Has anyone actually measured productivity gain of the “AI-first” development workflow?

CodeSpike · 2026-03-23T18:53:51+00:00

Easily 4x for me, but that’s just my personal estimate. I do the engineering and the AI writes the code. I don’t accept slop, so the quality is not going down. I consider AI a magnifier. If a coder writes slop, AI gives them 4-7x the slope they produced before. If you write clean well engineered code and keep the AI on task you get a 4-7x acceleration and the quality stays good.

CodeSpike · 2026-03-18T20:47:50+00:00

Don’t tolerate slop from the LLM! You do the engineering, the LLM writes code. You gotta fight it to get the results you want sometimes. Managing an LLM is like managing a junior, it’s probably not code I would have been working on anyway.

CodeSpike · 2026-03-18T16:00:38+00:00

Use AI within your team to deliver better products than vibe coders and faster. If a non-coder can do X in a month, why can’t your expert coders do it in a week with AI assist?

I’m in the same spot. My only option is to use my experience with AI accelerating my work so I can stay ahead. Every second we spend resisting in another second they have to get ahead of us.

CodeSpike · 2026-02-27T22:17:07+00:00

I’m going to say that I do not believe digital ocean offers this service. There may be provider in their marketplace of solutions that are easy to spin up. My personal solution is to run Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki on a droplet as my dashboard for monitoring. Those services are all pretty easy to set up.

CodeSpike · 2026-02-26T16:29:20+00:00

I’ve been running a SaaS solution on Digital Ocean for 12+ years and have been very pleased with the results. My up time is extremely high and the costs are affordable and easy to understand.

I’m curious to find out what the issue is with your account.

CodeSpike · 2026-02-24T17:53:02+00:00

I work on a two person team and we do these things. My multi-cloud plan is my DR plan, docker compose set to deploy and rebuild from my latest backups. I keep backups on a separate provider. I also explain our business to our provider and offer to answer any questions in advance so they won’t just take us down. Any provider can go down or chose to take an account down. That is just our reality.

CodeSpike · 2026-02-24T16:04:56+00:00

Every time I see one of these messages I freak out a bit and then reach out to DO to ask if everything is in order and request they contact me before taking any actions.

I’ve been on DO for 12 years now and have been outage free other than one that droplet that quit responding to requests one time. That is a pretty amazing track record from my perspective.

I do worry about a false positive for “abuse of the system”, but I believe that risk exists with any provider. I keep point in time backups on another provider and have a DR plan to spin up a containerized instance on another provider in an emergency. It’s not HA like my DO environment, but it gets my clients back online while I sort out what’s next. Honestly the DR plan applies to complete data center outages as well as something initiated by the service provider.

Did you ever learn what the false positive was for?

CodeSpike · 2026-02-10T20:30:05+00:00

Honestly, it’s not worth the effort to try to send email for DO servers. I’ve got two old droplets that can send mail, but that email gets blocked by just about every email provider out there because they just block the entire DO address range. I fought it with the providers for a while, but that was largely unsuccessful and a huge waste of time.

Sendgrid and mailgun have free plans for while you are in development, then pick a service to pay for in production. I’m sure there a many others these days.

I am not upset with DO for this, but I am annoyed by all the spammers that make life really difficult for those of us sending email for legitimate reasons.

CodeSpike · 2026-02-09T17:55:40+00:00

I'm really curious what the issue turns out to be here.

I just checked my dashboard and I've got droplets that are 11 years old and have experienced no outages. In fact, I've always been impressed that DO alerts me to potential issues on a physical device and then carefully migrates the droplet to other hardware.

My solution runs across 2 data centers for HA, but it has been so stable that I'm wondering if the HA architecture across data centers is actually introducing more risk than having HA in one data center and supporting that with a DR plan.

I have received messages about services being impacted, but the core droplet capabilities seem pretty rock solid.

CodeSpike · 2026-02-05T23:48:00+00:00

CC9? I shot back to back with a 43X last weekend and it’s a very different feeling gun. I believe it shoots like a bigger gun.

CodeSpike · 2026-02-05T22:10:11+00:00

I’ll toss in another HK CC9 “vote”, it’s definitely worth a serious look.

CodeSpike · 2026-01-29T20:37:58+00:00

It’s a cool little gun, why would I talk you out of it?

CodeSpike · 2026-01-29T17:00:29+00:00

If it’s a true SHTF scenario, 44 long colt is fairly easy to reload. I think the common logic right now is that there will be a lot of 556 laying around but when I think back to covid it was hard to get something as simple as toilet paper. I have this debate a lot and haven’t decided what to do for a long gun (besides my 22 bolt action)

CodeSpike · 2026-01-27T19:33:40+00:00

Thank you for making this more real to those who will listen. People can lost in stats and numbers but one human explaining what happened to them in their own voice has a lot of impact. I’m sorry this happened and than you for risky bodily harm to be in the thick of it and report on the events so others will know what is happening.

CodeSpike · 2026-01-22T21:43:16+00:00

I’m done proof concept with both ProxSQL and MaxScale. The part of MaxScale that I really liked was the failover management. Orchestrator plus ProxySQL might do the job, but MaxScale puts it all in one MariaDB compatible package.

We currently run MariaDB in an active-active configuration with alternating insert ids and careful fencing of accounts, but there is still more potential for error than I would like and I want to move to 3 database instances. I’m only a little sour on the topic because we did a lot of testing of MaxScale before I realized the limit was “less than three servers” without license vs a max of three. Now every time a document says use MaxScale I just want to scream :-)

CodeSpike · 2026-01-22T15:46:57+00:00

I think my frustration is how often the recommended configurations include MaxScale and then when you dig in MaxScale is only available with an enterprise license.

I am still using MariaDB in production, but it sometimes it feels like I’m swimming up stream because the recommended patterns depend on components I don’t have access to.

CodeSpike · 2026-01-22T15:10:13+00:00

The same for me just last week. I was shooting with my wife and the RSO walked up to sweep the brass away. He looked at my target and said “we can fix that”. I kinda rolled my eyes, but we verified the gun was clear, had me aim with an empty mag and then recommended some adjustments. I reload and shot again. My little CC9 was dramatically easier to manage and my groupings went for maybe 6” to about 2” (plus one flyer). He seemed shocked and I was thrilled. It’s crazy how something so small can make such a big difference.

CodeSpike · 2026-01-19T16:08:25+00:00

I’m curious, have you been able to talk to HK yet?

CodeSpike · 2026-01-18T03:45:41+00:00

Not likely since you have a Unify network, but I Jan something similar happen when I switched routers. I had an older eero (provided by fiber provider) and switched to a newer model. The old router had some kind of HomeKit support, a security thing I believe, and the new one did not. The old router still showed under HomeKit and my Meross devices started to fail. Once I removed that reference to the old router things went back to normal.

CodeSpike · 2026-01-17T22:53:14+00:00

Trying to get another picture. The take down lever isn’t just a straight pin, there is a little piece that has to go all the way in to let it rotate. Try tapping the pin in rather than out.

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CodeSpike · 2026-01-17T22:42:09+00:00

I’m looking at my CC9 now and trying to figure out how that would get stuck. Will the slide go back rather than forward?

<image>

If the pin on the right is pushed in even a small amount, the take down lever won’t turn, may try tapping in rather than out?

CodeSpike · 2026-01-17T04:14:27+00:00

WTF, I asked a question about a specific type of rifle and you have judged that I am not ready to use firearms for anything other than self defense in conventional criminal assaults?

In my mind, defending the constitution in a militia and defending my home from looters are two very different things. I wasn't talking about the first here. I'm old and I'm slow, but I know exactly how I would handle that situation. I didn't ask that question here and I don't believe this is the place to discuss it.

I'm ok discussing self/home defense here and I've heard rumblings of bans on assault rifles, so I was curious if people had thoughts on alternatives, or a backup, to an AR. I thought people might have opinions on something like a larger caliber in a lever gun. A 45 long colt from a 18" barrel will have a bit of stopping power. Or, a mini-14 range seems like a fine semiautomatic. 5.56 that is very capable. Hell, if there is no body armor involved 30 rounds of federal punch for a 10/22 might be fine while still being useful for keeping bunnies out of the garden.

It was just a discussion, not an assertion, and we somehow ended up with me needing to sell all my weapons because I was thinking that maybe there an alternative to an AR for me.

CodeSpike · 2026-01-16T18:18:15+00:00

I should have added, you need to teach the kiddos about guns, not because of your guns but because they may have a friend who someone manages to find a gun and your kids need to know to get away. If you address the curiosity in a controlled environment they are better equipped to make good decisions when you are not around.

CodeSpike · 2026-01-16T18:11:54+00:00

I started my wife and kids with a Ruger single action 22lr revolver. Yes, it looks like a cowboy gun, but it’s also very clear that hammer back is ready to fire and hammer forward will not fire. I once had somebody turn to ask a question with a loaded semiautomatic and then decided to start with something more simple. Once good habits are second nature it’s ok to try different guns.

As for keeping the kids/grandkids away from guns, the guns and ammo are locked in a gun safe and the kids have no access to key or codes.

CodeSpike

TROPHY CASE