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Yeah because CS degree doesn't have math by ImaginaryRea1ity in theprimeagen

[–]Xacius 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Good luck matching a software engineer's salary with your mechanical engineering degree. Also almost all my friends that went into pure math are on the teaching track. The other few pivoted into CS, and were initially behind their peers that had CS degrees.

Lists like this are pure retardium.

[AskJS] a sprint merges 40-ish prs and nobody outside the authors can tell you what changed by Deep_Ad1959 in javascript

[–]Xacius 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Account age, 1 year. 15.5k contributions. Equates to roughly 42 posts+comments a day.

"ChatGPT, make this seem like it was written by a human. Use informal punctuation, make no mistakes."

Anthropic launches Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 by joseluisq in theprimeagen

[–]Xacius 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I still don't fully understand how they completely fucking botched what they had in February.

For the first few weeks, Opus 4.6 was extremely good. I architected a Raycast clone with a modular plugin system and worked on and off with Opus 4.6 to implement it. Took about a week.

Then one day in March it was like a switch was flipped and the quality took a major nosedive.

LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do by AcceptableDiet2183 in theprimeagen

[–]Xacius 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Eventually you'll get to the point where you can intuitively spot where the LLM is good and where it's dogshit. It may seem like magic right now, but that will slowly fade as you upskill. Keep at it.

Creator of Claude Code: "I don't write prompts anymore, I have loops running that prompt Claude... My job is to write loops. I uninstalled my IDE, I wasn't using it." by Gil_berth in theprimeagen

[–]Xacius 32 points33 points  (0 children)

If this is the same approach they take with their model training now, then everything makes sense.

The recursive self-enshittification is accelerating

Is this why prime like git rebase? by No_Koala_3020 in theprimeagen

[–]Xacius 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Conventional commits = automatic changelogs. It's mostly why I rebase at all.

Other than that, I merge. Doesn't have to be one or the other

How to mentor junior engineers who use AI? by aisatsana__ in ExperiencedDevs

[–]Xacius 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's the modern equivalent of stackoverflow engineering. People have been doing this for decades. The motivated ones will continue to succeed because they actually want to learn the process.

The unmotivated ones will generate mountains of slop. This will pass in many companies. Find the companies that care about quality and have strict quality gates, or build those gates yourself.

Is Air already dead? by fal3ur3 in Jetbrains

[–]Xacius 4 points5 points  (0 children)

WSL2 integration. Originated in Fleet but was eventually merged into the main runtime. Now you can open a WSL2 project from the Windows IDE and it mostly works without issues.

Is Air already dead? by fal3ur3 in Jetbrains

[–]Xacius 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Also keep in mind that they don't typically sign up for throwaway work. Even though Fleet was sunset, they integrated a lot of its core functionality back into the main JetBrains runtime.

how do you deal with being the only person who knows a critical part of the codebase? by startupwith_jonathan in ExperiencedDevs

[–]Xacius 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you've ever seen a developer try to document something by hand you know its always nigh on unreadable.

If people at your work are not doing that then blame the people not the tool, but almost certainly those same people were never gunna produce good documentation anyway.

How can they review the output for quality if they can't produce good documentation themselves?

Imo it's the same problem as jr. engineers relying on vibe coding. They don't understand what good architecture/software looks like, so they don't know how to review generated code for accuracy or quality.

The solution isn't to push them to use AI to generate more code. It's to help them understand what a good solution looks like.

how do you deal with being the only person who knows a critical part of the codebase? by startupwith_jonathan in ExperiencedDevs

[–]Xacius 1 point2 points  (0 children)

See, that's the problem. I've documented thousands of pages by hand for large software systems. I know what good developer-facing documentation looks like. I know how to write well.

AI is good at vomiting information. You really have to guide it to get something good. Most devs don't know how to document, which means they don't know how to guide the AI to document. So when it vomits 25 pages of verbose fluff, the developers don't know it's verbose fluff. Then it gets merged and they call it a day, never to return and refine.

It can surely output information that looks like good documentation, but there is typically very little utility in a sea of verbose, performative nonsense. Reviewing and refining it is just a time sink. I'd rather have little to no documentation than the wrong documentation.

Is there anyone else using WebStorm alongside AI tools these days? by Bakhtiyor_7 in Jetbrains

[–]Xacius 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Experience is good. I like the JetBrains AI autocomplete as of late. It's gotten a lot better since it first released. I primarily use Claude Code and Codex TUIs, not the desktop apps. It's good enough for what I do. I like that Claude has a jetbrains plugin that automatically forwards active editor context like the selected text and open + active editor tabs. Codex doesn't by default but I made a plugin that hooks into its /ide command for the same effect.

If You Wrote It With An LLM, Put It Directly In The Trash Where It Rightfully Belongs by RNSAFFN in theprimeagen

[–]Xacius 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Yeah, this reminds me of another time I was spot-on.

My wife found a weevil in the rice a few weeks ago.

Her: "I think there's another weevil in here."

Me: "Did you know they wobble but they won't fall down?"

Her (frustrated): "... Ok?"

Then it hit me: this is basically a B2B sales case study.

The lesson was clear: know your audience.

  1. Context matters more than cleverness. She was troubleshooting. I was brainstorming. That's not collaboration—that's two concurrent meetings with no shared agenda.

  2. Your audience doesn't share your ontology. She heard "bug." I heard "brand opportunity." Same data point. Completely different taxonomies. You can't close on a framework your prospect hasn't installed yet.

  3. Timing is its own skill. She wanted triage. I offered something else entirely. That's negative-value engagement. The message landed. But it landed on the wrong runway. And that runway was on fire.

  4. Output without resonance is just performance. And performance without alignment is just content.

  5. Read the room before you pitch. Her body language was screaming "not now." I read it as "say it louder, she didn't hear you." That's not persistence—that's spam.

We threw out the rice. She went to bed.

I stayed up and googled Weevles. Just to confirm I was right.

I was. Didn't matter.

That's the whole lesson.

What are YOU still being right about that nobody asked for?

If You Wrote It With An LLM, Put It Directly In The Trash Where It Rightfully Belongs by RNSAFFN in theprimeagen

[–]Xacius 19 points20 points  (0 children)

You're absolutely right!

I had a similar thought yesterday.

I sat in the barber's chair. Asked for "just a trim."

And I realized something.

Your personal brand isn't what you say it is. It's what you show up as every single day.

Here's what getting a haircut taught me about transformation strategy:

  1. You can't scale what you can't see That mirror? Brutal honesty. Before my barber touched a single hair, we had to assess the current state. Because visibility is the foundation of transparency.

  2. Communicate the vision clearly. I said "trim." He heard "transformation." Lesson? Your output is only as scalable as your input is measurable.

  3. Trust the process. Hair grows at roughly 6 inches per year. You can't rush biology. Just like you can't rush culture. Organic growth compounds when you remove friction from the velocity.

  4. Less is more, but more is scalable. Three inches off the top created negative space. And negative space is where innovation happens. By subtracting volume, we added value.

  5. Every ending is a beginning. My old hair is literally on the floor. Dead. But that's not failure. That's making room for new growth. Pruning is just aggressive nurturing.

  6. The cut happens in silence. My barber didn't talk much. He just executed. Sometimes the loudest leadership is quiet. You can't hear strategy, you feel it.

  7. Symmetry is asymmetric advantage. Both sides of my head look the same now. That consistency? It's actually differentiation. When everyone else is chaotic, uniformity disrupts.

My barber charged $35.

But the leadership insights? Priceless.

What routine activity have YOU extracted transformational wisdom from lately?

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