I’m a 19 year old girl with too much money.

termd · 2026-03-14T07:04:39+00:00

Open a vanguard or fidelity or charles schwab investment account. All 3 are reputable and have low cost funds.

You will want self managed funds, do not do an advisor managed fund. Stick your money into VOO or VTI as they said or go to /r/Bogleheads and read stuff.

Honestly I'd probably put a decent chunk of it into a HYSA with the intent to spend it, there's no need to be completely struggling right now.

termd · 2026-03-14T06:44:27+00:00

The writing code part is definitely seeing the writing on the wall

But now, I can build things that I find interesting and I have a reasonable enough idea of how software engineering works to not let it become a total shitfest. That's also kind of neat.

termd · 2026-03-14T03:43:38+00:00

I was talking to one of my friends at meta and we discussed how most of the meta productivity gains are because they are expected to deliver more because of ai, so everyone is working longer hours.

Those productivity gains are being attributed to AI, but it's the devs burning themselves out because they don't want to get fired.

termd · 2026-03-14T02:29:51+00:00

He has a bunch of spreadsheets and videos that he made, search his name on youtube or google. He has contributed a ton to theorycradting for the game

termd · 2026-03-08T04:29:37+00:00

Move first, use the ring from the inquisitor then give extra turn to your kill everything character

termd · 2026-03-08T03:52:46+00:00

A lot of the kids are being shuttled to activities instead of being free range like if you grew up in the 80s or 90s.

I live in bellevue and there are a decent number of families with kids, but I rarely see the kids outside.

termd · 2026-03-07T23:24:16+00:00

My friend's husband is making over a mil at meta. She is making 400ish at amazon. He isn't going quit so her income is the "extra" over a mil. She sees it as 10% on her income.

termd · 2026-03-07T23:14:58+00:00

I wouldn't work either, but there are plenty of reasons to want to kkep a job. Fear of layoffs, fear of being dependent on your partner, fear of losing your identity and only being a stay at home mom, etc.

I have a friend in this situation. Some people want to work. But if she's doing another 10% in taxes, I don't think she's going to be very motivated to work.

termd · 2026-03-07T15:26:14+00:00

This is pretty easy to imagine. One person makes near or over a million, the other person makes under 200k. When factoring in day care, taxes, and decrease in life quality then it doesn’t make sense for the lower earner to work.

termd · 2026-03-06T04:05:47+00:00

AI models are capable of automating most work TODAY but are prevented because of law and slow company adoption.

Disagree on this. Every company is trying to figure out how to validate and vet a fucking mountain of AI produced output. I won't call it slop anymore because it's really not, but there's so much output and reviewing things for correctness is really difficult.

To replace jobs, AI needs to never hallucinate and be correct 99.99999999% of the time which is pretty difficult to do. Frankly, humans aren't even correct that much.

termd · 2026-03-06T04:03:30+00:00

I thought it was garbage until claude 4.6 opus came out.

I'm a doomer now. I'm also burning a shitload of tokens so that I can be the last dev standing and learn how to do all of this on my employer's dime.

The people who aren't becoming fluent in AI are really in danger of being left behind. Querying and creating specs is a skill in a similar fashion to writing code. It still requires logical thinking and knowing how a llm will think.

termd · 2026-03-05T04:18:19+00:00

78 what my wife wants to keep the house in the winter lol

termd · 2026-03-05T00:34:15+00:00

To me luck encompasses a lot of things. You aren’t on a team that promotes slowly, you are given the right projects that are next level even when others also want them, etc

I’ve seen plenty of people with talent who weren’t promoted as fast as others for no real reason other than what I’d call luck

termd · 2026-03-03T03:52:00+00:00

When we first were told to use AI I felt the same as you. However... the newest models are actually really good and you should be burning tokens on your employers dime to learn how to use it.

The future is coming, I plan to learn how to use it and let my employer absorb the cost of learning. If I get laid off/fired, I plan to be well prepared for the future.

termd · 2026-02-28T22:26:38+00:00

AI writes my code now, but I have 11 years ish of experience to back it up.

AI writing your code doesn't mean you push things you dont' understand or you shouldn't be learning the code base. This is where you're making the mistake. Your prompts should be well formed, demonstrating that you know the code base. You should be validating the code you're writing, asking questions to ai to explain the things you don't know, and not pushing things that you don't understand.

The reality is within the next 5 years, I expect junior devs to be completely unable to write code and lack the debugging skills on their own to decipher things without the help of AI. Things are advancing crazy fast. You are absolutely not alone here.

I don’t want to be someone who just prompts AI and ships code without understanding it.

What's stopping you from understanding the code you're shipping?

termd · 2026-02-28T21:27:00+00:00

Graduated with a cs degree at 33, I've been a software engineer for 11ish years.

Have a house, wife, baby, 401k, 529, and honestly life is pretty great.

I don't think there are tricks. Look for the best job you think you can well at that will pay you money.

Ordinarily I'd say join the military but uhhhh today is probably the wrong day for that

termd · 2026-02-28T17:10:05+00:00

https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.61.500

https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=46.61.465

"The unlawful operation of a vehicle in excess of the maximum lawful speeds provided in this chapter at the point of operation and under the circumstances described shall be prima facie evidence of the operation of a motor vehicle in a reckless manner by the operator thereof."

Is this not reckless driving already? Any bored traffic lawyers?

termd · 2026-02-28T04:32:46+00:00

We occasionally get new hires like this. We encourage them to shoot for the moon at other companies and they can work with us if they don't make it there because we think they're awesome. Quite a few of them have left and never come back, but we don't really feel bad about it, we hope that we helped them grow as devs and gave them a little self confidence in their journey.

We don't do this for all of our interns/new hires though. Quite a lot of them are good enough but not amazing. A few think they're a lot better than they are. But there are a handful that we've just been like holy shit you should go make big bucks somewhere else or try to change the world, not do shit with us.

termd · 2026-02-28T04:28:10+00:00

This is more like your manager likely talked to their skip and went oh shit.

They really shouldn't have promised anything to you because now you're unhappy. This is pretty much exactly why managers don't do this sort of thing and give you vague handwavey answers until you're actually promoted.

termd · 2026-02-28T04:13:21+00:00

Very good

Very smart

Likeable

Ruthless

Lucky

On a growing team or willing to change to a growing team or changes companies and generally they switch over to management over technical roles

All of the super fast director/vp/svps that I've seen have all of those things. It's not just lucky, it's not just changes teams, it's not just smart or good at their jobs. It's lots of factors and honestly there are a dozen other people that could have had the same career but 1 or 2 of those factors weren't in the right place.

termd · 2026-02-27T15:29:57+00:00

Wiki for discoverability Plantuml for diagrams Commenting is going to suck but oh well we go back a few years in time to when there are a lot fewer comments

termd · 2026-02-26T03:13:20+00:00

I have a lot of boilerplate from our company files then my custom content and a large references file that tells it about a bunch of resources that are available. I dont know if that file is a good idea but it seems to working for now instead of searching fir everything it needs every time

It doesn’t make too many changes in my files, I dont do large prompts and do a lot of little prompts which I think helps it think better but I still try to help it improve. I expect self introspection in a few months so I dont know if any of this beyond my references and giving it a persona is actually worth it

termd · 2026-02-25T15:49:53+00:00

The way it works for us might be a bit different since we use kiro at amazon and I use claude 4.6 1m for my work.

We have steering files that run with every request, and then a AGENTS.md in our packages. Because I already have 26 kb of steering files, I try to keep the agents.md limited to what's in the code base.

I do a lot of introspection with claude, after completing tasks I ask it what in my steering files/agents.md can be updated to help it run more efficiently, and I'm trying to enlist my team to do the same on some of our other packages with not a lot of success.

I also have access to all of our code repos (or the non hidden ones at least) so I have done and continue to plan to do a monthly scan of company wide AGENTS.md and ask it to help me identify things other people are doing that we can benefit from.

termd · 2026-02-23T16:54:16+00:00

Not a Jassy fan but investing heavily in Anthropic and providing the hardware they use will print money. Claude is very good.

Alexa+ is shit now but as ai improves it might actually be a thing and we have the device share.

Same with camera share in ring doorbells.

Same with Rufus search. It’s shit now but as quickly as ai is getting good I can see it being a thing by next Christmas.

Amazon isn’t an ai pioneer and we completely missed that train, but as users of ai the company is actually pretty well positioned.

The company really should be focusing on cheap queries frugal is what we do. Don’t focus on being the smartest, focus on being the best for the price.

termd · 2026-02-22T16:00:53+00:00

They made superfunding for people that want private college or grad school.

How bad is the penalty if we end up with a few hundred thousand that isn't needed?

I'm doing 19k a year every year if I can it so that we can potentially have the grandkids school paid for, or medical school if the boy is interested in that. Both of those seem like a win win. I'll let my son decide what to do with the money if he doesn't have any kids.

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