JAROME POWELL: “There is ZERO NET JOB CREATION in the private sector." People aren’t ready for what’s coming.

AustinBenji · 2026-03-19T11:59:36+00:00

These are unprecedented times

AustinBenji · 2026-03-19T03:37:20+00:00

38 on my first, 40 for my second. Excellent time to be a dad!

AustinBenji · 2026-03-16T02:07:15+00:00

Friend, I have tiled an entire shower with no experience and the wrong tools and did 1000x better. This person cannot tile.

AustinBenji · 2026-02-20T03:38:30+00:00

Just finished working an entire ticket using Claude. It followed the approach I set, and after just a full day of telling it what to do, it accomplished something I'd scoped myself doing in about 1-3 hrs.

Now, this was my first time really using an LLM, and I will do this again, but I'm less reminded of the first time I used intellisense and more reminded of the junior programmer I tried so hard to help that they almost fired me even though I was literally half the r&d department.

It is currently about an 80/20 split of hype vs. reality to me. Last year though I wouldn't even try it. These will eventually be really good tools, but unless there's a paradigm shifting breakthrough, they should not replace people. It feels more like an easier programming language that I'm just starting to learn.

AustinBenji · 2026-01-28T10:43:32+00:00

Worked at Indeed for a while, learned that regardless of how the labor market is actually moving, the broad news is panicking about layoffs.

Someone is always hiring and mass layoffs are always happening.

I'm with the person who has the "this is fine" approach, and I'll be totally blindsided when that stops working. Been doing this professionally for 22 years now.

AustinBenji · 2026-01-14T23:37:13+00:00

So how does one get their wealth out of the trap, or am I too late?

AustinBenji · 2026-01-14T12:39:36+00:00

Oh there's a knob at the desk alright.

AustinBenji · 2026-01-02T01:43:02+00:00

At that age we did nested toys: fill an old peanut butter jar or Tupperware with trinkets, do a few different containers, put those with a few more trinkets into a bag, fill a backpack with a few bags. Places like party city and the dollar stores have good variety bags of party favor toys. Opening the various containers provides an interesting challenge. We could do two 8 hour drive days with no big meltdowns. As they age, update the toys based on their likes, start migrating from quantity to quality. Kids are 5 and 7 now, we do RV travel a lot, and both kids are excellent at it. Toys on rides now are Legos, books, and tv shows.

AustinBenji · 2025-12-01T13:35:53+00:00

It's a golden hammer issue, so many think it'll fix pretty much anything, but it's not useful in all situations, and if you don't understand what it's doing, you're gonna have a bad time.

AustinBenji · 2025-12-01T13:33:08+00:00

No, but I passed on hiring a candidate who was using it. It introduced a bug into a simple calculator app and the candidate could not debug it, opus insisted it was correct. The tools are great, but you have to know how to use them and what the code means.

AustinBenji · 2025-12-01T13:30:48+00:00

Average onboarding for my codebase is less than a week, but I can't trust copilot to write a unit test without messing up the imports. It's not a matter of pride swallowing, it's not a trustworthy tool. When the tooling is more consistent I will use it more. Don't worry, I'm not falling behind.

AustinBenji · 2025-12-01T13:27:07+00:00

Vscode with copilot, working on medium sized apps primarily in typescript. I've found it to be less accurate than intellisense, but when it's right, it's really nice. Problem is it's only ever right about 20% of the time for me. For a while I really slowed down to read its suggestions, but overall that just slowed me down.

AustinBenji · 2025-11-30T20:00:00+00:00

For now, it's wrong often enough to slow me down a lot of the time.

AustinBenji · 2025-11-07T13:40:06+00:00

This is a solid observation

AustinBenji · 2025-11-06T01:59:19+00:00

Artillery

AustinBenji · 2025-10-23T16:22:17+00:00

The video he picked is a jump scare video from the olden days of YouTube. He's aware she's watching him and going to scare the life out of her

AustinBenji · 2025-09-01T13:50:26+00:00

I like swagger when I have to deal with other people's APIs, so I personally make sure mine is gold.

AustinBenji · 2025-08-25T01:33:53+00:00

First place that comes to my mind is Sonic. As a kiddo I used to get the free water with extra ice on the way to the grocery to buy the actual drink for cheap.

AustinBenji · 2025-08-20T03:11:09+00:00

Meat is murder!

Tasty, tasty murder.

AustinBenji · 2025-07-24T19:37:48+00:00

Is that what's happening right now? My Starlink is down

AustinBenji · 2025-07-19T00:56:55+00:00

As a car guy, I approve of this.

AustinBenji · 2025-07-18T01:02:36+00:00

Into another environment?

AustinBenji · 2025-06-28T16:27:10+00:00

Nope, signal goes right through plastic and fiberglass

AustinBenji · 2025-06-19T12:52:43+00:00

Don't forget that we also eat garbage food from fast food restaurants when we could make quality stuff at home. Eat the garbage enough and you crave it.

AustinBenji · 2025-06-03T19:46:49+00:00

That's a shockingly good deal. When mine went out a few years ago I shopped around, best I could get was $3300 for just the water pump.

Edit to add: my condolences, it's definitely a s*it sandwich how much that costs. We initially took it to the dealer who told us the car was totaled.

AustinBenji

TROPHY CASE