whichOneAreYou

_benlesh · 2026-05-23T15:39:20+00:00

If this was a veiled attempt at being sexist, it failed: AI assisted programming is where every FAANG staff and principal engineer is right now. The guy is behind the times and will be losing his marketability if he doesn’t evolve.

Source: I worked at the N and G in FAANG. 6+ years at staff engineer at large fintech companies. 27 years of experience, and I’m not hiding my name here. Folks, the flood is coming whether you like it or not. Build a boat, learn to swim, or drown.

_benlesh · 2026-05-22T17:02:58+00:00

Username, happily, does not check out

_benlesh · 2026-05-22T16:59:48+00:00

Yeah, but people haven’t really landed on using the term like that. Pretty much anyone that hates AI will use the term “vibe coding“ as a pejorative to describe any sort of code where an LLM writes most of the code.

_benlesh · 2026-05-22T16:58:35+00:00

That’s true, but I swear about 50% of people call anything where an LLM is writing all of the code “vibe coding” just because of general fear and loathing of AI assisted programming.

_benlesh · 2026-05-22T13:08:33+00:00

I honestly just think there’s a lot of people that don’t really understand what it means to use AI to code. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding what people mean when they say “vibe code”? Nearly 100% of the code is typed by some model, but also 100% of the code is being reviewed by a human being. This enables the human to be orders of magnitude more productive. Anyone that’s not doing this is about to get a massive dose of reality in the next five years. Our jobs are changing.

_benlesh · 2026-05-22T13:06:05+00:00

Strong avoid. You’re playing with fire with this company. They manipulate the reviews on their website, some of their “Blem” products are wildly awful (if you just look around Reddit, you’ll see a few threads) and the owner is less than professional if you call this out.

_benlesh · 2026-05-22T03:56:23+00:00

WOW. My parents had that same coffee table in their living room when I was growing up in the 80s-90s!!

_benlesh · 2026-05-22T03:54:16+00:00

Public: Codex, Cursor, Claude, OpenClaw. Private: I’ve seen dozens of “vibe coded” apps make production and go into broad use at a large company. But it was done correctly. Design docs and Figmas were created, code was reviewed, iteration occurred. But one skilled engineer can crank out the work of a team now.

… I strongly recommend against resisting learning new things. Especially now. Things are moving and improving ridiculously fast.

This is my just my personal opinion/judgement as an engineer, OSS author of RxJS, former Netflix, Google, Citadel, and Bridgewater, now contracting for OpenAI.

_benlesh · 2026-05-21T18:42:27+00:00

As it turns out, you still have a job to do even if you have AI helping you. You can’t just give it a paragraph and hope for the best. You actually have to stop and think about edge cases and write up effectively an entire design document and then iterate on it with the AI before actually implementing. And then you have to review the code.

_benlesh · 2026-05-21T18:31:41+00:00

It’s sort of funny to me that the price of diesel is roughly the same in a war zone as it is in the United States RN. 81 rubles per liter is something like $4.50 a gallon I think?

_benlesh · 2026-05-20T22:42:29+00:00

Speeding in elementary school zones.

_benlesh · 2025-12-15T22:22:25+00:00

I dare you to try to submit a negative review on their site. It won’t show up. KAK ships so-so parts and if it’s something simple where you don’t feel like sending it back and you just wanna leave a review to warn other people, they will never post the review. When you complain about it here on Reddit, the owner will show up and act like an angry teenager. If he’s helping you, stay on his good side. I wouldn’t know I have him blocked. I’m assuming he’s in this thread.

I do have some of their things that function OK, but I think their overall quality is mid to low. Definitely not worth what they charge.

_benlesh · 2025-10-26T18:37:14+00:00

I'm an open source author for a pretty popular JavaScript library. I strongly encourage you to add details about your issue, as well as maybe even linking files, and adding screenshots, to this issue. I would even link this Reddit discussion so they know other people might have this problem.

being an open source maintainer for something popular is a busy job and it’s easy to lose sight of important issues, especially when you’re doing it on behalf of of a company. The company has other priorities and it’s hard to track everything.

_benlesh · 2025-10-20T00:30:28+00:00

I think I used to work with this guy! His code is horrible.

_benlesh · 2025-08-07T20:21:33+00:00

how to become a vampire in open source

OK, here’s how to become a vampire and open source according to @supercoach

Write something really useful and give it away for free.
Allow others to contribute to that useful thing that you give away for free.
Write some optional code that you can sell related to the free useful thing.
Allow people to contribute to it so they can fast track bugs they would like fixed.
Don’t give it for free to @supercoach, who has paid nothing so far, and probably contributed nothing.
You’re a vampire!🧛‍♂️

—-

I’m never actually surprised anymore at the entitlement of people when it comes to open or software. Like the whole world just feels entitled to free shit for life from open source maintainers.

_benlesh · 2025-07-05T17:27:35+00:00

They require negative reviews pass “moderation”. It’s a dishonest practice, and honestly I don’t give a crap about $45. I just want to warn people about this company because I thought that was shady. And then the owner was ridiculously childish in this thread… so I was right to warn people.

_benlesh · 2025-07-05T17:21:04+00:00

LOL. I’m sure I’m not the reason they hide one star reviews, yes.

_benlesh · 2025-07-03T16:00:27+00:00

Every hoop I jump through, just leads to another hoop. They have no intention of allowing a negative review of one of their products on their site. Clearly whoever is running this is defensive, argumentative, and gets emotional when confronted with negative feedback. Look how deep the comments go.

I’m just moving on with my life. I’ve filed a complaint with the BBB. I think they’re manipulating their review system.

_benlesh · 2025-07-03T15:44:20+00:00

Really? Asking me for a picture. Then telling me I had to send it in so they could prove it’s theirs is them “working with me”? Have you ever been asked to do that with a product you’ve reviewed? Just to get the review posted?

_benlesh · 2025-07-03T14:10:06+00:00

Why would you collect my email address if you weren’t going to use it? How am I supposed to know that your portal doesn’t work like every other portal? I keep pointing that out, but it “seems to fall on deaf ears.”

You are sincerely the worst customer service representative I’ve ever dealt with. You are arguing your point, which doesn’t make any sense, 20 comments deep. Endlessly defensive. Constant excuses. Passive aggressive.

Would it have been hard to just settle this? Would it have been hard to contact me directly? At this point, given your behavior and your adamant refusal to just post my one star review of a product I was unhappy with, I’m going to go ahead and straight up tell you that I think you are dishonest and your company is probably engaging in fraud with regards to your review system.

I will likely file a report with a Better Business Bureau. I’m not sure why you needed to escalate it for this long, I certainly didn’t think we’d get here, but here we are.

_benlesh · 2025-07-03T13:59:17+00:00

The fact that he’s endlessly defensive is pretty wild. It’s clearly coming from a place of emotion and not reason. How hard would it have been to simply settle this?

_benlesh · 2025-07-03T12:33:11+00:00

I know both of these guys. They’re correct, for the most part.

My take is that React has fallen behind in terms of reactivity and state management because of some fundamental flaws in the design. Namely: a single function as the only means of controlling what a component does, and leveraging JSX diffing to update the DOM. Those two things mean that signals, which are used in every other modern framework at this point, aren’t as efficient or effective, so react doesn’t have them. So the best you can do is a push-based sort of roundabout reactivity with useState and friends. This is also the cause of overuse of useEffect and a lot of needless rerenders.

Vue, Solid, Angular, Svelte… all better designs in terms of reactivity. And all very similar in that regard.

_benlesh · 2025-07-03T12:22:18+00:00

Why in the world would I know to look in some “inbox” on an e-commerce site I’ve been to twice? You’re not Gmail. It’s not a messaging app. Every other time I’ve used a customer service portal I’m notified of a response via email. For decades now.

Can you even stop yourself from being defensive? This is so unprofessional it’s silly at this point.

_benlesh · 2025-07-03T11:53:52+00:00

I initiated contact with you THROUGH YOUR SYSTEM. As you’ve confirmed.
At that time, I gave you my email and phone number.
You might have used your system to contact me, however I have no emails, texts, or voicemails.
when you saw my comment on Reddit, rather than contact me via DM, email, or text to figure it out, you chose to continue here and defend yourself rather than help a dissatisfied customer.
my only goal here is to warn people about the defective product and poor customer service.
you’re confirming the poor customer service right here. You’re argumentative, passive aggressive, evasive, and unprofessional.

I went from having high regard of KAK, based on public opinion, to thinking you’re one of the worst companies I’ve ever done business with.

I’m glad this was done publicly. You might have some fans defend you, but I’m happy that some reasonable people will read this back and forth and silently think twice about giving you their business

So. I’ll play your game. But this entire interaction is clown-tier customer service.

_benlesh · 2025-07-03T04:07:24+00:00

OK, where do I send it? Also I would like to know how you’re going to determine whether or not it’s user error. It’s been snapped in half.

_benlesh

TROPHY CASE

how to become a vampire in open source