As a father of 4 children who’s married, I haven’t had time in years to pursue any of my software hobbies. The nights playing with arch Linux, fussing with half built oss projects - I can’t justify the time anymore but I still Enjoy them. The cloud and Kubernetes came along, I told my wife this was something I had to learn and throw myself at. Despite spending tons of family time instead in my lab in my basement and trying to push those techs at work - I got my butt handed to me - felt like a young man’s game for every interview I went to.
At home, this has changed. Claude helped me setup a satellite dish, tune it, recompiled goesrec, for me and built a website to serve it - and my family dynamic was only “slightly interrupted” (daddy are you working still?). But it worked! And now I log in and tend to my projects with terminus instead of blindly go through the news or social media. Amazing! I’m still throwing myself at a new tech but way less invasve to my personal/family time.
At work though, i have been made into an absolute powerhouse. I invested the time years ago fussing with those oss projects and arch Linux or setting up lan parties and fixing my buddies rigs - toiling through terrible codebases at companies, deploying bad infrastructure, owning it and learning the hard way how to succeed - and it all is paying off and now 10x. AI can’t replace my judgement in the context of my org - maybe in time as the org shifts, but not for a few years.
The existential threat is not to me, at least for 5y - it’s when I’m asked - how do we get more features out the door?
* More headcount? Not unless they’re rockstars - more tokens.
* offshore talent? No, context switching and TZ - just more tokens.
* fly by night software startup xyz? No I’ll just write my own fault injection framework for $5 tailored to this project.
* consultants? Nope - pretty easy to try and fail fast and rewrite - again building to suite - software is disposable.
* oh no it was written in language xyz or deployed to cloud provider abc - no sweat, we’ll make it work on our cloud provider for $8.
Junior devs and offshore talent are the real losers here - I worry about them. Unless you’re die hard, I’d just assume do the work myself. But how do you accumulate this level of skill without getting paid to do it? I look back - I never got beyond baby projects or hobbies at home. I had to have someone roll the dice on me at a real job cause - rent and shit like that.
For those of you just starting out - I don’t have a great answer for you on how to start out, but - I can say you can install arch Linux, any oss project you want and all the things I did to get started in an afternoon - this is the new normal and embrace it.
For the rest of us it is our cloud moment - use the free tier - get your feet wet - we’re about to go for a hell of a ride. If you stick to the “took ur derbs” and want to keep treating your craft like artisian soap - go ahead, we’ll need those but don’t expect to survive on that
They make some engineers 10x more productive and some engineers 10x less productive. LLMs give you all the rope you want to hang yourself.
Some engs I work with have their strengths, but using an LLM just totally ruins them. I watched one miss a deadline by a month - letting Claude take them down OOM rabbit holes for a simple python ETL script.
When I did finally stop and try to help what I saw was incredible. Claude churned out all of this OOM/garbage collection with prediction nonsense - totally gaslighting this engineer. They didn’t even stop to question and have the thought Python did its own GC - why are they writing code to do it? Whats wrong with my logic? Claude certainly didn’t bring it up…
This individual would have performed better without an LLM - just writing from scratch on their own being forced to think step by step and understand the implementation and the tools they were using. This has been great for
Years for this eng.
Flip side is I’ve seen good engineers do incredible things. I’m worried this widens the skill gap.
I hope these individuals, like
The Eng I mentioned with the script, can figure out a productive way to leverage LLMs. It’s definitely a new skill to use agentic coding tools.
At home, this has changed. Claude helped me setup a satellite dish, tune it, recompiled goesrec, for me and built a website to serve it - and my family dynamic was only “slightly interrupted” (daddy are you working still?). But it worked! And now I log in and tend to my projects with terminus instead of blindly go through the news or social media. Amazing! I’m still throwing myself at a new tech but way less invasve to my personal/family time.
At work though, i have been made into an absolute powerhouse. I invested the time years ago fussing with those oss projects and arch Linux or setting up lan parties and fixing my buddies rigs - toiling through terrible codebases at companies, deploying bad infrastructure, owning it and learning the hard way how to succeed - and it all is paying off and now 10x. AI can’t replace my judgement in the context of my org - maybe in time as the org shifts, but not for a few years.
The existential threat is not to me, at least for 5y - it’s when I’m asked - how do we get more features out the door?
* More headcount? Not unless they’re rockstars - more tokens.
* offshore talent? No, context switching and TZ - just more tokens.
* fly by night software startup xyz? No I’ll just write my own fault injection framework for $5 tailored to this project.
* consultants? Nope - pretty easy to try and fail fast and rewrite - again building to suite - software is disposable.
* oh no it was written in language xyz or deployed to cloud provider abc - no sweat, we’ll make it work on our cloud provider for $8.
Junior devs and offshore talent are the real losers here - I worry about them. Unless you’re die hard, I’d just assume do the work myself. But how do you accumulate this level of skill without getting paid to do it? I look back - I never got beyond baby projects or hobbies at home. I had to have someone roll the dice on me at a real job cause - rent and shit like that.
For those of you just starting out - I don’t have a great answer for you on how to start out, but - I can say you can install arch Linux, any oss project you want and all the things I did to get started in an afternoon - this is the new normal and embrace it.
For the rest of us it is our cloud moment - use the free tier - get your feet wet - we’re about to go for a hell of a ride. If you stick to the “took ur derbs” and want to keep treating your craft like artisian soap - go ahead, we’ll need those but don’t expect to survive on that
reply