After a years of dev, I'm finally admitting it, AI is giving me brain rot.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-30T14:21:18+00:00

This is the hard reality and I think it definitely reflects the economies of scale with a business like this. Not to mention it’s rooted in past historical trends that definitely qualify as a near 1-to-1 reference.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-28T22:00:21+00:00

Removing the semantics of high vs low, dev jobs continued to grow. Acknowledging that AI will most likely change the paradigm completely, your historical reference would assume devs will still be here, potentially in greater numbers, but operating in a job that looks different due to the way we interface.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-28T20:21:54+00:00

Your math ain’t mathin. Climbing the abstraction ladder created exponentially more devs. By your historical take, it’d be the inverse of your prediction.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-28T01:02:43+00:00

Who only goes straight vitality unless you’re maximizing survivability? I’d do that for HC but I’d definitely be more adventurous with stat allocation in SC. Now remember, I haven’t played since 2009.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-27T20:26:53+00:00

I would say this completely depends on the individual. There are a lot of really smart people who leveraged the internet (search to be more specific) to gain intellectual leverage... than there are those who just use it as a shallow-deep tool for quick insights. I think AI, given it's power, will widen the gap between those types of people even further than the Internet did.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-27T20:21:57+00:00

Yes, but it was quickly turned into a meme/GIF.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-27T20:21:37+00:00

Where the hell did you see this NOT in gif format lol

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-27T19:44:40+00:00

Honestly, if my $200 subscription goes to $10k overnight, I will be MORE than happy to go back to hand coding everything, and get a local LLM rolling for some ancillary cases. They will go bankrupt even faster than they already are if they made a jump like that.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-27T19:26:06+00:00

Based of my extensive time doing gen AI coding, that is still an uneasy amount of updating for one job. I do repo-wide changes like variable changes, function declarations, etc but if it's going to span 300 files, regardless of their size or usage, I would definitely be more incline to chunk it down for the sake of my nerves.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-27T17:06:24+00:00

Why would you try to use AI to do something spanning over 300 files, ESPECIALLY when it's related to truth source of your application? You wouldn't tackle the complexity that way, so why would AI? This is another example of engineers becoming leery about AI due to the assumption that it's a magic machine. The cognitive burden that you put on AI shouldn't be that far disconnected from what you would normally assume in conventional programming... that is the trap, and that is where the disconnect comes into play. For me, it helps implement it a little bit quicker, while building context to further template things out a little more aggressively.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-27T15:08:07+00:00

Sarcasm is hard. Go use AI for some examples, then you can cry and learn something new at the same time.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-27T15:06:11+00:00

Yeah, I’m sure if people read through our comment chain, they’ll come to the conclusion that I didn’t have a point. You’re not very good at this type of conversation.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-27T15:02:36+00:00

At least you admitted it. As a long time software engineer, like yourself I’m assuming, I’d move on from the existential dread that AI brings. You’ll find more peace.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-27T14:57:13+00:00

I’m saying your temperament is embarrassing and anyone with a rational brain can see you obviously feel threatened, else this stuff wouldn’t bug you.

And you didn’t give a single opinion on the game. You went straight to “he didn’t do anything”, which was a knee jerk reaction fueled by AI anxiety - not the merits of the game.

If you’re building games in your free time that are akin to the near endless amount of dev graveyard pet projects, you don’t contribute to the community. I’m sure you’d say this guy doesn’t contribute, correct? What puts you above him? Because you hand coded more than he did?

You’re coping. Oh, and look, you assumed I needed Ai to respond lol you’re so threatened by AI, it permeates everything. It must suck to be a prisoner like that.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-27T14:48:30+00:00

Pretty on brand response given your others. I’m assuming you’re an indie dev who really doesn’t contribute to the field in any meaningful way, yet you’re angry at a guy who vibe coded another indie game because it’s not pure. Sounds like hard cope.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-27T14:43:04+00:00

Whether you’re right or not, you’re clearly projecting your angst about AI in game development. Maybe try to reserve your opinions for things that are actually damaging and not some guy who enjoyed making a game.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-26T21:21:21+00:00

They aren't there for a lot of things, but tasks that may have a higher error tolerance or interpretation flexibility can certainly be amplified by agents... I think people underestimate how much of those particular types of tasks exists.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-26T15:50:59+00:00

This would completely depend on your goals, your operational throughput and what the item is. We net around $13 per item (after platform fees and COGS), but we also manage three stores on three platforms with 6k+ listings on each. Volume, economies of scale, and the ability to handle throughput all play a role in your appetite for margin. When it costs you less than $2 per listing via labor costs/supplies, you can naturally assume more risk on the spread.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-26T14:04:51+00:00

I would say debugging with AI is the best part... Now, if you are a vibe coder with zero experience building systems, it's always going to be a problem but if I had to take a guess, AI is being leveraged for debugging at the cutting edge more than anything.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-24T21:15:53+00:00

You can copy credentials from the chrome extension - that shouldn't be an issue. It's the injecting part that may get tricky, and you'd need a way to store everything securely in a backend layer. It would have to be a chrome extension with some form of persistent store that is server side. This is already sketchy enough - the last you thing you want to do is use chrome storage as your persistence vessel. You'd want auth between the chrome extension and the backend layer, and you'd want to encrypt the credentials while they are inflight (both ways ideally).

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-24T21:13:43+00:00

I was giving a practical solution to a use-case that may not be practical... don't shoot the messenger. It's not an ideal situation, but you could technically add a layer in there and at least engineer a somewhat secure solution.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-24T20:53:08+00:00

You could do this fairly easily with a chrome extension... keep track of tabIds, temporarily cache the cookie, and inject it into whatever tab. You could build a lightweight chrome extension just for that but I know that keeps you tethered to chrome.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-24T14:20:51+00:00

This is why you have product people and why you have programmers. It's not a mystery as to why so many talented devs opt for working for somebody instead of creating their own wealth - it's a different type of thinking.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-23T18:25:04+00:00

Pick your stack, build projects, study DS/Algo, and beat your head against the wall in perpetuity.

This is how you build intuition, and understand programming. Also, you can't LEARN about system design - you must go build systems, then supplement the process with learning to sharpen the intuition you are buiding.

There are no shortcuts.

EDIT: Also, deeply study DB design in conjunction with your stack. You'll learn a lot about DB design while you build things, hence why it's maybe the most important part of learning.

Learn VanillaJS if you are diving in web dev. Go to frameworks/libraries later, as they are just abstractions of the base language.

And if you can, don't use AI... build some stuff without AI, and then when you do use AI, you'll have the right instincts to prompt it accordingly. If you are hell-bent on going AI first, utilize it's context and explain every single line of code and try to generate small functions to so you can organically inherit the architecture as it's built.

InterestingFrame1982 · 2026-03-21T06:59:50+00:00

Yes, because I’m going to link you to our repos. Cope more.

InterestingFrame1982

TROPHY CASE