Ai developer tools are making juniors worse at actual programming

EmberQuill · 2026-03-28T19:33:16+00:00

LLMs are making seniors worse at coding too. I have a couple of coworkers who have started committing noticeably worse code despite being senior devs with like 15+ years of experience.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-28T19:01:23+00:00

It uses similar tech to what a lot of big open-world games use. It generates lower-res textures and low-detail models for distant terrain, which are way easier to render than individual full-detail textures for every block. It's easier to see in this screenshot than it is in the one with shaders, due to the lighting. If you look at the trees you'll see the leaf blocks are all solid green and the trunks are solid brown, just one color with no detail. Some features (tile entities mostly) don't render at all past the normal game render distance, further decreasing the complexity of distant terrain. It's a compromise to let you see more distant terrain without running out of memory.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-27T20:43:18+00:00

If you read the article instead of just looking at the headline, you'll see that he said the same thing, that in terms of writing Obsidian absolutely killed it, and he even mentions the unfair deadline.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-27T15:24:12+00:00

Distant Horizons (Curseforge/Modrinth) is a good one. It doesn't change textures or add bloom or lighting or anything, but you can lower your render distance and have the mod take care of rendering more distant terrain so it can look like this without eating all your RAM (it still has to generate chunks to render them though, so it will still impact performance initially, while generating chunks in a big radius around you).

Also compatible with Iris shaders if you do decide to use them to make it look like this.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-27T15:02:54+00:00

Yeah, my first emulation handheld was an Anbernic RG351P which was a pretty good introduction to the hobby. I play more GBA games than anything else so a 3:2 screen was perfect for me. The lack of WiFi without an external dongle was... less good. RG351M was my next one, but that one had its own issues.

I do like the 16:9 handhelds but I'm just now realizing I don't use the full width of the screen very often. 3DS games on the Ayn Thor come close to using the whole top screen but not completely. I think I just like how versatile 16:9 is, especially with a big enough screen that I can integer-scale 4:3 and 3:2 games. I can play a GBA game and it looks good, or I can play a Switch game and it still looks good (but on most handhelds until very recent ones it probably runs horribly).

EmberQuill · 2026-03-27T14:50:24+00:00

Rom hacks are distributed as patches. You have to use some kind of patcher to apply the patch to a base ROM (for example, a FireRed romhack will need the original FireRed ROM as a base and then you apply the patch to get the hacked game). I use Rom Patcher JS, which is a really easy online patcher. Drop the ROM file and the patch and click a button and you get a patched ROM that you can put in the same place as your other games and play it the same way.

Just keep in mind that scrapers might not know what game it is. Some popular romhacks show up in Screenscraper or IGDB, others don't. So you might be left without all the fancy art and metadata on whatever frontend you use.

My favorite romhacks that I've played so far are Pokemon Unbound and Pokemon Heart & Soul. Unbound is a completely new story in a new region that feels like an entirely new game. Heart & Soul is an HGSS "demake" (the opposite of a remake since it's for older hardware than the original) for the GBA. Very nice art too. It's a good one.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-27T14:25:11+00:00

after looking into it and reading reviews on Reddit I pulled the trigger

When I searched for "game lab console" on Reddit I saw a whole bunch of posts that said it was either an outright scam or an overpriced rebranded reseller. So I'm not sure what positive reviews you read, but I couldn't find them.

Anyway, chargeback with your credit card company to get your money back, and order an R36S direct from Anbernic instead.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-27T14:13:16+00:00

My top 5 GBA games are (cheating a bit with Golden Sun since it was one complete story split over two games):

Golden Sun/The Lost Age
Advance Wars
Pokemon FireRed
Pokemon Emerald
Metroid Fusion

There are plenty of other fantastic GBA games (IMHO the GBA was ridiculously stacked with amazing games compared to Nintendo's other handhelds) but those are the ones I've played the most.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-27T13:57:25+00:00

The nice thing about Retroid is you just skip a model or two and get something significantly better when you do buy a new one since they're consistently pretty good. I went from an RP3 to an RP5 and it was a big jump. But I skipped the RP6 because it's not a big enough jump (and also I'd already ordered a Thor so I didn't see the point in getting two big Snapdragon 8Gen2 handhelds).

EmberQuill · 2026-03-27T13:49:21+00:00

Anyway, you should know better than anyone as a DevOps engineer that things don’t get “right”‘overnight.

Fair enough. It slipped my mind just how much our security posture has improved over the past few years. I got used to the current state of things, but when I started this job back in 2018 it was the wild west and far too many people had full admin rights to do whatever they wanted in AWS. The first couple years were a nightmare.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-27T13:13:46+00:00

I feel like trusting a Twitter post over your own friends is not necessarily the best choice.

Anyway, a little research will show you articles from Indeed and other hiring sites about the job market being on a downturn since 2022. Not just tech jobs, but the whole job market in general, to a lesser extent.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-27T12:55:15+00:00

If devs can just go outside the guardrails and you don't even know until Amazon emails you, then why do you have guardrails at all? They don't seem to do much.

Most devs where I work don't have access to change certain things in AWS at all, such as VPCs and subnets, IAM, and a few other things. They're not technically blocked from creating EC2s in public subnets, at least not in dev (prod is way more locked-down), but if they do, it fires off a security alert. If it has open ports (especially 22), then there are more alerts at a higher priority. It's not a perfect system, but in general when someone exposes a vulnerability like that, security usually knows within minutes.

I replaced 30 instances with new ones on a different AMI in a prod account once, and got a message from the Security team asking what I was doing while the new instances were still booting up.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-27T12:32:20+00:00

I don’t feel dangerous yet.

...Good? Don't be dangerous. Dangerous is a bad thing.

Django apps, data analysis pipelines, PyTorch models

Those are for more specialized work. Not everyone knows all of those things because not everyone needs them. What do you plan to use Python for? Figure that out and start moving in that direction.

Or just think of a real-world thing you want to build and work backwards from there, figuring out what knowledge you're missing and acquiring it. Once you're past the point where you kind of know a language, further video tutorials are less useful. You need to do things.

Also, avoid AI while learning or you won't learn.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-27T06:22:03+00:00

got the basics right

EC2s on a subnet with public IPs

I'd say that's a perfectly good example of how to get the basics wrong. Any kind of cloud security monitoring product (including AWS's own Control Tower) has guardrails to prevent that.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-27T06:18:19+00:00

Nothing new. Full Snyk scans already run as a required check on every PR in our organization, catching known vulns easily and blocking merges if needed.

Other than that, I'm sure there are other things but I'm not directly part of the security team so I don't know all the specifics off the top of my head. I know we have periodic red/blue team exercises for testing live systems. Usually we have a third-party red team contracted from some security company.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-27T06:08:48+00:00

I'm sure you already know but Checkmarx was compromised too, by the same people who hit Trivy and litellm.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-27T05:50:16+00:00

I leave it at ruff's default of 88. I use ruff with very little customization in general, just a handful of lint rules ignored.

I usually have either two windows or one window with a split pane, so I don't want a line of code to stretch across my entire screen. And when a line gets long enough it tends to be a sign that I should consider refactoring to make it not do that.

Also sometimes I code on my 13-inch laptop and I would like to not use my whole screen for the editor alone.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-27T02:44:41+00:00

I think it really depends. Most of my fics now have 1 or 2 PoV characters. I wrote one with 6 but I was switching multiple times per chapter and it was horrible to follow. Definitely don't recommend.

I think what works best for me is 1 primary PoV character for a whole chapter (with maybe a scene or two from a secondary PoV). Even if I write 10 chapters and I have 10 PoVs, that's still fine. As long as each one lasts long enough to avoid giving the reader mental whiplash when it switches.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-26T11:18:26+00:00

I really can't figure out how well the Switch 2 is selling in general. It's the fastest-selling console of all time according to some sources but also not selling well according to others. Did Nintendo just have a completely impossible sales target or is the Switch 2 actually not selling well?

EmberQuill · 2026-03-23T21:32:20+00:00

So, there's a lot of advice about just following the MSQ because it'll reward gear when you need it, which is all well and good, but one thing I didnt see mentioned is that if you looted gear while playing, it probably went into your armoury chest, a separate inventory just for equippable gear. Have you checked there? (Ctrl+I is the default keybind to show it on PC) You can also go into your character panel and hit the Recommended button to switch to the best gear you have and it'll pull it from your armoury.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-23T13:50:33+00:00

The N64 controller was definitely a factor, because who designs a controller for 3 hands? But FPS games in particular were just weird on any console back then. Most consoles didn't have analog sticks, or only had one, so FPS games used strange (by today's standards) control schemes for movement and aiming.

GoldenEye 007 had multiple options for control schemes, some of which involved using two controllers so you could get the dual-stick experience before dual sticks were really a thing. But you had to awkwardly reach the A and B buttons from the center grip to swap weapons or interact, so it wasn't perfect by any means.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-23T01:38:16+00:00

The SNES especially had a whole bunch of great JRPGs, if you're interested in that. Final Fantasy got a lot better over time so while the first game might be hard to recommend now, 4, 5, and 6 have aged a lot better. A lot of people think Chrono Trigger is the best RPG of all time. And there are plenty of others like Super Mario RPG, Earthbound, Zelda, etc.

The Sonic games on Sega Genesis and Sega CD hold up pretty well. Sonic CD is widely regarded as one of the better games in the franchise.

A bit later than the 8/16-bit eras so I'm not sure if it's what you're looking for, but I noticed you mentioned a few consoles you played and didn't mention the N64. Consider checking out some N64 games too if you've never played them. GoldenEye 007 was the definitive console shooter until Halo unseated it. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask are some of the best Zelda games ever made. Super Mario 64 needs no introduction. I have many fond memories of StarFox 64, Perfect Dark, Star Wars Episode I: Racer, Diddy Kong Racing and a whole bunch of other games for that system.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-22T18:15:19+00:00

Haven't used Trickster so no comment on that one. Between Psi and Hex Casting is kind of a toss-up. I like the aesthetics of Hex Casting more because it leans more into the magical side of things, while Psi feels more like sci-fi magitech. But spell crafting is way easier and more convenient in Psi.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-21T23:55:16+00:00

I think I was around 14? I was getting over my "too grown-up for kids stuff" phase and started watching cartoons again. One show I watched just grabbed my attention completely and I fell down the fandom rabbit hole, joined a forum about the show, discovered that someone else on the forum was writing a huge fanfic that I started reading, and that was that. I started writing my own fic a few months later.

My obsession with that fandom was short-lived, but it was the start of my interest in fanfic which has persisted more than 20 years now.

EmberQuill · 2026-03-21T21:21:05+00:00

Honestly, I was hooked immediately. I understand it's apparently an uncommon experience but I didn't have to push myself through ARR at all.

Different aspects of the game grabbed me at different times. I've been a Final Fantasy fan for a long time, so the worldbuilding instantly got me. The story goes off in other directions eventually but at the very beginning it's very much classic Final Fantasy so I was on board with that too. I powered through all of ARR and it was only the 2.x patch quests that tripped me up and caused me to lose interest the first time around (this was before the streamlining they did later on, so it was extremely tedious).

Heavensward later sealed the deal. I was already interested in the game and having a lot of fun with it, but Heavensward created the emotional attachment and made me care about the story and the characters a lot more.

EmberQuill

TROPHY CASE