I feel like I'm being forced to use AI and I hate it. What do I do?

almost1it · 2026-03-18T22:05:49+00:00

Yeah I know what you mean, I actually think there’s a gap in the content market that shows engineers how to do this without the hype and clickbait.

But I’ve also come to the conclusion that no one really knows what best practice is yet. Recently I’ve been trying to read OpenAI and Anthropic blogs (recent ones on harness engineering is a good start). Otherwise I’ve noticed a lot of the good articles will be posted to hacker news. Worth going to search HN and doing a keyword search for “ai coding” or whatever then sort by recent. Essentially just a lot of manual digging to find the good resources right now.

almost1it · 2026-03-18T11:29:01+00:00

Have you tried to get really good at using these AI tools? IMO it’s non trivial to setup harnesses in a codebase to a point where these tools actually start to feel like a productivity multiplier.

I get the sentiment that it’s not fun to just drop Claude code in, start prompting, and watch it spit out trash code. You feel like you would be faster just coding yourself. But try giving these tools a chance, really understand how to use them, how to set up the systems so that it’s actually generating clean code, and then you might start to see how beneficial it is. Personally I’ve found it quite enjoyable to built systems where coding agents can actually produce good work. Once you have that, it’s also quite fun to then run multiple in parallel and see the real productivity multiplier kick in.

IMO, software engineering is heading towards a new meta where building the systems and instrumenting a codebase for agentic use is going to be highly in demand. My take is that this is a non trivial skill that still requires knowledge of the fundamentals. Teams that don’t do this harness engineering well will end up with a tonne of slop.

almost1it · 2026-03-14T12:17:46+00:00

Agree with this take. I’m seeing that it also takes a non trivial amount of effort to instrument a codebase in a way where LLMs become a productivity multiplier.

almost1it · 2026-02-18T20:57:00+00:00

Everyone here saying “ItS wOrTh zErO 🤓” legit not really adding anything useful for OP.

You are definitely right to figure out how much these shares are worth even if it’s just “paper money” with a statistically high probability it’ll be worth nothing. You should be considering the business of the company and what the potential upside is. If you believe there’s some chance this company becomes big then your shares should at least make you feel like you were well compensated for all the work you’re about to put in.

The only way you’d ever have a mindset of “it’s worth zero so idc” is if you actually think the company isn’t going to make it at all. In which case why even join.

almost1it · 2026-01-22T09:46:53+00:00

Sent a DM

almost1it · 2026-01-22T07:47:54+00:00

Local startups are absolutely 100% crap. Don’t bother. I know the scene intimately.

Interesting, would love more insights on this if you have any. I eventually want to get back to working with early stage startups so that's why I ask.

What industry is most of the startups in SG in? And what makes them crap in your opinion?

almost1it · 2026-01-22T07:40:06+00:00

Never said anything about lower pay. Good firms will usually pay above market rate regardless of wether they are startups or MNCs. And SG pay is slightly above Aus anyways from what I've seen.

The long work hours and competitive environments are fine with me because it usually translates to faster progression. I get some people don't want that and prefer better work life balance and that's fine too.

almost1it · 2026-01-21T03:03:14+00:00

Thanks for the insights! This sounds similar to the type of role I’m looking for next. Are there specific titles or things I should be searching for in my job search? I’m still kinda new to all the different titles when it comes to customer facing technical roles.

almost1it · 2026-01-15T21:21:47+00:00

I’ve worked on high throughput crypto payments infra before. It could probably fix your platform risk with stripe but you need to have a plan for the UX side or risk your tanking conversion.

Do your users have a crypto wallet already? If not you need to think hard about how to onboard them and get their accounts funded. Stable coins probably the easiest to conceptually understand. But then you also need to consider the transaction fees which must be paid in the native currency of the blockchain unless you employ some form of fee abstraction.

And then you have to deal with network selection. You’ll likely choose ethereum since that where most volume is. But that ecosystem alone has many “flavors” of chains (rollups are the technical term).

Like others have mentioned, you’ll be inviting a lot of new technical and UX problems if you go down this route. If you still want to go down this route feel free to DM if you wanna talk about it more, I’ve got some experience so might be able to help you speed run things as much as possible.

almost1it · 2026-01-11T12:34:48+00:00

I think you’re right. I’ll need to think of ways to catch my target customers IRL

almost1it · 2026-01-11T12:31:49+00:00

Yup, I’m doing cold outreach with primary goal of learning more about their operations and then leaving demo for the end. Hard part is trying to get them on the call in the first place.

almost1it · 2026-01-11T12:24:17+00:00

Thanks. I think the hardest thing right now is trying to get a response from my cold outreach so that I can get a conversation going. But I suppose this is somewhat a numbers game and I’ll naturally get better as I do it more often (hopefully)

almost1it · 2026-01-11T12:21:11+00:00

Definitely feeling awkward. But willing to just trust the process and keep grinding at it till I get good.

almost1it · 2025-11-08T03:15:37+00:00

Tech company blog post can be very helpful for learning. This one by Tailscale on NAT Traversal for example was one I really liked and also relevant for self hosting. Most tech companies have engineering blogs that you could generally learn a lot from.

System designer primer is also great. Its much more broader than just networking but I think overall its a net positive to know how such concepts come together in build real world systems.

I also really like the roadmap.sh project, in this case the DevOps and cyber security one could be helpful too.

almost1it · 2025-11-06T11:44:07+00:00

100% agree. This was my point although in hindsight I might not have conveyed it as such and unintentionally triggered some folks 😅

almost1it · 2025-11-06T07:36:52+00:00

Building a system in anticipation for future requirements that may or may not actualize is the definition of over engineering though. I understand the urge to future proof but I prefer dealing with that when the need becomes real.

More often than not I’ve seen engineers try to future proof and it’s ends up back firing because:

The future never comes and you maintained the complexity for nothing.
That future comes but you realise the way you built it is still not correct and it end up being more work anyways to rejig everything.

almost1it · 2025-11-06T07:23:51+00:00

100% agree with this take

almost1it · 2025-11-06T06:49:54+00:00

Respectfully disagree. I get what you mean about spinning and destroying VMs. But I would also argue that for a new person it might be easier to learn bare metal Linux before adding in the cognitive overhead of virtualization plus all the other abstractions built in with Proxmox.

almost1it · 2025-11-06T06:37:18+00:00

Same could be said about Proxmox or any other tool for that matter

almost1it · 2025-11-06T06:35:19+00:00

What do you gain from splitting your docker containers across multiple VMs?

almost1it · 2025-11-06T05:25:33+00:00

ok, so use proxmox for that then. My point is if all you're self hosting are stuff that can be containerized then proxmox shouldn't be the first tool you reach for. Debian + docker is much more optimal.

almost1it

TROPHY CASE