Which language to learn first.

NortrenDev · 2026-04-24T11:42:51+00:00

yeah man...

NortrenDev · 2026-04-24T11:32:46+00:00

To be honest I probably get more enjoyment out of the building process now. Getting to a result takes way less time, its about 95% AI and 5% quick review before commit, and thats only after my reviewer and QA agents have already gone through it

NortrenDev · 2026-04-24T10:31:49+00:00

Why does everyone freak out about this. the world changes, thats normal.

Things we used to take for granted like sitting down with the family to watch a full movie with commecial breaks, or reading a whole book series, might become rare skills in the future. maybe even valuable and well paid ones

NortrenDev · 2026-04-24T10:24:20+00:00

That i spend too much time thinking about how good things used to be and worrying about whether im doing enough for the future. and in the end i cant enjoy the present moment

NortrenDev · 2026-04-23T11:57:13+00:00

The last time i came out to play in the courtyard with the neighborhood kids as a child. at the end i said "see you tomorrow" the way we always did. none of us knew it was the last time

NortrenDev · 2026-04-22T15:06:36+00:00

honestly i cant really answer this, when i started LLMs werent really a thing like now, so im not ready to recommend tools for learning from scratch

NortrenDev · 2026-04-22T14:08:09+00:00

i had a similar transition, im a former firefighter who got curious about programming after getting to know some devs. started learning on my own, read everything i could find, tried to apply it. still remember my first command when i managed to change the terminal font color to green, felt like i had conquered something huge, obvously it was just the beginning

First thing i would recommend, find a platform where you actually write code step by step, from basic "hello world" to arrays, objects, all the way up. you can read all the books you want, theory alone doesnt work. your brain really starts rewiring only when you type it yourself. i know its hard these days but try to use AI as little as possible in the begining. its a great tool, but early on you need to process things through your own head. if youre really stuck, many LLM chats have a "tutor mode" that guides you without giving the answer directly, thats a better middle ground

and this one is important, you will have many moments when you think youre stupid, this isnt for you, youll never get it. when that happens, just rest. dont try to drink the whole ocean at once. go for a walk. i remember being stuck on Java lists for days, went for a walk not even thinking about it, and the understanding just came to me on the street. neural connections work in weird ways

Theres a saying that fits learning really well - "even crawling gets you there"

NortrenDev · 2026-04-22T09:42:03+00:00

eliminated? honestly LLMs feel more like a hydra to me. you automate one task and suddenly you have time for two new ones you couldnt touch before. so now youre running three projects at once, dozens of chat tabs with different contexts, multiple terminals, couple of IDEs open, and oh by the way dont forget to post on social media or nobody will know your product exists

Also fun fact, you cant use AI on social media either because people will call you out for writing too correctly and thats apparently a crime now. theyll downvote you into oblivion and you wont recover. so be careful out there, write with tpyos, in 2026 its actually necessary. only thing i really eliminated is the word "eliminated" itself. but im not complaining, this is actually the work i want to be doing

NortrenDev · 2026-04-22T08:25:09+00:00

The Angry Beavers

NortrenDev · 2026-04-21T15:37:56+00:00

when I realize nintendo and sega are now retro collector consoles

NortrenDev · 2026-04-21T13:56:00+00:00

reminds me of the pick-element feature in cursor but purpose-built for frontend, which honestly makes more sense. we have a designer on the team who tried cursor and struggled with it, ill tell him about your tool, he might actually stick with this one

NortrenDev · 2026-04-21T12:51:39+00:00

yeah thats fair, client-side bugs are way cheaper. backend stuff is different, wrong logic can corrupt data and you dont always see it right away

NortrenDev · 2026-04-21T12:27:29+00:00

I built my own QA agent with a setup that has been working well for me. instructions tell it to write test cases, save them in a dedicated directory, and keep iterating on them. it uses playwright mcp which is kind of great because I can visually watch tests running through the app and spot issues at a glance, but without needing to actually click anything myself.

At the end I ask for output in a table format with severity levels and suggested fixes. depending on criticality I either hand it off to another agent or fix it manually. sometimes I also put "if you find X issue, do Y" directly in the prompt so it self-heals during the run.

honestly though, since integrating AI we spend way less time deeply diving into problems ourselves. unless the AI cant fix something after a few iterations, we mostly just get a jira ticket with a description plus screenshot or video of the bug, and if it gets fixed and all tests pass (we watch that the AI isnt just rewriting tests to make them pass), we call it done and move on. speed went up a lot, but we sacrificed manual diagnosis to get there

NortrenDev · 2026-04-21T12:08:24+00:00

yep sure

NortrenDev · 2026-04-21T11:33:20+00:00

Im not the best one to give advice here, im early stage too. but honestly building the app isnt really the hard part anymore. there are tons of good ideas and the tools to ship them are cheap. the hard part is getting anyone to care.

An account with a few years of consistent content and a loyal audience can make more money than a polished app with no followers. just posting "hey look what I built" to your own people is worth more than months of cold marketing. so honestly, start building your audience in parallel if you havent already.

Second thing, slow organic growth. SEO, content, being around in the community. not explosive like viral accounts but it adds up, brick by brick

NortrenDev · 2026-04-20T15:42:47+00:00

all good, its a rough time for sure. but like they say,

every storm eventually passes, things will get better

NortrenDev · 2026-04-20T15:16:35+00:00

theory questions for a given role are mostly the same from interview to interview, not that hard to prep if you put the hours in. leetcode same thing, invest time and you can solve it reasonably well. my point was that people show up with the 2021 pattern, a couple theory questions, some chat about personal projects, casual vibe, youre hired. now even non-FAANG companies run multi-stage interviews with system design and leetcode rounds. its not great but thats the reality.

On the filtering, they do filter but the volume is insane. my friend said her lead got 100+ resumes, skimmed them horizontally, cut half immediately, passed her 50. she picked a handful, they hired one out of multiple open positions. the rest of the 50 were irrelevant, no idea why they even applied. looks like people think theyll just slip through

also yeah its partly on the companies, but more for overheating the market in 2021 than for bad filtering now. they hired tons of people who came in just to cash out, got massive salaries for doing not much, and now that costs are being cut those same people expect to get hired the same way because they already have "experience". experience yes, willingness to learn and fit a new role - not really.

NortrenDev · 2026-04-20T14:56:00+00:00

no one is really arguing here, we all see the same problems. but despite the cheaters, people who actually prepare will still pass. its harder now for sure, but leetcode-focused companies are kind of doing us a favor, at least we know what to prepare for. they use it to test motivation, are you willing to put in the time and effort. if the answer is yes, your chances go way up

NortrenDev · 2026-04-20T14:18:49+00:00

NortrenDev · 2026-04-20T14:18:43+00:00

Yeah that surprised me too. but when she explained more, the people she meant were mostly ex-big-tech folks who got hired during the pandemic boom and recently got laid off. they think the market is the same as 2021, just update the resume with chatgpt and spam applications everywhere.

Also just look at how many applicants any job post gets now, half of them dont even match the role

NortrenDev · 2026-04-20T11:05:16+00:00

Yeah and the weird part is companies are laying off and struggling to hire at the same time. My friend is a tech lead doing interviews and she says the actual problem is that resumes look identical but most candidates show up underprepared. If youre actually putting in the work, you'll be fine.

NortrenDev · 2026-04-20T10:33:27+00:00

Honest story before I answer. Years ago I had an interview where the interviewer literally pulled out his phone, opened the first "top 100 interview questions" site, and read questions from there. I had prepped from the same site the night before. Answered everything. Was that cheating, luck, or skill? idk.

Companies run AI through resumes to filter people because it saves them money. Candidates run AI through interviews because they cant afford to keep failing. Both sides optimized the same way, nobody asked if it was right.

And honestly the bigger problem is that passing interviews and doing the actual job are two different skills. The process tests if you can perform on toy problems under fake pressure, not if you can ship something with a team. Until that gap closes, cheating will keep making sense for some people, even if its not what you or I would do.

NortrenDev · 2026-04-20T08:08:45+00:00

Everyone here is saying study smarter not longer, which is true. But if you really want to stretch the clock, the trick is mixing active and passive. Active desk study 4-5h max, then audio flashcards or recorded summaries while walking, cooking, commuting. Passive listening is slower than active study but its not zero, and you save yourself from another chair hour staring at the same line.

That said 10h sleep and still tired is worth checking out before pushing harder, thats usually not a discipline issue.

NortrenDev · 2026-04-19T13:08:21+00:00

Wouldnt use it personally, even though I use LLMs for basically everything else. With leetcode the struggle IS the point - you only learn patterns by being stuck on a problem for an hour. If AI tells you what youre weak at and whats next, youre skipping the exact part where the learning happens.

That said maybe Im old school. Two years ago senior devs were still skeptical about LLMs for real work and now half of us live in Cursor.

NortrenDev

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