now have enough money to survive without working. But I also am very low maintenance, thanks to my early life being raised in harsh conditions. I am not scared to go back flipping burgers again.
"Yup I now have enough money to survive without working" Your opinion is borderline irrelevant then.
Indeed, after all I am just replaceable dime a dozen software engineer like I said above.
You mean it shouldn't be the driving force of your employer to make decision. Yes I agree 10000% I meant it can be your (not necessarily your employer) driving decision in life. Of course, you need to suffer. That's about having tradeoffs.
almost all employers are going to expect you to use AI and produce more with it you can definitely choose not to participate and give the opportunity someone who are happy to use AI and still have fun with it.
Ok I will bite. Every single example you gave is in a hobby project territory. Relatively self-contained, maintainable by 3-4 devs max, within 1k-10k lines of code. I've been successfully using coding agents to create such projects for the past year and it's great, I love it. However, lots of us here work on codebases that are 100x, 1000x the size of these projects you and Karpathy are talking about. Years of domain…
That’s right, but it also hints at a solution: split big code bases into parts that are roughly the size of a big hobby project. You’ll need to write some docs to be effective at it, which also helps agents. CICD means continuous integration continuous documentation now.
I wonder if anyone has tried this thing before, like... micro-projects or such... ;)
> academic papers take 6-12 months to come out It takes about 6 months to figure out how to get LaTeX to position figures where you want them, and then another 6 months to fight with reviewers
Couldn't AI help with the LaTeX? Cutting it down to 6 minutes
I have found it to be pretty bad at formatting tables
25 years ago, I was slinging apps together super fast using VB6. It was awesome. It was a level of productivity few modern stacks can approach.
> 25 years ago, I was slinging apps together super fast using VB6. It was awesome. It was a level of productivity few modern stacks can approach. If that were too, wouldn't we all be using VB today?
Ever try to maintain a bunch of specialized one-off thrown-together things like that? I inherited a bunch of MS Access apps once ...
Ok I will bite. Every single example you gave is in a hobby project territory. Relatively self-contained, maintainable by 3-4 devs max, within 1k-10k lines of code. I've been successfully using coding agents to create such projects for the past year and it's great, I love it. However, lots of us here work on codebases that are 100x, 1000x the size of these projects you and Karpathy are talking about. Years of domain…
That’s right, but it also hints at a solution: split big code bases into parts that are roughly the size of a big hobby project. You’ll need to write some docs to be effective at it, which also helps agents. CICD means continuous integration continuous documentation now.
Splitting one big codebase into 100 microservices always seems tempting, except that big codebases already exist in modules and that doesn't stop one module's concerns from polluting the other modules' code. What you've got now is 100 different repositories that all depend on each other, get deployed separately, and can only be tested with some awful docker-compose setup. Frankly, given the impedance of hopping back and forth between repos separated by APIs, I'd expect an LLM to do far worse in a microservice ecosystem than in an equivalent monolith.
The title is doing a lot of work here. What resonated with me is the shift from “writing code” to “steering systems” rather than the hype framing. Senior devs already spend more time constraining, reviewing, and shaping outcomes than typing syntax. AI just makes that explicit. The real skill gap isn’t prompt cleverness, it’s knowing when the agent is confidently wrong and how to fence it in with tests, architecture,…
Is anyone else getting more mentally exhausted by this? I get more done, but I also miss the relaxing code typing in the middle of the process.
So far what I've been doing is, I look for the parts that seem like they'd be rewarding to code and I do them myself with no input from the machine whatsoever. It's hard to really understand a codebase without spending time with the code, and when you're using a model, I think there's a risk of things changing more quickly than you can internalize them. Also, I worry I'll get too comfortable bossing chatbots around & I'll become reluctant to get my hands dirty and produce code directly. People talk about ruining their attention spans by spending all their time on TikTok until they can no longer read novels; I think it'd be a real mistake to let that happen to my professional skill set.
most organizations have awful leadership, sure but that doesn't mean you can't (or shouldn't) work around it
have you tried telling your boss you won't use the AI anymore while the rest of the team uses it ? how do you imagine such conversation to play out im curious
what I've done is avoid the sort of boss who would mandate AI use
in a past job I did tell a boss that I wasn't going to be doing the whole tickets/estimates/schedule tetris thing, and that actually worked out... because the leaders I worked with understood the value of being flexible and trusting their lead engineers