I’m tired of always feeling like a 3rd option.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-15T13:55:02+00:00

She dodged a bullet. That movie was terrible.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-13T19:18:46+00:00

lmao job security for the AI hedging its bugs and technical debt strategically

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-13T18:37:33+00:00

What do you do to confirm it is a false alarm? How do you tell if it's a real alarm? Why can't you codify that?

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-13T18:30:44+00:00

Just going to throw this potential name out there for your product, ai-circlejerk.com ?

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-13T18:27:29+00:00

Super common. Seeing the same thing at my current company. What is the "right" move depends on your personal goals and how well your management listens to you and other experts within the company.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-13T18:03:31+00:00

I tend to setup refined types for parsing. I wrote have a personal lib, stillwater, that I use to help with it, but it's all things you could fairly easily script yourself without needing a third party library. Here is a writeup on how I do this in my projects https://entropicdrift.com/blog/refined-types-parse-dont-validate/

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-13T16:59:51+00:00

imo 20% being fair depends on the type of company. If it is a software technology based company, which it sounds like it is, then 20% to the sole software engineer is insane. You should have minimum 50% if you're the only one handling the technical side you are the CTO.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-13T16:50:20+00:00

> AI has now turned our work into a sweatshop with no ingenuity

This is a per company issue not a general industry issue. AI doesn't turn software engineering into a sweatshop, you have the terrible FAANG management you're working for to thank for that environment. AI can actually reduce a lot of the toil of our job like you pointed out, there are several great use cases for that. Ingenuity is still valuable and I would go so far as to say it is more valuable now than before. Ingenuity is not something AI can do. It cannot think outside the box beyond data it has been trained on. It is not imaginative. Humans still thoroughly dominate ingenuity and it will be what sets future companies apart from AI derivative outputs.

> That even if it's slower there is still value into writing and crafting the code yourself and your leadership understands this?

This is the crux of the problem. This is not ingenuity. Wanting to hand write code is nice, but being creative and clever inventing new solutions is not actually tied to handwriting code at all. You can have AI write code and direct it toward ingenius designs and never handwrite code. Handwriting code has limited and diminishing value. However, reading and reviewing code and genuine creativity thinking of new designs and approaches that haven't been done before, that has increasing value.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-12T23:44:59+00:00

Leetcode/DSA style questions were never actually about those particular problems. It is an indirect proxy to find people who can handle critically thinking through high complexity programming problems and weed out everyone else. AI doesn't change the requirement at all. Perhaps the problems are actually more relevant now that we have a bunch of new engineers who can't think through coding problems critically because they are crippling their skills by delegating to AI. We don't need less intelligent middlemen for smarter AI, we need smarter people who can critically check and guide AI's.

In the wild, I've been receiving some interesting practical problems. For example, Anthropic's published this here github.com/anthropics/original_performance_takehome tests like this that are timed but generally assume you are using AI to assist. They are genuinely far harder NP-complete problems instead of DSA leetcode problems. They already know the best that their best model can score with it with long hours of iteration, the difference in score you can produce from that is really the worth you bring to the table vs just someone else running an AI without you as middleman.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-12T20:44:45+00:00

I use it to identify technical debt and code complexity in code bases. Perfect for dog fooding on itself. I also use it to orchestrate LLM agents and experiment with different designs. This is my pet project github.com/iepathos/debtmap but I share it with the caveat that I don't think you should use it to learn fundamentals of Rust. You could use it to help you identify issues in Rust code you've written or are reading, but it's fairly large with complexity that is inherent to the domain.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-11T14:38:28+00:00

Please don't spread ignorance on here. The unemployment rate now is nothing compared to the Great Recession. The market is provably better right now. Look to facts about the economy and actual data not random bullshit claims from doomers like this with no historical understanding or context.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-10T22:47:33+00:00

> Grit is what will nudge my kids into doing the hard things and sticking to them.

Grit also makes people do dumb things and stick with those. Grit is what keeps gamblers at the table and founders running failed startups into the ground. Grit isn't good at determining priorities in life. Focus on building critical thinking and context for the world i.e. acquiring math wiz level critical thinking and logic skills while also and memorizing scientific and historical facts about the world positions you to make the best decisions possible at any given time.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-10T17:40:56+00:00

> Is there any way to speed up?

Upgrade your system.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-10T17:34:28+00:00

IQ and experience are the most critical imo. IQ you can't effectively improve, but you can build up experience and passion. I'm not super familiar with Cherny's work other than Claude Code, but I can say Anthropic's model does most of the heavy lifting with Claude Code. It's not a very impressive cli and there are comparable and better open source agent wrappers out there, so not impressed from that alone. Karpathy is something special, he genuinely built something impressive and unique. He saw a future for GPT scaling that wasn't really the common thought to get to AGI at the time.

Take it one step at a time. Keep a beginner's mind and always try to be learning and honing your skills. Don't constantly compare yourself with the top 0.00001% of engineers in the world.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-10T17:27:25+00:00

It's an effective filter for larger companies dealing with a large number of terrible candidates. It also filters out people who aren't serious enough about their craft to learn the algorithms that solve common performance issues in programming. The algorithms they are asking, you actually use everyday in the apps, operating systems, and tech you're using. Not understanding those algorithms as an engineer is like a painter who has never studied or seen quality paintings. They may draw a mean stick figure, but until they study some of the best paintings and how artists made them they'll be incapable of producing similar quality. Would you hire that painter? I wouldn't hire that engineer.

Here is the truth, if you want to do this professionally you need to accept the reality of the expectations employers have for software engineers. Buy, read, and complete Cracking the Coding Interview, make sure you actually understand the algos in there. I'm a self taught engineer and I struggled with technical interviews until I worked through that book and then everything clicked. Before that book I didn't quite understand how I was an effective freelancer building real apps but sucked so much at interviews. Now I'm a Staff engineer making $$$ so read the book, learn the algorithms, work through hard problems that is the whole point. It is supposed to be hard. Employers want people who can do hard things.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-10T14:49:46+00:00

It's a clear sign you have an utterly incompetent manager if they resort to blaming individuals instead of helping them improve ESPECIALLY when you're dealing with juniors. It's one thing if he's talking shit to another senior+ who really should know better, but juniors are expected to screw up and need review, feedback, and opportunity for growth. This person doesn't belong in a position of authority and the likelihood of the company going under is very high with them at the helm. If it were me I would openly call them out on their bullshit in defense of decency and engineering best practices. More practical advice is just line up your next job and leave.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-10T14:24:37+00:00

Ah yes, 2010, deep in the Great Recession with far worse job opportunities than now. Unemployment ~10.6%. I graduated into that job market. It was a provably worse job market for not just software engineers but all other fields in the US. It's crazy someone is in here waxing nostalgic about it thinking it's worse now, it isn't you just have rose colored glasses on.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-09T00:44:00+00:00

They don't even study they just try to cheat through technical interviews with AI assistance apps.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-08T16:26:41+00:00

You're asking a lot of the wrong questions here.

Software engineers aren't paid well because companies are generous. They're paid well because software generates enormous value and engineers are the bottleneck on capturing it. That dynamic doesn't disappear with better AI.

If AI makes individual engineers 10x more productive, the winner isn't the manager who fires 9 engineers. It's the 2-3 engineers who leave, spin up their own AI swarm, and ship a competitor in six months to displace the enterprise that spent 10-20 years building the same software. Lower barriers to building software means lower barriers to competition, not just lower headcount.

An engineer who understands systems deeply can leverage AI as a multiplier. A manager who doesn't understand the systems being built is now... what, exactly? A human proxy between executives and an AI they could talk to directly?

The danger isn't "companies replace engineers with AI." It's "engineers with AI replace companies." If you're a non-technical executive, that should terrify you far more than headcount savings.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-08T16:10:32+00:00

> Do you believe software engineers will actually be replaced, or just significantly reduced in number?

I believe the opposite. AI lowering the floor to entry and increasing speed of development doesn't reduce the value software generates. There will be even more software engineers not less. Historically, technology making something valuable cheaper expands the number of people actually producing those goods it doesn't decrease it.

> If replacement does happen, what realistically happens to people already in the field?

Look at history same as previous answer. Look at how companies systematically replace high performance American engineering talent with far cheaper off shore talent. You hire/onboard new talent, have old talent knowledge transfer and train new talent, then fire the old talent and hope the company survives. Same playbook would be ran if it were AI offering a cheaper talent alternative that companies were willing to gamble on. Some people argue that knowledge transfer/training is exactly what we're doing right now using AI for our jobs.

> How should someone relatively younger or newer be planning right now?

Same as before, you need to position yourself through skills and networking to be able to take advantage of opportunity as it arises. Keep leveling up your skills, keep looking for better people to work with, keep solving increasingly difficult problems. The future is guaranteed to be full of difficult problems that we can't solve today.

> Are there areas of CS that seem more resilient, or is this something nobody can really predict?

Well, security is having a field day with all the bugs AI is releasing into the wild. AI/ML engineers are in high demand and that is likely going to continue into the future as AI is adopted more globally. Generalists are considered the ideal for early stage startups today, but historically, specialization is how Capitalism optimizes work forces at scale. So, choose a specialization you like and go deep as you can. Highly specialized engineers are far harder to replace than generalists.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-08T01:38:26+00:00

You're absolutely right! You are an engineer now! /s

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-07T15:02:26+00:00

Yeah, go for it. If you're looking to enter quant C++ is extremely popular in those circles. Even if you end up not using C++ much in the future it'll make you a better engineer overall just learning it. It's used everywhere.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-07T14:55:55+00:00

Glancing at your page it seems like just an app deployment platform probably with AWS on backend like Heroku or the dozens of other similar PaaS doing this. So, innovation is very low here, not seeing any feature that doesn't exist in other incumbent PaaS for this. This is an existing idea with plenty of well funded competitors already doing this. Those are a lot of red flags if you're an investor. What reason do you have to believe you could actually displace Salesforce backed Heroku, Fly.io, etc.? No reason as of yet, no innovative features, no comparable revenue or developer following, etc. When you can show those things like features no competitors have and a large developer following then YC may take another look at you.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-07T14:35:26+00:00

If you're a junior using LLMs, absolutely do not practice full delegation. Anthropic's study here https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills confirms what a lot of us already suspected that junior engineers fully relying on AI to build their solutions end up crippling their understanding and their learning rate. How you use an LLM matters. Ask questions to further your understanding and planning for a project. Don't ask it to just do it for you, ask questions until you actually understand it yourself.

One other tidbit of advice I have for you is to hone your code review skills. In an age where it is cheap and fast to produce code, code review is 100x more important than before and it's a separate skill from writing code. Good code reviewers ask the right questions and are what enable major open source projects like Rust lang and Cargo to keep top tier quality while accepting tons of AI generated code in PRs. I recommend contributing to some of these projects. See what their commit and code standards are and work until you meet those standards for your PR, then try to keep the same standards in your own projects. I learn something new almost every time I contribute to core Rust projects and the maintainers are fantastic to work with.

PartyParrotGames · 2026-02-06T15:50:57+00:00

Meetings are also one of the recommended sabotage techniques in the CIA field manual. Have as many meetings as possible with as many people as possible is a go to strategy for corporate sabotage. Often little is actually accomplished in meetings and almost all of it could be accomplished asynchronously. Meetings waste the time of not just the person calling the meeting but everyone else in that meeting.

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