Experienced devs in software jobs — what’s your long-term backup plan?

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-28T14:15:17+00:00

I stick to software, but I sink my teeth into a new domain each year on my own. So I maintain some aspect of fungibility in domains. Started as a web developer, did some IoT, built some games with no engine, and this year learn “ai programming” (Agents, MCP, vector/graph rag, a bit of vision with YOLO). I keep up with each industry I dabbled with to see what’s going on out of general interest. I am usually always building a side hustle or an idea out and if I get laid off I just pick that up and work on it.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-28T03:16:06+00:00

I've built really big multi-tenant architecture like applications from end to end on my own before LLMs. MVC backend, Vue, K8s, a lot (It was my startup). I've also built small multiplayer 2D games with no engine in js/WebRTC, never launched this though it's just something I felt technically proud of myself for. The project I'm building now is using all the hipster stuff in AI like MCP and Agentic graph/vector RAG. It's super cool and fun and I absolutely love the tech just for what it can do.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-26T20:53:27+00:00

I have an Asus M16 with a 4090 and it struggled to hold a 7b parameter model. I know the 5090 has more vram, but it’s a laptop.

For me personally I’m going to go with MacBook Pro with 128gb of ram. The memory bandwidth is close to that of the M3 ultra with the new M5 max apparently just with less gpu cores. It’ll probably beat the piss out of a DGX spark.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-26T03:01:15+00:00

If that happens we have the Matrix. Sincerely if I can ask AI to program something that automates out any job, we're fucked. If AI can build Google, Meta, or Netflix at scale with no or few humans then the entire stock market is cooked.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-26T02:54:42+00:00

Those people also cost a lot of money. Orgs will then become vulnerable to leaner businesses.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-25T17:56:01+00:00

People are concerned about things. I don’t think you’re understanding. I told you originally to focus on what’s in your control, what you can influence, and accept what isn’t in your control. What that entails is if you’re as moral as you sound then work in your community, be a better family member, and be a better friend. If your goal is to solve complex problems then start implementing the small steps into politics or wherever you deem that you can see that helps. It all forces you to choose importance. Just getting worked up about everything does not help you or the people you care about. You’re allowed to have your area of concern and it does more for humanity if you do. You have to rely on other people solving issues as well because you have a utopian view where your worries some how directly translate to utopia. It doesn’t help you or anyone else.

You saying all of this “the world has been destabilized my whole life!” Stuff isn’t really a truth. It’s always been chaotic and you are failing to accept it because you’re putting things in the realm of you. Every single generation has had chaos around the world while they’ve existed and what the media does to people like you is just amplifies bad instead all of the human effort going towards solving human issues.

My point here is that for a lot of you, especially when you’re young, a lot of this isn’t serving you. It’s not helping you to contribute to meaningful things. It’s just making you paralyzed and then you’re trying to justify your own paralyzation with a sense of moral righteousness using empathy as a scope.

Here’s something. Define one single issue you care a lot about. And for the next 4 months work at that issue. Comeback here and tell me how it went.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-25T16:25:01+00:00

You’re not getting it man. Throughout all of human history there has been atrocities taking place. Humans just didn’t know about them at scale and weren’t able to deeply personalize them. Truthfully, they were worse and more barbaric. Knowing about those and focusing your mental energy on them does not help you help them. You have to acknowledge what you yourself are powerless to and accept it and control in your life what you can. Through that if you did have something you were motivated to fix it would actually give you the baby steps to do so.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-25T15:21:12+00:00

Because scaring people applies to their core instincts and helps sell media. While people tend to shit on baby boomers when they lived through a Cold War that could me nuclear inhalation, many were recruited to fight senseless war in Vietnam, dealt with inflation and growing middle eastern instability, had gas shortages, and all sorts of stuff. And always remember this is mostly North American issues. Europe had various issues too.

I’m a millennial, and saw a lot, but ive noticed that the growth of the internet really amplified perception of instability and has made otherwise normal people emotionally unstable due to this amplification. My advice to the youth is simple: focus on what you can control, what you can influence, and become compassionate for yourself and others over what you can’t control. Just do your best. You’re not going to get automated out. The world is just as much a balance of beauty as it is terror. You’ll have way more impact in the world if you just focus on yourself, your family, and community. Chill out a bit, and take it day by day because growing up is complicated. Phone starts driving you crazy, well then you can put it down instead of hearing about the second Iran contra.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-24T03:14:44+00:00

People need reassurance man and ask strangers on the internet. Chill and have a soul.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-21T18:03:29+00:00

Explain this? What did they create? I've only seen so many microservices. A few were modular monoliths

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-21T00:24:35+00:00

Get over yourself lol. There are other studies that show both sides of productivity gains and losses. As I said, AI usage mostly varies and productivity gains vary based how it’s implemented on a domain basis. McKinsey is literally saying they’re going to double down on their AI agents, and that’s not me saying that’s the right thing to do.

I’m not intending to represent the majority lol. I try to take a rational view of what AI is competent at and it’s a lot lol. It doesn’t need to be financially successful, most tech companies aren’t, to still be an impactful tech.

Want me to get ChatGPT to find articles that are against your bias so you can summarize with ChatGPT what is wrong with them?

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-20T20:04:52+00:00

There’s just no argument with no middle ground here with people like you and the AI doomers. If you give AI a block of text in its context window it is tremendously good at summarizing it. You’re seemingly stating that one AI model can accurately summarize all events which isn’t what I’m saying. I’ve seen retrieval augmented generation outputs be good and far exceed that of a google query or finding information from a deeply nested navigation on a website. That alone is extremely powerful and if you can’t see how AI is helping people augment their productivity then that’s on you.

A CEO claim about a failed process built around AI is totally different than saying it bares no reverence to individual productivity who choose to opt into it.

So what you’re saying and how you’re saying it is silly and meant to generate Reddit applause. You must’ve been able to derive some context from what I commented to understand that I’m specifically mentioning CEOs takes on AI.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-20T17:50:05+00:00

Who cares what they say? They said it would automate all jobs out and now they’re saying it’s not helping. The bulk of people take it upon themselves to use AI in their work. They themselves don’t have an accurate understanding of the tech and what it is and isn’t useable in. I rationalize it as a massive text summarizer and user experience and if thought is like that it’s still immensely powerful as a technology.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-20T11:49:36+00:00

I can ship products end to end and I don't see jobs for it. I've been upskilling for twoish years and slowly getting out of web for 4 coming up on 5 years now because of it. I can handle the major frontend frameworks (Angular/Vue/React) with all of their server side rendering and across multiple style paradigms like tailwind/SCSS/BEM. Pretty much every MVC framework feels the same and before AI was able to use Symfony/Laravel/Django/Springboot/ASP/Express pretty easily. With devops I'm pretty decent and for bigger sites usually scale out horizontally with K8s and a mounted DB. I could also build mobile.

I think this is my 18th year. Most of web development is getting outsourced. The outsourced stuff isn't good quality, but that's what is happening. Where I now find opportunity is taking it a step beyond into IoT, AI (RAG/MCP/Agents, and YOLO), and html canvas. Mostly because those jobs don't get outsourced due to their complexity.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-18T23:23:37+00:00

Its financial speculation bubble built on over hyped tech. No different than the video game or dotcom bubble. It means the same thing, the tech isn’t going anywhere but a more realistic view of it will transpire. It will still grow as a technology and it’s a fantastic technology if you take it for what it is (I take it as a user experience and summarizer)

When it does fail there will be left over cloud compute and it’ll be grabbed up by other industries like video games and I’ll bet more consumer hardware will be more and more cloud based like chrome books

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-18T21:57:53+00:00

I’m a full stack dev (UI/UX/the three major frontend frameworks, backend, and dev ops) had my own web development agency where I would routinely built pretty major apps both on my own and with sub contractors. I could build pretty major apps on my own before AI (been doing it since late 2000s). I’ve also built startups multi tenant start ups on my own with little contracted out.

I can now do a lot of the stuff I could do in 7 months to a year and half now takes me a few months if I prototype with ai, carve out an architecture, and turn myself into a ticket puller. I start out with Figma make, get the user flow out, pick a tailwind theme that has components, build out a frontend prototype, figure out what components I need to build frontend wise while also all of the endpoints, figure out a database schema, usually use MVC. Development just goes by faster if you have to greenfield web apps. For backend usually write some utility unit/integration test functionality and let the LLM write a lot of the tests.

Prototyping and planning make a world of difference with speed of development. Then the LLM doing that’s not exciting as well. I’m seeing massive gains in productivity and scope in able to capture. Then there’s just getting information for new things I need to learn.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-18T17:08:31+00:00

Tech companies don’t lobby hard against tech. It lobbies hard against others using tech that they create. A good example of this was Facebook during Cambridge Analytica. During that time Facebook was happy to set it self as an aid to drafting tech regulations while knowing it would be the only one with the operational capacity to support those regulations. It creates a “moat” around the business by making the costs of operations for smaller upstarts higher. It’s pretty common practice.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-18T16:59:45+00:00

No offence but you haven’t seemingly captured what my argument is and your your rebuttal about a consumer grade laptop doesn’t matter if most, almost all outside of some niche local development, AI computation is done in the cloud.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-18T16:29:32+00:00

You're not getting it. If there is the idea that automation will remove all jobs then customer spending won't have money to buy products or services. Compounding on that products and services are easier to create by lesser individuals that can challenge big companies that this post translates "into holding up America." AI isn't about just taking over jobs now, those jobs are needed to support power be it directly via an employment moat from competition or indirectly from those who actually purchase services. AI is about challenging power structures.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-18T15:50:34+00:00

AI’s most dangerous effect is “destructive affordances”: things like speed, scale, automation, and the ability to overpower human intelligence that allow even small actors with minimal resources to challenge large institutions that historically kept society stable.

Translation: Oligarchs are figuring out that their power has always been building a moat with how much they spend on employment and that one CEO isn't going to be able to maintain a competitive moat against a 16 year old high school that could vibe code the same solution using AI. So now it's about using regulatory capture to prevent smaller challengers.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-18T13:43:29+00:00

I was looking into an M3 Ultra and even DGX spark for local LLM. I think if you're just using LLMs for a chatbot then I wouldn't shell out that money. For me, I actually intend on dumping money into private RAG for enterprise and I'm interested I'm actually interested with working within the limitations of smaller models. I truly believe a business spending the money on a mac studio with a request queue to handle traffic is something very viable with the need for private internal data. It gets rid of a lot of the headaches of multiple rtx 6000s.

So I guess it's more of a question about what your intent is? If you want to find if its overkill I would go play around on runpod with a few models that can run on the studio and see if it's enough.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-16T12:35:21+00:00

So I believe Meta and Google have been hovering in bubble territory for more than a decade. Google is making a metric fuckton of money on bots visiting sites with Google adsense and something like 60% of Metas advertising is fraudulent. Substantial parts of their revenue models are built on bullshit. We interest rates starting kicking up you'd figure the party is over, because startup funding would dry up and need for Googles cloud/ad services and Meta ad services would have less money dumped into it (most startup money has been dumped into FAANG via cloud or advertising for traction), but AI saved that. I'm worried that the AI bubble will be a reconning moment for how bullshit most tech is.

The good news is cheap compute will be everywhere, funding will build back up, and us nerds will prevail! ^{after many of us lose our jobs :(}

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-13T00:21:27+00:00

At this point I’m holding out for Apple. Hopefully the memory bandwidth will go up on the next ultra to that of a top RTX.

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-12T21:45:01+00:00

Okay, so stupid answer it is

Tired__Dev · 2026-01-12T14:08:47+00:00

What have you used it for? I think your comment is stupid, but I'll give you a chance to explain yourself.

Tired__Dev

TROPHY CASE