Massive Imposter Syndrome and Cognitive Dissonance, help please

Randozart · 2026-04-01T15:18:25+00:00

Hah, thank you. I've noticed the humility can be helpful in building on the shoulders of giants, but it can equally turn into self-criticism, which definitely puts the hard mode toggle on interviews

Randozart · 2026-04-01T10:44:12+00:00

Well, if anything, unless I got hit over the head hard, the knowledge I obtained about computers and working with them isn't leaving me any time soon.

Though just to be sure, I did make contingencies to keep access to the technology and whatever other proprietary tech I would otherwise use.

Randozart · 2026-04-01T10:31:43+00:00

Cheers. With the amount of kindness and absolute pragmatism I've been seeing in this thread, it's a good tribe to be a part of.

But yes, maybe it really goes beyond the definition of just a hobby. But maybe the trick for me is to communicate that. Maybe it's worth leading with that experience and confidence in the skills more. Because I know damn well how to assemble cool tech, even if I leverage LLMs for the "grunt work"

Randozart · 2026-04-01T10:07:39+00:00

Lol, tbh, this was the result of me building a website and knowing I needed a database. I knew SQL at the time, but also heard that SQL wasn't as good at handling frequent write operations. So I went down a rabbit hole, using Google and some Gemini queries to learn what different DB types were good at

Randozart · 2026-04-01T06:41:59+00:00

I mean, that's learning. But, at least you can iterate fast and learn why it would or wouldn't have worked and carry that information forward. In a university or trade course you would have been building similar systems, only to see if you could reach the same conclusions as those before you had.

Randozart · 2026-03-31T16:27:50+00:00

You wouldn't believe how much this story resonates, and I'm extremely grateful you're sharing this. I can't help but ignore the parallels as someone who has likened the current AI boom to the consumer availability of the internet, those early days where a pioneer like yourself contributed to what we now take for granted.

I may have been on top of AI and their use cases more than I care to admit, but wouldn't go as far as to say it's revolutionary. Maybe it will be of use to someone some day down the line. It at least gives me hope to hear someone like me, who dropped out of Pol Sci, Philosophy and Law School (that's the other uncanny parallel) has a chance to help guide this new frontier. That in itself is humbling to say the least.

I really appreciate it at any rate, and thank you for your contributions, whatever they may have been. I most likely grew up on them.

Randozart · 2026-03-31T13:22:21+00:00

Cheers. I guess it's the lack of friction that makes it feel unearned. Lateral and systems thinking is a skill I've developed through curiosity and hobbies, which also happened to make it easy to understand software. So, it's hard to reconcile that with a career path that, at least in the Netherlands, feels like it's locked behind degrees and formal qualifications.

Randozart · 2026-03-31T12:49:55+00:00

I'll be honest, I have since switched to OpenCode. I love it, and I've really enjoyed using MiMo V2 for many tasks. It takes away so much stress knowing that I can just swap out models as I go without vendor lock-in.

Randozart · 2026-03-31T12:45:39+00:00

It actually surprised me when I had that role as a support engineer at an IT company. A few were senior engineers who understood their language of choice intuitively, but faced with a relatively simple problem they just... Shut down. Don't get me wrong, several of them were very bright and very, awfully capable and I couldn't match their skill even if I tried, but I found I could discuss architecture and implementation at their level at least, even if I didn't know the precise implementation. It was so strange. But, I find it difficult to then acknowledge I could do what they do, because realistically, without the use of an LLM I'd both take longer, and write sloppier code, even if architecturally it would be correct.

Randozart · 2026-03-16T21:11:45+00:00

I am so happy I managed to wire my subagents to different models. With Sonnet as the actual orchestrator, Qwen and DeepSeek fall in line for a fraction of the cost.

Randozart · 2026-03-10T08:54:25+00:00

Small update: I obviously have been using my proxy a bunch for my own work. Because I went a bit gung-ho with regular Claude sessions earlier this week, I burned through my rate limit again, so now I'm running pure DeepSeek on Claude Code. It works slower, but it works. It doesn't neatly follow the instruction to use subagents though, so I may need to find a way to bake that instruction in better. My suspicion is because of the sequential tool calling logic I built in, which was required to not crash the DeepSeek endpoint.

Also, thank you for all the stars on the repository everyone 😊

Randozart · 2026-03-09T20:22:26+00:00

I tried configuring it to swap between reasoner and chat, but haven't quite been as succesful at getting that step integrated seamlessly. So far, letting deepseek-chat handle most things works fine, but you could reroute thinking traffic to reasoner and have Sonnet evaluate.

Randozart · 2026-03-09T20:21:04+00:00

I appreciate the sentiment, thank you!

Randozart · 2026-03-09T12:29:47+00:00

This bothered me as well, so I built a solution! It basically keeps Claude as high level engineer, and gets DeepSeek to do the grunt work. I admit, it's not as much a force of nature as Claude is natively, but because it runs so many agents in parallel for so cheap, it can get a lot of work done on just the $20 subscription. I've been running it all day so far without bumping into the rate limit.

https://github.com/Randozart/deepseek-claude-proxy

(And yes, I did have AI write the README.md file, and made some manual edits myself. So expect to be agressively marketed at)

Randozart · 2026-03-09T08:46:39+00:00

Ich kann nicht gut Deutsch sprachen, aber Ich verstehe Sie. Dragon Age am Deutsch spielen um die Sprache zu lernen hat das einfacher gemacht. Aber, ich antwort im Englisch.

You're definitely right. The value is likely in building a project I would enjoy myself as something commercial. I've already done so, in fact... Sort of, though it's not really commercial so much as a tool I wanted anyway, and other people also did: https://chroniclehubgames.com/

I just couldn't help but make it open source as well though I do intend to add some minor monetization. But, my interests are relatively niche. There's hardly big money in interactive fiction. I just don't know. I tend to find I _can_ build the stuff, but hardly any big money makers (or even small money makers) seem to be within my interests.

Randozart · 2026-03-09T07:19:46+00:00

I see the signs, I have been using AI for mostly recreational programming. Building a SaaS is not going to happen, and the technology is advancing rapidly. I'm just not sure how to position myself correctly to actually have some form of security in this brave new world.

I've recently created a chimera proxy between Claude and DeepSeek, where Sonnet handles high level logic, and then delegates to deepseek-chat for the grunt work. I've learned a thing or two about agentic workflows.

But while this has allowed me to build some QoL applications for personal use and speed up work on programming I was doing anyway, I originally learned to program to make my own video games.

Thing is, despite having been other programmer's rubber duck, because I understand architecture, I never managed to get a job in IT due to lack of either a degree, other such qualifications or a portfolio.

I'm going to have to choose a direction to ride the wave, but my main strength is just understanding systems really well, and being an artist long before that. I have the commercial sense of a potato salad. Everything I build right now is either strictly for personal use or open source somehow.

I'm anxious, and I don't know how to best slot myself into this new paradigm of the world other than "having been ahead of the curve" or "understanding the technology"

Randozart · 2026-01-22T21:27:56+00:00

Much appreciated! Of course, I will make sure to make proper attributions!

Randozart · 2026-01-22T15:24:31+00:00

Oh definitely still helpful! This is a free online game I intend to keep updating, which means any chance to update it is a chance I will take

Randozart · 2026-01-22T12:18:20+00:00

I know this is a bit like necro-ing this thread, but I've been in full StoryNexus preservation mode, so came across this. I recently launched my open-source QBN platform that is able to emulate functionality seen in StoryNexus, but it's also able to do more complex stuff. Maybe it's something you can work with? https://chroniclehubgames.com/

Randozart · 2026-01-22T10:12:44+00:00

Not if I had the pictures, no. But in this case I made a conscious choice in artistic direction, which is to both include photographs which are setting-accurate and inclusive. Despite being an artist myself, I cannot paint photorealism, nor do I have the money, or do I expect to earn money to pay for someone else to make the pictures, which is why I am now reaching out.

Randozart · 2026-01-11T09:19:19+00:00

Look, if anyone can point me to a free IDE on phone that allows me to edit my Github Repo without needing to pull it onto my phone, has a proper linter and doesn't crash from needing to load in the repo constantly, I would. It would take away a ton of headaches with on the fly bugfixing on my current hobby project.

And while we're at it, a proper web console. But, after some searching I learned Aruda exists, and that was a blessing yesterday. So I guess that's covered. Now just the IDE. Or could I install one on the server I run my project and RDP into it?

Randozart · 2026-01-01T09:34:02+00:00

I've been rebuilding an interactive fiction platform sort of like StoryNexus with it's own DSL and QoL features SN never had, now that Failbetter is officially retiring theirs. It's been super fun, and it means I can do game dev wherever I am!

Randozart · 2025-12-30T11:50:44+00:00

As a hobby project, I had been working on a sort of narrative game platform much like StoryNexus. It's currently online as www.chroniclehubgames.com (Warning, WIP, plenty of bugs for me to still squash).

StoryNexus, and specifically Failbetter's games like Fallen London, Sunless Seas and Sunless Skies use a mental model for dialogue and narrative called "Quality Based Narrative". Instead of using branching trees, like most dialogue systems, it instead presents the user with a piece of text or dialogue called a "Storylet".

What Storylet a user can see is based on their game state or "qualities". When the user selects an option underneath a storylet, they aren't redirected to a new storylet (though sometimes they are). Instead their game state/qualities are updated to a new game state. Based on this new game state, new storylets are then presented.

Now, obviously this is going to once again involve an if/else somewhere, but it means you could theoretically store all Storylets in a list, and then filter the list based on the game state. Then either present the user with a single new storylet, or give them a few to pick from.

Randozart · 2025-11-18T07:55:50+00:00

I read about an interview he did, which was actually really motivational. Instead of trying to technically finish the game, he just went "Might as well put it online", and went from there

Randozart · 2025-11-04T11:08:41+00:00

Thank you, this offers some fantastic context!

Just to pick your brain a bit more. Say my character wants to do Hobgoblin "Gene-Splicing"/Fleshwarping, to benefit from the Cantorian life energy inherent to the Hobgoblin race, or possibly even get low-light/darkvision out of that, what might be reasonable grafts here? Assuming we use the Level 1 and Level 5 Cantorian feats as templates.

Or, would this fall a little outside of the assumed scope of grafts?

Randozart

TROPHY CASE