> let myself atrophy, run on a treadmill forever, for something
You're lucky to afford the luxury not to atrophy.
It's been almost 4 years since my last software job interview and I know the drills about preparing for one.
Long before LLMs my skills naturally atrophy in my day job.
I remember the good old days of J2ME of writing everything from scratch. Or writing some graph editor for universiry, or some speculative, huffman coding algorithm.
That kept me sharp.
But today I feel like I'm living in that netflix series about people being in Hell and the Devil tricking them they're in Heaven and tormenting them: how on planet Earth do I keep sharp with java, streams, virtual threads, rxjava, tuning the jvm, react, kafka, kafka streams, aws, k8s, helm, jenkins pipelines, CI-CD, ECR, istio issues, in-house service discovery, hierarchical multi-regions, metrics and monitoring, autoscaling, spot instances and multi-arch images, multi-az, reliable and scalable yet as cheap as possible, yet as cloud native as possible, hazelcast and distributed systems, low level postgresql performance tuning, apache iceberg, trino, various in-house frameworks and idioms over all of this?
Oh, and let's not forget the business domain, coding standards, code reviews, mentorships and organazing technical events.
Also, it's 2026 so nobody hires QA or scrum masters anymore so take on those hats as well.
This is a very good point. Years ago working in a LAMP stack, the term LAMP could fully describe your software engineering, database setup and infrastructure. I shudder to think of the acronyms for today's tech stacks.
And yet many the same people who lament the tooling bloat of today will, in a heartbeat, make lame jokes about PHP. Most of them aren't even old enough to have ever done anything serious with it, or seen it in action beyond Wordpress or some spaghetti-code one-pager they had to refactor at their first job. Then they show up on HN with a vibe-coded side project or blog post about how they achieved a 15x performance boost by inventing server-side rendering.
Ya I agree it's totally crazy.... but, do most app deployments need even half that stuff? I feel like most apps at most companies can just build an app and deploy it using some modern paas-like thing.
> I feel like most apps at most companies can just build an app and deploy it using some modern paas-like thing.
Most companies (in the global, not SV sense) would be well served by an app that runs in a Docker container in a VPS somewhere and has PostgreSQL and maybe Garage, RabbitMQ and Redis if you wanna get fancy, behind Apache2/Nginx/Caddy.
But obviously that’s not Serious Business™ and won’t give you zero downtime and high availability.
Though tbh most mid-size companies would also be okay with Docker Swarm or Nomad and the same software clustered and running behind HAProxy.
> Most companies (in the global, not SV sense) would be well served by an app that runs in a Docker container in a VPS somewhere and has PostgreSQL and maybe Garage, RabbitMQ and Redis if you wanna get fancy, behind Apache2/Nginx/Caddy.
That’s still too much complication. Most companies would be well served by a native .EXE file they could just run on their PC. How did we get to the point where applications by default came with all of this shit?
When I was in primary school, the librarian used a computer this way, and it worked fine. However, she had to back it up daily or weekly onto a stack of floppy disks, and if she wanted to serve the students from the other computer on the other side of the room, she had to restore the backup on there, and remember which computer had the latest data, and only use that one. When doing a stock–take (scanning every book on the shelves to identify lost books), she had to bring that specific computer around the room in a cart. Such inconveniences are not insurmountable, but they're nice to get rid of. You don't need to back up a cloud service and it's available everywhere, even on smaller devices like your phone.
There's an intermediate level of convenience. The school did have an IT staff (of one person) and a server and a network. It would be possible to run the library database locally in the school but remotely from the library terminals. It would then require the knowledge of the IT person to administer, but for the librarian it would be just as convenient as a cloud solution.
I think the 'more than one user' alternative to a 'single EXE on a single computer' isn't the multilayered pie of things that KronisLV mentioned, but a PHP script[0] on an apache server[0] you access via a web browser. You don't even need a dedicated DB server as SQLite will do perfectly fine.
> but a PHP script[0] on an apache server[0] you access via a web browser
I've seen plenty of those as well - nobody knows exactly how things are setup, sometimes dependencies are quite outdated and people are afraid to touch the cPanel config (or however it's setup). Not that you can't do good engineering with enough discipline, it's just that Docker (or most methods of containerization) limits the blast range when things inevitably go wrong and at least try to give you some reproducibility.
At the same time, I think that PHP can be delightfully simple and I do use Apache2 myself (mod_php was actually okay, but PHP-FPM also isn't insanely hard to setup), it's just that most of my software lives in little Docker containers with a common base and a set of common tools, so they're decoupled from the updates and config of the underlying OS. I've moved the containers (well data+images) across servers with no issues when needed and also resintalled OSes and spun everything right back up.
> That’s still too much complication. Most companies would be well served by a native .EXE file they could just run on their PC
I doubt that.
As software has grown to solving simple personal computing problems (write a document, create a spreadsheet) to solving organizational problems (sharing and communication within and without the organization), it has necessarily spread beyond the .exe file and local storage.
That doesn't give a pass to overly complex applications doing a simple thing - that's a real issue - but to think most modern company problems could be solved with just a local executable program seems off.
It can be like that, but then IT and users complain about having to update this .exe on each computer when you add new functionality or fix some errors. When you solve all major pain points with a simple app, "updating the app" becomes top pain point, almost by definition.
> How did we get to the point where applications by default came with all of this shit?
Because when you give your clients instructions on how to setup the environment, they will ignore some of them and then they install OracleJDK while you have tested everything under OpenJDK and you have no idea why the application is performing so much worse in their environment: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/oracle-jdk-and-openjdk-compatib...
It's not always trivial to package your entire runtime environment unless you wanna push VM images (which is in many ways worse than Docker), so Docker is like the sweet spot for the real world that we live in - a bit more foolproof, the configuration can be ONE docker-compose.yml file, it lets you manage resource limits without having to think about cgroups, as well as storage and exposed ports, custom hosts records and all the other stuff the human factor in the process inevitably fucks up.
And in my experience, shipping a self-contained image that someone can just run with docker compose up is infinitely easier than trying to get a bunch of Ansible playbooks in place.
If your app can be packaged as an AppImage or Flatpak, or even a fully self contained .deb then great... unless someone also wants to run it on Windows or vice versa or any other environment that you didn't anticipate, or it has more dependencies than would be "normal" to include in a single bundle, in which case Docker still works at least somewhat.
Software packaging and dependency management sucks, unless we all want to move over to statically compiled executables (which I'm all for). Desktop GUI software is another can of worms entirely, too.
When I come into a new project and I find all this... "stuff" in use, often what I later find is actually happening with a lot of it is:
- nobody remembers why they're using it
- a lot of it is pinned to old versions or the original configuration because the overhead of maintaining so much tooling is too much for the team and not worth the risk of breaking something
- new team members have a hard time getting the "complete picture" of how the software is built and how it deploys and where to look if something goes wrong.
Happy to be shown where I can learn more about this different rate of change and trend which sets our current climate change apart from the rest of Earth's history.
It seems like you won't have any trouble finding that yourself if you really wanted to. This "I'm just asking questions" mode you're in can be considered a type of trolling called "sealioning".
On that graphic -- under the heading 'Ice cores (from 800,000 years before present)' in case the link gets truncated -- one can observe regular peaks in temperature that took place before the current one. I'm happy to be explained what caused them, as it could not have been human industrial activity.
That's it. I'm open to dialogue but won't entertain any more lazy dismissals and unfair characterization.
> Once you use up the entire internets worth of stack overflow responses and public github repositories you run into the fact that these things aren't good at doing things outside their training dataset.
I think the models have reached that human training data limitation a few generations ago, yet they stil clearly improve by various other techniques.
> Claude is still just like that once you’re deep enough in the valley of the conversation
My experience is claude (but probably other models as well) indeed resort to all sorts of hacks once the conversation has gone for too long.
Not sure if it's an emergent behavior or something done in later stages of training to prevent it from wasting too many tokens when things are clearly not going well.
> That's just a different bias purposefully baked into GPT-5's engineered personality on post-training.
I want to highlight this realization! Just because a model says something cool, it doesn't mean it's an emergent behavior/realization, but more likely post-training.
My recent experience with claude code cli was exactly this.
It was so hyped here and elsewhere I gave it a try and I'd say it's almost arrogant/petulant.
When I pointed out bugs in long sessions it tried to gaslight me that everything was alright, faked tests to prove his point.
> Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, night is a thing, it might not be windy
Also, we can't survive an asteroid crash/extinction event with solar.
Nuclear is transcedental.
If we had practically unlimited fusion power, we could build underground, grow plants in aquaponics and aeroponics and ride it out in underground cities and farms.
One of the problems with nuclear is, um, it's ability to cause an "extinction event". Sort of.
In that:
* Nuclear power plant failures can be very, very nasty. As in, "producing uninhabitable land for eons" nasty. Yes, dam failures are spectacularly nasty, too (but don't create unlivable land as much). Yes, fossil fuel power plants also are quite bad in a "more silent way" via pollution (plus the occasional centuries-burning coal mine fires etc.). All power sources have problems. But this is a pretty big negative.
* What this means is that big centralized nuclear is also a big target for rogue actors... similar to dams, but not similar to more distributed energy sources like solar or wind. Blowing up a single solar farm or windmill doesn't have a huge impact, relatively speaking, compared to blowing up a nuclear plant. Nuclear plants thus have to spend extra expense protecting themselves against this sort of thing. (And, in the United States at least, classify much of the process of doing so.)
* Nuclear power plants can also be used to produce nuclear weapons. Now this is where the really fun politics begins. Many countries would be really unhappy if their adversary countries start making nuclear weapons from their nuclear power plants. A lot of military stuff has been spent over the last decades trying to prevent such.
This last point is where China's solar panel play actually makes more sense compared to nuclear. Think of the politics involved if China builds a big nuclear point in (insert adversary of some other country here). Could be very, very tricky in many cases. Whereas, there is very little if any politics involved with shipping a solar panel somewhere.
The distributed, small scale nature of solar panels also means that customers in countries with poor centralized power grids (common in developing countries) are able to use them to bypass the current system. This happened previously in many of these countries with mobile phones, where customers were able to bypass poor centralized phone networks. In this aspect, I think the "decentralized" aspect is far more important than the "renewable" aspect... but still.
(There are positives to nuclear, of course; I'm mainly countering the "transcendental" word here. All power sources have plusses and minuses.)
(Note: I have heard of work on smaller scale nuclear systems, but I am not certain if even a small nuclear power device completely resolves political or security concerns.)
Fusion will be its own extinction event as things go. At our development level, if we develop fusion, we'll have to live underground after boiling the oceans to generate crypto tokens and undress videos.
> Unfortunately this does not stop many from exaggerating claims in order to (maybe become) be internet famous
I've been thinking about this a lot lately in another context -- vira priests being anti-vax and realized it's the other way around: their motivation doesn't matter, but the viewers don't want to see moderate content, they want to see highly polarized and controversial topics.
The same with the claims about AI. Nobody wants to hear AI boosts productivity in nuanced way, people either want to hear about 10X or -10X so the market dictates the content/meme.
Would it be possible for the CLI not to be binary and just a shell script, or a webshell would be great.
My issue is I've had my work laptop wiped twice because of things I've installed on it and it's a hassle to switch accounts/devices but I've love to give sprites a go.
> I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.
I'm envious of those true believer kind of people.
My father is one of them and he's held absurd ideas as 100% facts and we've had many nasty quarrels about it, BUT it also means he 100% believes in whatever his current goal is and he's achieved a lot more than I ever will because he's unwavering in his beliefs and goals, whereas I'm always doubting and second guessing.
> I'm envious of those true believer kind of people.
> My father is one of them and he's held absurd ideas as 100% facts and we've had many nasty quarrels about it,
I am not even able to fathom how this is possible; unless someone is trying to convince you to join them in their belief, how on earth does a quarrel arise from differing beliefs?
I'm a lifelong atheist surrounded by religious family (and friends, too, TBH), and the only problem is when they refuse to take subtle hints that I am not interested in reading their book and I have to be blunt with them. And even then, that is not sufficient to start a quarrel!
I've had friends - they really felt like friends at one point - tell me that they don't want to know me anymore when they learned I'm an atheist. One told me that "without God there's no morality", so they can't trust in anything I say. Just like that. One told me that atheists should be branded or marked somehow, so that they can't pose as "good people". To my face. When I mentioned that history knows such policies, and that they almost always lead to massacres, pogroms, and things like the Holocaust, the person didn't see any problem with that. At all.
Beliefs, especially strongly held ones, warp a person and their perception of reality. This influences their actions, and those actions can hit you hard. If a father "100% believes" homosexuals are worse than dirt, and a son firmly believes he loves his boyfriend, that's how a "quarrel" will arise. Most people agree to "live and let live" in principle, but when it comes to details, it's almost always "but we don't want X or Y in this neighborhood".
You're really fortunate to have only met people who hold beliefs that are not in direct opposition to your continued existence in this world or in their presence. However, you need to be aware that there are beliefs that are more incompatible with yours, and that there are people who hold them - and that you will quarrel (or worse - much worse) when you happen to meet.
I would say that you are very unlucky. I know people of multiple different religions, and atheists, and agnostics, and people of no particular belief and I have never known anyone to make a comment like that about anyone else.
I know many families whose members follow multiple different religions or none in multiple combinations.
> If a father "100% believes" homosexuals are worse than dirt, and a son firmly believes he loves his boyfriend, that's how a "quarrel" will arise.
Yes, but that is atypical. It most commonly happens either with American evangelicals, or in the context of very conservative societies in certain places (e.g. in multiple African and Asian countries).
American evangelicals seem to have a peculiar obsession with homosexuality as some sort of uniquely bad sin - perhaps to deflect attention from what the Bible and Christian tradition have to say about materialism and wealth. Traditional Christianity is quite non-judgemental and optimistic - e.g. the belief, or at least the hope, at all or almost all of humanity will be redeemed.
> To my face. When I mentioned that history knows such policies, and that they almost always lead to massacres, pogroms, and things like the Holocaust
The Holocaust was carried out by people who had to invent their own religions (their variant of neo-paganism and "positive Christianity") to have religions that could be reconciled with their ideology. Their ideas were more rooted in "racial science" than anything else.
> or in the context of very conservative societies in certain places (e.g. in multiple African and Asian countries).
Also in a few European ones, I can personally assure you :) It's fortunately (much) less common today than it was 25-30 years ago, but the truth is, everybody everywhere has their own hellhole, and living there could indeed be seen as unlucky. Atheism in a country where 96% of the people adhere to folk Catholicism (outside cities, that would probably be 110%...) is a hard sell.
> The Holocaust was carried out by people who had to invent their own religions (their variant of neo-paganism and "positive Christianity") to have religions that could be reconciled with their ideology. Their ideas were more rooted in "racial science" than anything else.
Some of them thought they had to invent or resurrect such religions to sell their movement to the masses, yes. That movement's actual religion was that ideology and racial "science"; it kind of was its own religion. (Not that this is exclusive to nazism / fascism; the same goes for communism.)
> I've had friends - they really felt like friends at one point - tell me that they don't want to know me anymore when they learned I'm an atheist. One told me that "without God there's no morality", so they can't trust in anything I say. Just like that. One told me that atheists should be branded or marked somehow, so that they can't pose as "good people".
That doesn't actually lead to a quarrel any more than having a friend saying they want to stop being friends for any other reason.
IOW, if a friend wants to stop being your friend, does the reason matter? I don't argue with people who don't want to be friends anymore (regardless of the reason)
> If a father "100% believes" homosexuals are worse than dirt, and a son firmly believes he loves his boyfriend, that's how a "quarrel" will arise.
I can certainly see a quarrel arising from that because ... well ... what are you going to do? Stop showing up at family events because your boyfriend is not accepted? Cut off all ties with your family because your boyfriend is not accepted?
This "quarrel", though, is not like a normal quarrel about differing beliefs; this actually has an impact on the ability to remain part of the family.[1]
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[1] TBH, though, if it's only the father in this case who objects, simply not showing up at any event he is part of will usually be sufficient to get the rest of the family to pressure him into at least keeping quiet if you do show up, boyfriend in tow.
If the father is willing to keep from having outbursts, that more than sufficient to not quarrel. You don't need to man to believe that it isn't immoral. You don't need him to accept it. You just need him to shut up about it.
> You're really fortunate to have only met people who hold beliefs that are not in direct opposition to your continued existence in this world or in their presence.
What makes you think that?
I'm non-white, grew up in apartheid South Africa; in 2026, even transgenders in first world countries are treated better than my race was in 1986.
If you think systemic discrimination is bad, try living under legislated discrimination.
> However, you need to be aware that there are beliefs that are more incompatible with yours, and that there are people who hold them - and that you will quarrel (or worse - much worse) when you happen to meet.
No, I will not. If they are morally against my existence, let them go vote for laws to that end. I'm not gonna stand there arguing with them about it.
I'm sorry. I assumed too much about you, and I'm a bit ashamed for sounding so patronizing in my previous post. You seem wiser than me, and you're definitely wiser than I was back when it happened: I tried to defend myself. That's how the quarrel happened: I believed that I cared about morality, so I didn't want to just accept the accusation that I'm inherently immoral. That led to a few more shouts than it should; but as your sibling commenter says, at such points emotions tend to run high. I could have just walked away, and that would have been wiser. Somehow, I didn't manage to.
> What makes you think that?
Because you said you're "not even able to fathom how this is possible" - honestly, I still don't quite understand that sentence, especially after what you wrote above. It looks like you're advocating stoicism and disengagement, and I agree that it's a good strategy. But I can't believe you never felt the anger of being perceived through a lens of a belief that makes you into someone you're not - and that you "can't fathom" how that anger can get the better of you, to make you "stand there arguing with them about it". I get that you're able to rein in those emotions and simply walk away from situations like that; but I can't bring myself to believe you never felt that anger at all.
> You don't need him to accept it. You just need him to shut up about it.
Yes, that's rational. It's a way to live on without turning all family meetings into war. But maybe that particular war is worth fighting? Maybe, through countless battles over the Christmas tables, society changes course? Maybe by fighting against the belief that you're something lesser than human, by turning your life into a miserable one, you're paving a way for younger family members or the next generation to live their lives a little better than you could?
I don't know, to be honest. I'm not some activist. But I think I can understand people who decide to "stand there and argue". It's probably less rational and often leads to quarrels, but I'm almost sure that beliefs that are never challenged won't ever be changed. That's why I found your "I can't fathom" line a bit strange; sorry for overreacting :)
> Because you said you're "not even able to fathom how this is possible" - honestly, I still don't quite understand that sentence, especially after what you wrote above.
Look, in context, what I said had a qualifier:
>>> I am not even able to fathom how this is possible; unless someone is trying to convince you to join them in their belief, how on earth does a quarrel arise from differing beliefs?
I am not able to fathom how this is even possible unless one party is trying to change the beliefs of the other party.
I think that's a little less ambiguous, no?
> But maybe that particular war is worth fighting? Maybe, through countless battles over the Christmas tables, society changes course?
Maybe it does, and you just need to keep fighting.
Or (my approach), wait for the older generation to die off; the younger generation has no need to change the minds of the older generation, they just have to wait.
You still end up with the following result:
> next generation to live their lives a little better than you could?
I like my way better[1], but, you know, whatever works for you, works for you.
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[1] For example, in my entire adult life I have had only two serious (i.e. shouting) arguments with my father, and neither of them had to do with differing beliefs, and now that he is dead I regret even having those two arguments.
He did not approve of my beliefs, but both he and I take a live and let live approach to life. I mean, I'm atheist and I'm happily married to someone who isn't; we have yet (over decades) to have a single argument over religion!
Is missing out a variable. It's an action. An action e.g. it has been brought up.
Idea + idea2 + action
Merely encountering someone with an idea different to one we hold shouldn't lead to a breakdown in communication. It needs an action to e.g. discuss the idea, and this action is controllable. Most of the time we do not quarrel with people even though they are different than us.
Often we are not the ones who can control this, but we can control our reactions and stop participating in the quarrel should one start. (That's easier said then done as its all emotions by this point!)
There is a growing school of thought in academia and in some radical groups that says that we shouldn't stop participating in quarrels and that we should let our anger out and voice heard. This idea says that any call to understand the other (empathy) is therefore toxic and harmful and that it's a choice which suppresses our important story. (Usually we just say they are impossible to understand and so "other" them, which leads to de-humanisation as only humans can be understood). Often our pain needs recognition but to reject the idea of understanding another seems to lead to a worse world in any reality.
Now whilst to deny understanding is utterly fundamentally wrong in any and all rational belief systems, there is actually some truth to the idea! It will cause pain and effort to understand another. It does weaken one's own ideas and certainty about things. If I try to understand someone who opposes me on some important idea that I have, it will change me somehow. Maybe I will have less attachment to the idea, maybe I will find other ideas, maybe I will reject the idea, maybe I will not. These side effects of understanding can be dangerous.
It's Von Daniken's books that lead me here:
Why do people think funny things. What are the processes to believe things? What are the processes and ideas which keep people from changing their beliefs. What do people really desire? How are people manipulated and how do they manipulate others? How can people in a cult come out of a cult? How do cults work? How do people change the ideas inside them? How do I tell what I believe in? What does "ideology" mean? How can I tell where what I believe in comes from? How can I talk about different ideas with others?
> There is a growing school of thought in academia and in some radical groups that says that we shouldn't stop participating in quarrels and that we should let our anger out and voice heard.
I think the problem is in wanting to convince the other party to change their mind, except that humans untrained in presenting arguments just switch to campaigning instead.
Academia has always been where new ideas are seeded, germinate and flourish; this means that a lot of campaigns for change come from academia. It always has, probably always will.
The problem we have had recently (Moreso in the last 10 years or so) is that academia itself has tried shutting itself off from ideas; it's why there's safe spaces, and why people have been prevented from presenting talks at campuses, etc.
This new approach is resulting in a lot of "Nope, we won't even discuss it, nor will we allow you to discuss it to third parties".
Leading us to be in a thread about von Daniken, making fun of people who have a belief that meets a higher bar for evidence than the clear majority of the world.
The people making fun of the theories aren't even self-aware enough to realise that they interact daily with the rest of humanity who have even wilder beliefs.
> How can I tell where what I believe in comes from?
I believe (hehe) that this is where Cogito Ergo Sum came from.
Often we think someone is 100% sure but they only appear that way to us. Trying to change someone's thoughts by arguing with them never works.
Nasty quarrels might indicate an amount of uncertainty, or an amount of inability to articulate a thought. We often have ideas we don't really know why we have them, so we can help others to try to explain things to us in a way that helps them understand why too.
A "nasty quarrel" requires more than one side, and this other side is also responsible for the quarrel.
I think its wise when trying to talk about difficult things to first identify and agree upon the small things you can both agree upon.
If a conversation becomes heated it's no longer a conversation and you should get out before it gets worse. If you feel it's leading into fire and can still be salvaged you can then go back to these shared things and start again.
However a real conversation about ideas will also challenge and change your own view of the world. You might find your own ideas changing. People generally find this a psychologically painful process and will subconsciously resist such a movement. Generally we prefer to label the other as different, alien, us vs them. Having a quarrel is therefore even more likely as it means that your own psyche is protected from encounter with the dangerous other. Understanding that this also applies to the person you are talking with can also help reduce tensions and increase empathy. Again, starting from common shared baseline will help.
I think you are very close to explanation. Ideas in human minds can be presented as facts. If you decide that you are happy by some setting - that becomes a fact to you, while in reality that is a belief. The same about depression and sadness - you can get impacted by information you did not knew and would not be impacted if you were in blissful ignorance and some people choose exactly that choice. Some people get psychosis and their mind is hallucinating that they are on fire - that is real to them as what are your experiences, though those also are not based on facts, but serve as an information delivery to your brain.
The whole issue with human minds is that it is not built to deal with scientific facts, but with socium of other people. You can't use facts when operating with society - you have to use symbols, that they will associate with. And I think that the issue is with you(as it is my experience as well) - I can guarantee, that there are people, that will explain to your family members EXACTLY the same ideas, that you are trying to explain to them... and they will agree to that person - and not to you, because you are clearly doing it wrong.
You should try and and do what the OP is suggesting, i.e. to try and put yourself in your dad's shows and try to see the world the way he sees and understands it. I.e. this type of conversation goes both ways.
Becoming conspiracy theorist yourself is not a way to prevent dangers of conspiracy theorist. It will make the issue worst - instead of one conspiracy theorist, we now have too.
I also think that's the case, but I'm open to the idea that there are people that are really really good at this and maybe they are indeed 10x.
My experience is that for SOME tasks LLMs help a lot, but overall nowhere near 10x.
Consistently it's probably.... ~1X.
The difference is I procrastinate a lot and LLMs actually help me not procrastinate BECAUSE of that dopamine kick and I'm confident I will figure it out with an LLM.
I'm sure there are many people who got to a conclusion on their to-do projects with the help of LLMs and without them, because of procrastination or whatever, they would not have had a chance to.
It doesn't mean they're now rich, because most projects won't make you rich or make you any money regardless if you finish them or not
You're lucky to afford the luxury not to atrophy.
It's been almost 4 years since my last software job interview and I know the drills about preparing for one.
Long before LLMs my skills naturally atrophy in my day job.
I remember the good old days of J2ME of writing everything from scratch. Or writing some graph editor for universiry, or some speculative, huffman coding algorithm.
That kept me sharp.
But today I feel like I'm living in that netflix series about people being in Hell and the Devil tricking them they're in Heaven and tormenting them: how on planet Earth do I keep sharp with java, streams, virtual threads, rxjava, tuning the jvm, react, kafka, kafka streams, aws, k8s, helm, jenkins pipelines, CI-CD, ECR, istio issues, in-house service discovery, hierarchical multi-regions, metrics and monitoring, autoscaling, spot instances and multi-arch images, multi-az, reliable and scalable yet as cheap as possible, yet as cloud native as possible, hazelcast and distributed systems, low level postgresql performance tuning, apache iceberg, trino, various in-house frameworks and idioms over all of this? Oh, and let's not forget the business domain, coding standards, code reviews, mentorships and organazing technical events. Also, it's 2026 so nobody hires QA or scrum masters anymore so take on those hats as well.
So LLMs it is, the new reality.
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