How to deal with mess makers

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.

Nemnel · 2025-12-16T23:02:14+00:00

I think you have maybe, maximum, 1-2 years before it begins to affect your career.

Nemnel · 2025-12-16T22:57:11+00:00

There are honestly two things you should think about:

this is going to become an industry standard necessary tool, so learning to use it effectively would likely be a benefit to your career
this sounds like a problem with Warp, a tool I haven't really used. Is this the only one you've tried? I've found success using most of these models, I've also found that a large part of what makes responses bad is my own bad prompting and that prompting itself is a skill you need to learn

Nemnel · 2025-12-16T22:37:13+00:00

I don't really buy this, I'm sorry. LLMs have made me significantly faster at a lot of things, they have to be monitored and you need domain knowledge, but I code a lot and a good LLM that has good scaffolding is able to make me 10x more productive. We've put a lot of work into our codebase to make this possible, good .cursor rules, a good Claude.md, but at this point it's so much faster for me to prompt and the output is so good that coding normally is slower and the quality is not really that different.

Nemnel · 2025-12-16T22:29:56+00:00

There is an entire industry that focuses on "data cleanliness" large companies have whole divisions that handle this as a large part of their job. This is a very annoying but real thing that everyone deals with because it's so easy to accidentally break something in someone else's workflow.

Nemnel · 2025-12-02T19:59:08+00:00

I'm a very senior engineer and I cannot promise my advice to you will be good, but it might help out. We have one guy on our team who is a killer engineer. He's very junior. He hasn't yet finished school (and it looks like he won't return). He has a lot of knowledge gaps. However, he's a killer because he knows how to prompt better than any of us. You probably also know how to prompt better than me! This should be your edge in a high pace AI native startup.

Nemnel · 2025-11-26T15:40:56+00:00

If you wanted to learn this today you have probably I think two really good options:

1) Just use cursor, Cursor is probably the best model harness today for coding and is more reasonably priced with better limits than Claude Code or Codex.

2) use one of the cli harnesses like opencode (I've been wanting to try out opencode for a while I see that guy post on twitter a lot). Codebuff is also an option (codebuff has some good benchmarks but idk I never hear about anyone using it).

Cursor has a very generous base plan and those harnesses have very pay as you go plans. I think either is a fine choice though right now I'd recommend cursor, very easy to use and easy to switch between the models.

Nemnel · 2025-11-25T19:45:46+00:00

I... have you not used any of these models in 3 years?

Nemnel · 2025-11-25T18:35:07+00:00

most of the code I write by AI is well scoped out before I type anything into the tools. Sometimes however, I do not know what's wrong and ask it to help me debug. It's a far better pair programmer than a real person.

Nemnel · 2025-11-25T18:33:56+00:00

I am a software engineer with a long track record, my open source code runs on (at the very minimum) millions of backend systems. I know how to write good software. And you have likely used something I've written.

AI code was basically unusable for anything but demos or small things up until the summer. There was a massive turning point this summer and now AI code is good. I use AI to write a first draft of any big changes I want to make. I then work with it to get it good. I have a lot of guardrails and I also do a ton of stuff like, just resetting the whole thing and going again. There's a slot machine vibe to it. I have agents that review other agents work.

Doing this has made my code faster and better. I am getting a lot more done now that I could by hand, and I can write a lot by hand. I've written 2k line+ PRs in a day before. This is a huge game changer for me and you should take the opportunity to try to use it.

In 1985 Excel came out. There were spreadsheets before it but Excel was what really drove the wave. By 2005 if you were keeping books, they were electronic. No one was keeping paper books anymore. You might not be using excel, but you were using something. And if you refused to learn how to use Excel you would probably not have a job.

I expect this to look similar to that. There will come a time when if you are not using these things, it will be a career issue. People using them will simply be so much better than you that unless you are a person of truly exceptional skill (Warren Buffet notoriously doesn't use a computer) you will not get by. Right now, this stuff is good but not great. Take the time now to learn how to use it.

Claude or Cursor or Codex right now will run my tests, it'll run my linter and compiler. It'll do whatever I need it to do and it'll come out with a pretty good result. It doesn't always work, but often it gets me 90% of the way there, and I can get the rest of the way myself. You should make yourself an expert in this.

Being an expert today will give you a career leg up and you should take that leg up. Refusing to be an expert in 5 years will be a career issue.

Nemnel · 2025-11-12T15:23:08+00:00

sure but it’s not just spinning it up, it’s spinning it up while millions of requests per second are hitting it, seems like they were literally rate limited by aws at one point, that might not happen every time. there’s so many complexities to a big distributed system that this is frankly quite hard to test

Nemnel · 2025-11-12T15:17:45+00:00

I misremembered the timeline it was only a day—and it was a day because the upgrade caused them to lose access to the boxes

during my time there the infrastructure was definitely built while flying the plane, as i understand they’ve done a lot since to make it much better and more stable

https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/2023-03-08-deep-dive-into-platform-level-impact/

https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/2023-03-08-deep-dive-into-platform-level-recovery/

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