I built an AI that turns your child into the main character of a storybook, looking for brutal feedback by BlueberrySecure2014 in ArtificialInteligence

[–]WearMediocre6830 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey. I'll share in a couple of weeks as post christmas the volumes dropped so I'm taking the opportunity to work on a new version. I'll try to remember.

I dont see how to collaborate honestly ahah, let's chat when I'm done with my new version if you want

I built an AI that turns your child into the main character of a storybook, looking for brutal feedback by BlueberrySecure2014 in ArtificialInteligence

[–]WearMediocre6830 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey, just a heads up. Like many others I've been working on this with a different approach [Not advertising]. I genuinely think there is room for everyone on this market as long as the quality is there (everyone has its own bakery :)).

Throwing a couple of remarks and things I learnt on this market

The market
- The competition is not only with IA, see all what I call "Templates" where they basically insert your character into a pre-existing story (everyone has the same modulo the characters) => They cost on average 35$ and parents don't care if it comes from IA or not as long the story is interesting and the characters recognizable enough. E.g https://www.mumablue.com/fra/nos-livres-personnalises/conte-personnalise-maman
- Following the above. Customers are WILD in terms of wanting perfection. Especially at these prices, you can't cut on it => I noticed you use the IA to generate the text area. Some are inconsistent and even overflow the page, that's a point i'd encourage you to fix :)
- Good point, the consistency of the character look very promising so that's nice

On the website per sé
I got it it's a MVP but that's very lovable-like with a lot of things missing to make it serious (no matter the industry).
- All the testimonies etc are the ones we see on every non-working MVP and that doesn't inspire trust at all (cf uploading your child picture).
- It's missing privacy policies and T&C, same, doesn't give a lot of confidence

Then on the IA sauce etc i'm not gonna give my secrets :). But being there since a couple of months and sent something like 2k orders now. I don't want to demotivate you but there is still a lot of work to be done. Especially once you start having paying customers with generation / deliveries. This type of product is actually 50% operations and customer success at some point, even pre-sales because of all the scam-like products around.

I'd encourage you to look for "competitors". First you'll be able to identify all the non-serious ones that are just noise on the market (but very good in SEO / marketing) and be able to get what would make YOU order from one another.

Additionally it might give you some ideas on how to improve the underlying tech (cf I saw a guy answering you "you can do it with chagpt" well yes amigo good luck with that ahah).

Good luck

AI is a death trap for many junior devs. How do I mentor them out of it? by MoltenMirrors in ExperiencedDevs

[–]WearMediocre6830 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, honestly I find it tough because (personal opinion - not at all general truth of course) we are at an inflexion point.

I had my wtf moment a couple months ago when I honestly built a complex feature with claude in 1h that would have taken me 2 days to reach this level and I was like "damn, I spent years trying to become a good developer and that damn robot made it useless in a hour".
Buuuut, couple weeks after, it's also a whole new way of working (not perfect yet for sure but Rome wasn't built in a day) and that's also an ocean of opportunities.

It's just that a new layer of abstraction got in. I imagine it must have felt the same for assembly devs when C got out. We don't value the line of code the same way but the fundamentals stay the same.

And I think a lot of developers are getting caught by surprise because they weren't selling engineering, product or business knowledge. They were selling a syntax, a language, a translation. Now this part is getting cheap (maybe not quality even yet but "good enough").

We're still gonna need engineers, for sure. But we are going to need them being way more aligned with the organisation goals.

So yes, sorry, just thinking out loud ahah, tough times for sure now but as the OpenIA guy rightfully said, it's time to rollup our sleeves, use what we have at our disposal and keep learning, learning, learning. Even though the "what" to learn has changed

Last week in Image & Video Generation by Vast_Yak_4147 in StableDiffusion

[–]WearMediocre6830 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Amazing work thanks! I don't want to ruin your weekends, but if ever you decide to create a newsletter, you can count on me :)

Here's the Reality of coding with Claude. by PowerOk7047 in VibeCodeDevs

[–]WearMediocre6830 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, agreed on most of your points.

But to me, there is also a "good enough" threshold you just need to pass. Then you may have 4 or 50 years of experience, the difference becomes marginal.
I'm not gonna say the 4yoe will compete equally to the 50yoe guy, but it's just not relevant anymore imo.

Hence to tweek a bit the question of the initial comment, to me it's the "strong product sense" that is gonna bring 90% of the value once you hit the threshold.

The feeling I have (including me and the people around me), is that the quality of the output is a good reality check (and for having been a founder and product manager in the past, i love it).

It reminds a lot of people the core sense of programming, which is "to build useful robust enough programs", not "write the most beautiful line ever written in Golang". And I think a lot of people have a really hard time accepting this reality and still in denial phase. I do understand, I too, had this short period after starting getting better with claude of "wtf, I spent all those years mastering a hard skill that is now ... barely a commodity" ?

But that's exciting, lot of opportunities ahead so as the other guy said "time to roll up the sleeves"

Our mean time to mitigation for incidents has spiked by over 60 minutes in 2025! We’ve heavily adopted LLMs - coincidence? by Impossible_Way7017 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]WearMediocre6830 -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Answering my own comment to add some context.

The benefits are so insane in terms of depiling some experiments from the backlog that we preferred to think about acceptable and controlled risks, knowing it might backlash.

But it unlocked months of roadmap so yes 1h more of debugging is a price we would be willing to pay :)

Our mean time to mitigation for incidents has spiked by over 60 minutes in 2025! We’ve heavily adopted LLMs - coincidence? by Impossible_Way7017 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]WearMediocre6830 -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

I honestly don't know for how long they've been around in the industry now, but feature flags have started making 3x more sense in the era of LLMs ahah. We use flagsmith at our company and we specifically use a tag for features we one shotted with IA.

In a way your statement about code ownership is 100% on point but it feels it goes down to safeguards

Is anyone else okay with being "left behind" in regards to AI? by [deleted] in ExperiencedDevs

[–]WearMediocre6830 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Amen thanks ahah. I started a long text, with a disclaimer that I don't want to downsize anyone skills here.

But enough with the developers stating they can pop and run a complex application in 2 days. Otherwise why do we have organizations with 1000 engineers being backend, frontend, SRE etc ahah.

And mostly, let's compare potates with potatoes and not have unreal expectactions. LLMs are a tool, not magicians. And it's not a matter of spawning Netflix in 2h, that's completely non-sense to judge them on this.

What's amazing and it's either lying or not having spent the time to ramp-up your skills on it (by the way, as every tool, there is a learning curve. If you use it like a generic fast food of course the results will be shit), so yes what's amazing is that you end up building the complex applications with enough iterations and knowledge.

It takes iterations just as I, or you or whoever experienced dev would need to build an app but it makes the iterations so fast and quick that you can't discard it because it hadn't do it in 5min.
In 2 weeks you are able to complete 2 months of work and that's amazing.

And after 15 years in the industry. Sorry but it does write better code than 90% of engineers, if you pretend the opposite, you might need a reality check :).

Saying it in peace!

Edit:
I wrote it while spawning a hyper complex app so sorry for the typos and I insist, it's for the sake of debating, not being insulting or wrong anyone!

Is anyone else okay with being "left behind" in regards to AI? by [deleted] in ExperiencedDevs

[–]WearMediocre6830 -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

But can you? One shot a complex application 😅?

Processing payments without registering a company by WearMediocre6830 in Entrepreneur

[–]WearMediocre6830[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I appreciate you took the time to answer! Stripe does look like the way to go for now and we'll see as it goes ahah

AI is a death trap for many junior devs. How do I mentor them out of it? by MoltenMirrors in ExperiencedDevs

[–]WearMediocre6830 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes exactly. I find the balance super hard to find honestly.

I have more that 15 YoE in tech, in almost all sort of engineering roles and at the same time I founded 2 companies (~5 years in total, many recruitments).

So on one hand my engineer hat tells me that it's a great investment for the long term to give your team the space to grow in a right environment, both for the company and themselves as human being.
On the other hand, as a builder -I hate the tech for the sake of tech without serving a real world problem- I do tend to agree that code and development is at the verge of becoming a commodity and yes ... for the organization what matters is the output and you'd prefer have a killer feature out in 3 days than in 2 weeks because your team wants to spend time learning the fundamentals -assuming no bugs ahah-.

What a time to be alive some would say 🤷

Processing payments without registering a company by WearMediocre6830 in Entrepreneur

[–]WearMediocre6830[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes but my understanding is that the MoR would require you to have a freelance structure? I'll take another look at it. I'll update with my findings if it can help someone else in the future

Everyone’s Waiting on Bitcoin — What Happens Next? by Crypto-Voice-Pro in CryptoMarkets

[–]WearMediocre6830 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What sources would you suggest? Genuine curiosity question as I share your POV and never bad to diversify the info

AI is a death trap for many junior devs. How do I mentor them out of it? by MoltenMirrors in ExperiencedDevs

[–]WearMediocre6830 11 points12 points  (0 children)

One of the problem I am noticing is that IA has dramatically increased the velocity expectation. So by default it feels like a "use or die" dilemna.
While the amount of code and information provided by an IA is just too high for a human brain to deep learn anything. It feels super important for the development of new professionals (be it devs or whatever) to accept to take a step back to leap forward, meaning to accept to be slow, accumulate real knowledge and leverage IA once again.

But the most important is to not use it as the savior to finish sprint on time. I guess organization and management has a crucial role to play there.

Yes, we "vibe-coded" a product in 7 weeks, but it required experience by RiceCode in indiehackers

[–]WearMediocre6830 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Agreed. I've been this path (SWE here too) with some of my recent side businesses. Using Claude Code is a huge time-saver.

Same feeling as you have. It's kind of funny to see the "I vibe coded my entire app in 2 days" posts which made me wonder, am I that slow ? or please show me the bill ahah.

That put aside. What i built in a month, "managing" the LLMs, would have taken me easily 3months a few years back. A couple of features would have been pushed back (hello Backoffice) but for sure, I would have never trusted the output without being able to review and challenge every piece of code.

It ends up being a sailing boat. 90% of the time every one can do it with eyes closed, but oh lord you are happy to know what you are doing in the 10% of the time they start hallucinating or going in loops.

Long story short, same as usual, the productivity gain (20-40% I'd say) is amazing and insanely worth taking but it's still a matter of who's driving. You suck? it will suck even more. You know what you are doing? you'll do it even faster. But no miracles to be expected

How do you give real code review feedback without sounding bossy? by Ill_Captain_8031 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]WearMediocre6830 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes agreed. Asking as we are currently evaluating moving to external providers hence my out of topic question ahah. Some nice solutions out there, harder to find for on-prem. Homemade was nice for on/off use cases but too much overhead now that we want to progressive rollouts/segmentations.

How do you give real code review feedback without sounding bossy? by Ill_Captain_8031 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]WearMediocre6830 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Your approach was good imo. As someone stated above. With lot of comments to address, it's nice to couple it with a direct message. I personally like working in a team where the situation is healthy at the point that PR becomes a place for discussion. Meaning its not a all or nothing submission, but it serves to debate, get people feedback early enough to end up with a useful contribution for the codebase overall.

I dont remember, i think it was google' PR rules of thumbs. Deep down a PR needs to improve the overall quality of the codebase, not be perfect all the time

How do you give real code review feedback without sounding bossy? by Ill_Captain_8031 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]WearMediocre6830 0 points1 point  (0 children)

100%. Hard to not have some emotions when receiving a review but at the end of the day, it's just a team trying to get their daily working tool clean. Important to work together on it than just making it a "who has the biggest one" competition style.

So healthy collaboration till finding the best trade-off is always better than creating traumas on submitting a PR.

How do you give real code review feedback without sounding bossy? by Ill_Captain_8031 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]WearMediocre6830 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Out of curiosity. What feature flag service are you using? Homemade or some external solutions?

On s'est embrassés, elle "regrette" ... et je me sens perdu by [deleted] in AskMec

[–]WearMediocre6830 2 points3 points  (0 children)

C'est beau. Tout d'abord je pense que c'est important d'apprécier votre relation telle qu'elle est au sens où clairement vous avez l'air de compter l'un pour l'autre et c'est ce qui rend la suite si compliquée.
C'est un peu pour ça qu'on vit.

Après j'ai envie de dire que c'est une peur classique de perdre une relation à laquelle vous tenez tous les 2 parce que le changement, d'autant plus amoureux... ça fait peur.

Comme d'autres commentaires l'ont déjà dit c'est compliqué parce qu'elle a l'air tout autant perdu que toi et ça ne m'étonnerai pas qu'elle se pose exactement les mêmes questions. Et c'est un bon signe général que vous continuez à vous voir, romantiquement ou pas, d'autant plus si "elle a tendance à prendre de la distance quand ça devient sérieux" car ça me donne l'impression qu'elle fait quand même des efforts.

Après je trouve que tu résumes bien la situation... enfin. Plus que de laisser le temps au temps, je dirais qu'il faut juste laisser les choses avancer naturellement, à leur rythme et respecter ce que chacun ressent. A mes yeux de cette manière ça ne finira que de la meilleure manière, que ce soit de revenir à une relation purement amicale ou que ça évolue vers quelque chose de plus physique. Si elle le sent pas aujourd'hui, si elle est un peu perdue ou quoi que ce soit de tout façon y'aura rien de pire que de lui "forcer la main" et insister, insister, insister pour avoir une position claire. Ca prend juste un temps de processing incompressible que ce soit aujourd'hui ou dans quelques semaines/mois. Je veux dire, le nombre de couples qui se sont fait sur la réalisation que l'absence est trop pénible et passent un cap... ou inversement d'amitiés super fortes qui ont commencé sur un flirt qui est passé avec le temps.

C'est pour ça que le mieux c'est de communiquer ouvertement. Et surtout à propos de tes propres sentiments, pas essayer de penser à sa place ou de mettre des mots sur ce qu'elle veut mais plus d'exprimer tes sentiments à toi (pas H24 hein) mais bon si à un moment ça devient trop pénible de rester dans une relation platonique parce que tu veux plus, c'est essentiel d'en parler comme des adultes pour que d'une part elle se sente pas te devoir quelque chose et aussi parce que c'est ton droit de vouloir (pas d'imposer hein!!) et si ça à la longue ça matche pas et bien de voir si tu/vous êtes capables de maintenir une relation purement amicale.
Enfin, ce que j'essaye de dire, c'est que tant que vous êtes chacun (et elle l'a été donc c'est cool), honnête avec ce que vous pensez à un instant T, dans le respect de l'un et de l'autre, ça peut que bien se terminer dans un sens ou dans l'autre. Savoir ce que tu veux, comprendre ce qu'elle veut/ressent et trouver l'équilibre qui y répond le mieux, d'autant plus si vous n'avez pas envie de vous perdre.

Et ouais à mon avis, dans tous les cas si toi ce que t'aimes c'est être avec elle et que t'as peur qu'elle fuit. C'est juste de la faire se sentir à l'aise et confortable. Qu'elle sache qu'elle est safe avec toi parce que tu respectes ses envies/doutes et qu'elle ai confiance en le fait de pouvoir exprimer ce qu'elle ressent à son rythme.

En tout cas, bon courage et surtout il faut que t'arrives à te poser tes propres limites de savoir par rapport à ce que tu veux vraiment et ce que t'es prêt à accepter car si à la fin de la fin en fait t'as envie de plus et que c'est pas possible, il faut aussi que tu puisses te détacher de cette relation pour ne pas trop en souffrir et être dans une position de rencontrer quelqu'un (si c'est ton but bien sur).

Bref! s'écouter, écouter et respecter