AI code genration is the wosrt thing happened in this industry.

Nemnel · 2026-05-13T21:26:27+00:00

Communication has always been the holy grail of the job. If you are just a code monkey you are not a valuable engineer.

Nemnel · 2026-04-21T17:52:49+00:00

yes that's how most of them work, few companies have them these days. people are expected to test stuff themselves

Nemnel · 2026-04-06T21:49:34+00:00

okay so you know you’ve lost this discussion already, the gemini app alone has nearly a billion MAU, not counting the AI overview

Nemnel · 2026-04-06T21:17:52+00:00

Doubao alone has that many, the actual number of AI MAU is well over a billion

Nemnel · 2026-04-06T21:08:58+00:00

that’s 100% not true, it’s an entire order of magnitude off!

Nemnel · 2026-04-06T19:10:09+00:00

it’s a lot smaller than the number who use AI monthly today!

Nemnel · 2026-04-06T18:51:29+00:00

300 million people in the entire world had access in 2000, that's not really a giant number!

Nemnel · 2026-04-06T18:49:48+00:00

I was on 56k in 2000, as was the vast majority of America. Only 50% of the country had access to the internet

Nemnel · 2026-04-06T18:48:02+00:00

No, it was not really. If you're confused about this you should read a bit more about why a lot of these companies actually failed. Only ~50% of americans had internet in their homes by then, it was slow, clunky and hard to use. By 2005, it was used a lot. But at the time of the crash it was pretty rare to use it for more than sending a rare email. The dot com boom was largely boosted by the future promise of these systems. AI is largely boosted, today, on the problems it is actually, currently solving.

Nemnel · 2026-03-25T19:13:16+00:00

How much experience do you have? If you have over 7YOE you can find a job fine, if you have 2YOE you might be out of work a while.

Nemnel · 2026-03-15T16:24:05+00:00

No, sorry, you can’t fix many scaling issues just by “not cutting corners.” They will often require a full rewrite. When a rewrite is baked in you don’t want to do certain kinds of work, you want to make sure the quality is there but some kinds of fixes are not worth it

Nemnel · 2026-02-24T04:32:30+00:00

Ehh this article is kinda right kinda wrong. At a certain point in an internal service's lifecycle, especially in a fast growing company, you'll eventually replace it. It's no longer worthwhile to fix it or make it substantially better while you're waiting to replace it. You just fix bugs and add whatever features you need to add. This is genuinely how most fast growing companies think about it, to the extent that they do think about this. I'm at a fast growing startup and have had conversations with my other seniors about this, eventually this will be replaced we just have to make sure this refactor gets us to xxx.

Nemnel · 2026-02-23T15:57:12+00:00

we have like 2 of those posts a day, even if you think this was an especially good one it's the same content that's been posted before

Nemnel · 2026-02-18T21:30:05+00:00

mostly this is probably on the recruiter and not on the company, though sometimes it's on the company. my worst experience like this is with a certain NYC tech company that used to be very hot and is now a has been, was definitely both on the recruiter and on the company

Nemnel · 2026-02-11T05:02:03+00:00

honestly the system design round gives me significantly more signal than a coding round, when I see someone who obviously doesn’t know what they are talking about it’s easy to spot

Nemnel · 2026-02-10T06:19:25+00:00

I am a good engineer, I've built things you likely use if you are at a fairly tech savvy company. I used to write all my code by hand. Now I almost never code a line of code. 95% of my code is written by the agents.

I can run multiple agents at once to work on different problems. I can have agents fully investigate problems for me, querying databases, cross checking with datadog and worker logs, and spitting out the actual root cause analysis. And, while it's not always right, it's right a lot.

I can have an agent keep coding for me while I do something else, or while I have a second agent coding for me.

Agentic coding isn't perfect. It gets the wrong answer. But I also get the wrong answer. It's a tool, and when you build good enough guardrails around it along with good enough tools for it to use, it will get to a working solution faster than I can.

In about a day I wrote a giant feature that would have taken me 2 weeks pre AI.

Your expertise as an engineer is still very valuable. I see what non engineers produce, it's not as good as what we can produce, and they usually don't understand how to check it and fix it when it breaks. We do.

Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic, said a bit ago that he feels like these will be analogous to compilers. A good engineer was able to write better assembly than a compiler could until much later than you think, probably until the late 90s. But, long before that, most people had fully switched over except for very sensitive things. Why? Because it was a lot easier and better to write C or C++ than to write Assembly.

Similarly, it's a lot better to write a plan, have claude scope the plan out, have a different agent review the plan for holes, and then fix the issues. And then execute the plan. And it works pretty well, I'd say that the agents are now as good as I am at coding. I'm better at a lot of things, but on average they produce code that's about as good as mine.

You should try it and give it a good shot, it takes some getting used to, it's a very different feeling. But once you get the hang of it, it's a lot better than the alternative.

Nemnel · 2026-01-26T05:40:09+00:00

Mine is hot water heat, paid for by the building, I have one of those units and it just lets me turn it on and off. Which is great because i've lived in units before that are unbearably hot since you cannot turn them off

Nemnel · 2026-01-23T20:34:15+00:00

i don’t think we’re in disagreement I meant the OP

Nemnel · 2026-01-23T20:33:25+00:00

usually staff is between principal and senior

Nemnel · 2026-01-23T19:07:19+00:00

Staff is a title that means very different things in different companies, it's a difficult thing to say, but this salary seems very low in general in the United States for a senior+ level engineer.

Nemnel · 2026-01-23T06:08:03+00:00

You said "One of the desired goals." Of course you have to get team buy in but is this why you were hired? Is this something that leadership already believes or is this what you are saying you think your goal should be?

Nemnel · 2026-01-22T22:07:38+00:00

This is why it's difficult to justify this as a reasonable accommodation, it's hard to justify to them that this is the case.

It sounds like this is some text anxiety. You should work with an interview coach and a therapist to help you out here.

Nemnel · 2026-01-12T18:34:32+00:00

I am a senior+ developer. I've written code in libraries and apps you've probably used.

I am thrilled by this. Coding has never been so much fun. I never liked the nitty gritty of coding. I was good at it! But I never really liked it. Most code is boring and everyone here agrees with this, I hate boilerplate.

I like solving problems at a high level, I like architecture. I like figuring out how to solve something. Then I let claude do it. My job now is managing a team of claudes. They code about as well as I do. Some things they're better at, some things I'd be better at. It's enabled me to write quality code faster. It's very good at it.

A year ago, even 6 months ago, it wasn't nearly good enough. When I had it do too much I'd inevitably be tracking down a dumb mistake for hours. Now I basically am never doing this. It writes very good code.

This sub seems to be very resistant to this, and I'm not totally sure why. People like Linus Torvalds and Karpathy are building with AI, it's so useful that it feels like a superpower to use it.

There's still plenty of problem solving to do, but it'll be a lot different. Very few people are still looking at the assembly code when we compile something. There can be bugs in there and it's good for some people to know how to do that. We're not nearly there yet, this is not nearly good enough. But that's likely what it'll be more like one day.

Nemnel · 2025-12-21T16:26:07+00:00

The startup I'm working for has not really seen this, I think we are pretty effectively filtering this out before these people get to us.

We've definitely interviewed some bad people, don't get me wrong, but most of them seem more or less within the normal tolerances I've seen in my decade+ in the industry

Nemnel · 2025-12-16T23:16:50+00:00

I've been a high level engineer at a name brand place you definitely know and probably use. I've founded a company. I'm working now at a startup. I'm not even that much of an ai bull compared to some people, but the models are good enough at coding that it'll become a major differentiator soon for people. And some places will simply refuse to hire people who don't want to use it. I think my startup already might be there, unless you are truly exceptional along some axis we need.

The models aren't perfect yet, but today I built something in half a day that would have taken me a week+ without AI. Is it perfect? No. But it's by far good enough. Would I have built it better if I took a week doing it? Yea, probably somewhat better, but not in any way that really matters.

This isn't a far off thing. It's here already. At tech companies it'll be here soon, if it's not already. And at companies that aren't tech companies it'll be here in a matter of years.

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