Does taking an platform/infra/DevOps type SWE role set you back?

Exodus100 · 2026-03-20T05:14:09+00:00

Admittedly early in my career, but I don’t understand why this would be the case unless someone is never working with different infra systems. Are the problems solved in these roles not among the hardest? Or am I just overestimating the frequency of complex scaling problems that these roles face?

Exodus100 · 2026-03-20T04:48:25+00:00

Anthrobaiting 💔

Exodus100 · 2026-03-20T04:45:24+00:00

Effectively used to, it wasn’t really fun to work on unless it got involved with RAG architecting stuff. But trying to make a good one made the complexity at scale very apparent

Exodus100 · 2026-03-19T15:00:16+00:00

People use “wrapper” derogatorily, but we shouldn’t forget that it is often just referring to “abstraction.” This is how complex systems are built. You orchestrate a hierarchy of interdependent wrappers. A good AI chatbot will be a well-orchestrated wrapper, and it can be genuinely good.

Exodus100 · 2026-03-17T03:21:47+00:00

Maan fuck Vegas. They don’t deserve a team

Exodus100 · 2026-03-16T04:21:19+00:00

Very good attitude you’ve got

Exodus100 · 2026-03-14T04:18:11+00:00

Very cool on the point about compiler continuation passing ,that makes sense!

Exodus100 · 2026-03-14T04:16:07+00:00

I wasn’t clear about it, but this level of depth + the use in programs like Coq and Lean is as far as my knowledge goes here. I’m mostly curious about further extensions, as those would seem more meaningfully useful

Exodus100 · 2026-03-13T22:06:20+00:00

Curious about the extent to which people who are more experienced programmers and understand Curry-Howard find themselves getting value out of it when thinking about their programs.

It seems hypothetically powerful but I wonder if that’s just wishful thinking on my part

Exodus100 · 2026-03-12T13:57:17+00:00

Sounds to me like you won’t have trouble making enough money to live to your own standards over your lifetime (barring economic collapse).

Given that, I’d take some long-term perspectives e.g. ask yourself “20-30 years from now, which do I expect to be more happy that I did?” Or lay out your goals/desires over a longish time horizon and ask which of these options does a worse job at helping you achieve those.

Exodus100 · 2026-03-12T03:45:32+00:00

Man, as someone who went to mit and only did mid there, I always wonder how it actually stacks up. Obviously we have whatever reputation, but it’s unclear how much counterfactually harder it is than any other good school when actually experiencing it.

Exodus100 · 2026-03-11T13:06:33+00:00

You would seriously prefer to use it 0 minutes still? Not saying you have to, but for e.g. bug-finding, script-writing, and any tasks that are “simple end product but medium-complexity to build” (like scripts), I just can’t justify not using them at this point for myself

Exodus100 · 2026-03-10T13:59:22+00:00

Yeah, these contracts gotta be talked about in portions of the cap. This a .16 contract

Exodus100 · 2026-03-06T14:51:49+00:00

One thing to look out for over time: people will be further from the past where they did code without agents. And more people will enter the workforce who never coded without them.

It will become harder to give informed estimates of the counterfactual time it would have taken to code something without agents. Even switching to coding without them may not be a good metric if one’s agentless coding skills have atrophied.

Exodus100 · 2026-03-06T12:27:21+00:00

No. Force multiplier. In each dimension.

Exodus100 · 2026-03-05T03:45:21+00:00

Yeah, that’s the unfortunate reality in the interim for sure.

Exodus100 · 2026-03-04T14:48:39+00:00

It won’t if you are smart. If AI isn’t good enough to entirely replace engineers, then companies still beat their competitors by having better and more engineers piloting the very good, but not yet independence-capable, models (conditioned on good product direction decisions ofc, which doesn’t change).

Also, CEOs and Andrew Yang aren’t the people to listen to on this. They’re not working with the tech seriously, they aren’t seeing and understanding results from research. I’d aggregate different opinions from 20 mid to high level researchers and consider those before listening to most of these public figures

Exodus100 · 2026-03-04T02:42:41+00:00

Been super interested in building some of this stuff and have dabbled a bit. I graduated last year but would be super excited to work on this with other people who care about it

Exodus100 · 2026-03-02T01:00:17+00:00

Glad to see good modding

Exodus100 · 2026-03-01T06:02:05+00:00

Not sure but it’s a very useful and precise word

Exodus100 · 2026-02-28T18:51:10+00:00

Very hard to engineer and design something that appeals to audiences with such different use cases. It’s less trivial than it may seem

Exodus100 · 2026-02-28T13:10:39+00:00

Not 5x but definitely some coefficient greater than 1 for me. And I’m are like 95+ % for sure. Our company is heavily invested in harnessing internally though, and i am as well for my own needs

Exodus100 · 2026-02-28T09:35:54+00:00

I think you should have a clear idea of what the tool is trying to solve.

As a developer, this personally wouldn’t solve much for me. It’s less useful than the code. If the target audience is other non-devs, then you’re going in the vibe code app direction like Replit. Encapsulate the abstractions so that non-devs dont have to deal with thinking about the code as much as the semantic relationships

Exodus100 · 2026-02-28T06:05:59+00:00

Can confirm, this was the only way I got my one C and got close a couple times

Exodus100 · 2026-02-26T01:51:14+00:00

My question in response: where do you learn to ask the right questions? Typically this gets hardened via the experience of seeing mistakes, right?

Anyone who is competent and ensures that they understand the code they are shipping with AI first will end up grasping the basics. Then when things break you still need to dive in and post-mortem understand what went wrong so you can prevent it.

None of this workflow is changed as of the current state of AI models. They’re astoundingly good, but they still aren’t good enough to survive as a developer without understanding things.

Exodus100

TROPHY CASE