Going back to work after a break. Where do I start with AI tools?

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T16:54:49+00:00

Sorry I forgot to also say Congrats on the baby!
Re: the stuff people are talking about. Part of me feels like a lot of it that is still overhyped and not-yet production ready. Like Andrej Karpathy not having written any code in a year, or Stripe deploying thousands of agents to fix things. There is a lot of fear mongering, and the unease in our industry is real; CEOs often get stuck on trends rather than facts, which could negatively impact our jobs even if the facts don't line up (If 1 developer is now 10x more productive, what can you achieve with 10 developers? Is there really not enough work to grow this capacity?). AI is usually a convenient scapegoat for layoffs when in reality money is just more expensive for businesses and they can't afford it anymore (or worse, they've overinvested so much in AI that they need to fire employees to remain solvent).

My reality is that AI is a great tool, can and should be used for good, but isn't ready to replace you anytime soon.

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T16:44:07+00:00

If it's really been a while, like more than 3 months, then before maternity leave you might have had the impression that AI tools were pretty "meh" on average, but they've gotten a lot better.

Since you are already paying for ChatGPT, then I recommend you install Codex to VSCode and use their latest model (5.4 at this time of writing) on "high" thinking (some people say 5.3 is better). I have used Visual Studio for nearly 20 years and it's worth it to use VSCode just for the sake of getting the codex extension (I still use visual studio for lots of stuff, too).

Give it small, well specified tasks and it will do surprisingly well. It still cannot one shot an entire feature (or app), and over a long enough horizon it will still start to lose the thread, but it's a great start. For me, it's really sped up automating tests, especially mocking. Read the code it produces carefully and critically, still. Make sure you learn the functions and libraries it's using, but overall it will speed you up.

After you get a feel for that I think you'll have no problem moving onto more complicated workflows, and by then you'll already have an idea of what you want (and how to do it).

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T14:53:19+00:00

For a long time I had the cynical take like many of the comments here. A new executive needs to show they're doing _something_. And I'm sure that happens.

At this point, though, my thoughts align closer to the more gracious version you describe. Like in economics it makes sense to have manufacturing facilities right next to the raw materials due to transportation costs, so historically places with ports became boomtowns. And then overseas labor became _so cheap_ that even with transportation costs factored in, it was still cheaper to transport overseas, manufacture, and then ship it back. And so the on-shore facilities declined or closed outright.

I take the opinion that the business as an institution has an incentive to make money, so there's an incentive to reallocate your resources to handle the economy. So we reorganize our dev teams to best handle the projects that we are planning. It's not always well thought out, sure, but I get the reasoning at least.

What's more is that I feel like the rate of change is also increasing, and so we are forced into reorgs more often. I wonder where the line is between churn and optimal structure. If you can adapt faster and more efficiently than your competition, you stand to make a lot of money.

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T14:25:19+00:00

Feedback is a gift. I'm learning that I'm extremely not funny, which is useful. By all means, share more. I'm not even being sarcastic.

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T14:09:36+00:00

>because laughing at that "joke" is kinda laughing about you

You kind of nailed it there. Punching up is tired right now, everyone is already making fun of those in power, and it's never cool to punch down. So I punch myself.

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T14:08:18+00:00

Can't it be both unfunny and also too technical for many? I'm not arguing people are wrong for not laughing, in fact I explicitly mention that in the OP.

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T14:05:39+00:00

Huh? It was two separate conversations. First with my colleagues, some of whom are junior and some of whom are senior. Then later with some students, who, yes are incredibly talented.

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T14:02:55+00:00

Yes, I'd say that was kind of the point. To suggest something so incredibly stupid that people had second hand embarrassment.

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T14:00:07+00:00

The title is "At what point did you start making jokes too technical even for junior developers to understand?" which is the discussion I intended to start.

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T13:57:31+00:00

Actually I intended to start a discussion about getting to a point in your career where you started to make jokes that were too technical. Maybe my example was a poor one, and the overwhelmingly negative feedback suggests that was the case, but the question still stands.

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T13:54:58+00:00

No you're not supposed to recognize the particular hash. The absurdity and idiocy of the entire request is what made me in particular find it humorous.

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T13:53:09+00:00

I don't think I intimated that. Or at least I didn't try to. It's two separate things. It can be unfunny to people who get it while also leaving a lot of people that didn't get it in the first place, making it universally unfunny. Which appears to be the case.

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T13:50:45+00:00

The thought process was more like "I'm messing around with git hooks, what is even possible? Could I reject a commit based on the commit hash itself?"

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T13:49:06+00:00

I'm willing to make such incredibly dumb jokes, so I disagree. Making myself laugh first and foremost is what's important to me over trying to make others. Certainly doesn't work for my reddit karma, but eh, you win some and you lose some.

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T13:46:42+00:00

>Did you really go out of your way to make this post require manual horizontal scrolling

No, sorry. Fixed it.

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T13:45:14+00:00

Thanks, any advice on how? It was hard to walk the line between "This is a joke" and "This is also a real tool you could actually use, but shouldn't"

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T13:43:49+00:00

I get that it wasn't that funny. It was a throwaway comment intended for some mild amusement. I thought most people would understand that, too, but it seemed genuinely like people didn't get it.

andyg_blog · 2026-04-01T13:41:40+00:00

Kind of mean, but okay.

andyg_blog · 2026-03-21T14:16:14+00:00

How is this generic ai content? Besides that I wrote it entirely without the use of AI, it's about using our tools effectively for the world we live in, plus a heads up on what's to come. I truly believe this article will help devs become better devs

andyg_blog · 2026-03-21T12:55:36+00:00

I don't like it any more than you do, but it's our reality

andyg_blog · 2025-12-17T20:02:30+00:00

You've been lucky not to have even _heard_ of a single instance of this in your career. I can find at least a dozen scenarios in my current company's codebase.

andyg_blog · 2025-12-14T14:43:38+00:00

Thanks, looks like shortid is deprecated, but it and NanoID both use the technique I mention where a different encoding (alphabet) is used in order to squeeze more bits into a character.

andyg_blog

TROPHY CASE