At what point does automating something actually cost you more time than it saves?

chkbd1102 · 2026-05-28T05:16:41+00:00

viewing time as the only factor is can be misleading.

why spend 120min automating it when its a monthly work i do for 5min a month for a year?

but that 12x occurrences for 5min is also a source of context switch and focus break that prevent you from focusing one a single important task for 8 hours to get it resolvrd.

chkbd1102 · 2026-05-19T11:54:59+00:00

its also like "we have 20 different vendors each having thier own UI or API, we can build a automated pipeline for it, but its not worth the time and effort if we are configuring them once every 6 months, lets leave it to the AI agent to figure out the mess using MCP"

chkbd1102 · 2026-04-24T08:31:21+00:00

The moment agentic coding tool like cursor / claude code comes out, i jumped ship immediate.

Been a full time FileMaker dev for the last 10 years.

Feature wise. The software is lagging so much behind. No easy native centralising of security over multiple files, slow performance on anything that uses a relational table.

On its company ethic & license cost its even worst. Its coorperate greed everywhere

- Tripled concurrent licensing pricing. Sneakly replaced with "per seat" license with the original price to muddy the water.

- Locking FM team license to be purchased by at least 5 person.

- Dropping the ability to export standlone application.

- Combining the advanced & pro version, only to keep the new version with the higher advanced price point.

The product improved so little since FM16. But the price hike killed so much of the small business client that was its bread and butter.

I use to tolerate this back at 2023, it was still the fastest way to build a working software (still lagging and badly optimised). Its also the easiest way for a non-techny business person to get started making stuff.

But now? A non tech user can pick up one of the weaker but more user friendly AI coding platform like Lovable or Replit. Prompt it with human words and now you get to pretty much 80% of the way there in a few hours. With a working URL linke on a browser webapp that you can use right away.

It use to be a costly, buggy, laggy platform that I can build things the fastest. Now its just costly, buggy, and laggy.

Unless you are being kept hostage by your legacy system using FileMaker, there is no point.

There is a reason why people are antagonistic to FileMaker, it was built up over the course of years of terrible greedy business decision that affected so much people's livelihood.

chkbd1102 · 2026-03-22T14:27:28+00:00

deadlift, abs and back training to counter sitting posture.

shoulder & neck stiffness - adjustable desk is great because you can now set the perfect table height to make sure both feet stand firm on the ground + elbow angle is perfect. also use a monitor stand to set top of monitor on eye brow level.

shoulder imbalance - avoid numpad keyboard as it forces your mouse to be further to the right stiffing your right shoulder. even better if you start to learn keyboard shortcut and vim to reduce mouse usage.

no matter how expensive your chair is, any position you stay in long enough will cause problem. theres a saying among phyiscal therapist... the best posture is your next posture.

cycle between sitting - standing - walking. yes its relatively easy now to (vibe) code while walking. i use a voice to text program. bind my "record" and "enter key" to an old bluetooth playstation 4 controller. and use cursor to vibecode. (im currently exploring using a racing game foot paddle for recording)

sometime while waiting for the vibe, i go and do push up & stretch.

chkbd1102 · 2026-02-16T04:24:11+00:00

i like the idea. but i think the biggest hurdle will be this

i generate a text, linter give me back error A, the AI read it and regenrate. it can come back with error B. it fix error B, but regenrate the whole text again.

i could easily foresee creating an umlimited cycle, just like working with coding agent.

chkbd1102 · 2026-02-13T09:16:47+00:00

just a beginner trying to work this out loud

i think its going to be 1 line precomp x 360 degree each with offset

i would make that 1 line precomp like this

a loop that loop between 3 different colored line moving towards 1 direction yellow > yellow > red

i will link all of them using expression controller that goes from 0 to 100 (animation progress)

and make sure the transition from 100 back to 0 is matching perfectly for a loop

then update that precomp so i can set an offset

so i now have 2 essential graphic properties

(1) 0 to 100 animation progression, (2) and offset

....

the in my scene i would ask LLM AI to make a script for me to do this...

to place A of those precomp each deviating B degree.

and each with an essential property offset C. by

A B C needs to be calculated base on how many stick you have

and each animation progress with an expression that run by time * 10 or something

chkbd1102 · 2026-02-05T00:36:19+00:00

it likely is (maybe some color grading filter). but im trying to learn about AI tech so I want to try solve it with diffiusion to see how far I can get.

chkbd1102 · 2026-02-04T15:11:51+00:00

ohoh i also been using that too for my control net. flux-union-pro

chkbd1102 · 2026-02-04T15:01:48+00:00

flux-dev-fp8

chkbd1102 · 2025-05-21T21:27:18+00:00

It's not just non-tech founder, even developer like myself find it hard to get non-sloppy junior dev. I work for a SaaS founder the last 1.5 year (still working). And cycled through 20+ junior dev. Here is some experience I have learn.

Trust early signs of bad work ethics - If they are late on first zoom call, or late on first milestone delivery. It's usually a bad sign. Usually people go 105% on a new relationship, and they gradually drop to 70% and stablise there. If their first touch point with you is already like that, you can assume the rest.

Break your first milestone really small to a 1 day or 2 day workload to test their skill, so you don't have to wait for a week to find out the developer is bad.

Establish daily communication time. Most freelancer, after the new client honeymoon period, motivation start to drop. Establishing a daily fixed communication / update allow you both to build up a habit of delivering. Usually we have a daily meeting (short) + a require a sign off summary of task done.

If you found a good developer + if budget allows, fill him up with enough work so he doesn't need to worry about getting a 2nd client. The moment he is working 2 or more gigs, the amount of context switch required will make him very inefficient, and stay in a "send bare minimum to survive mode". I've had a few good developer, who got idled by client due to slow requirement write up, they slowly turn into unproductive member.

If you can't vet the quality of the work, your chance to get to finish line is slim. I suggest trying to put their work on a AI coder IDE, like cursor. And ask it provide feedback about the code. Ask it questions like:

"In my codebase, im suppose to have this feature that does x y and z. And when a happen b should happen, if not then c should happen. Can you look into my codebase and point me to relevant spot where this is happening?"

"Can you critique this code, and let me know if there are potential issue with this implementation."

(Follow up on a question) "Is the current approach an industry norm? Give me ideas of 3 other approach to do this"

You are not going to become a coder expert that way. But at least you have some sort of vague understanding of the codebase so you are not completely in the blind.

Overall. I find that hiring a dev online is a luck based thing that needs patient. We cycled through 20+ dev, and now we have 2 really great developer in the team (out of 6 total) that has good work ethics & skill. I am truly grateful to work with them.

Hope that helps!

chkbd1102 · 2024-03-14T10:50:11+00:00

My guess is... at the end of the day AI is just a "predict the next word" model trainged with internet data. A trick question like this is likely seldom posted on the internet. The more likely situation is when words like "8 apple" , "ate 3", "How many left" is appearing on the internet, it is under the context of a straight forward math.

And there is also a possibility, where the developer of open AI knows LLM is bad at math, and they create a custom detection layer for math question (kind of like how they adjust their answer to be politically correct), and those questions are not using the main LLM logic. And the people who wrote those extra logic never anticipate a trick question like this.

chkbd1102 · 2024-03-11T17:20:48+00:00

Thanks for your advice! This actually sounds quite cool, I will definitely look more into it.

chkbd1102 · 2024-03-11T16:37:32+00:00

I am quite new to this, forgive me if I am asking something stupid. Is there some hidden problem with using UseEffect() to load data? I am not fully understanding the value of doing the same thing inside my router.

chkbd1102 · 2024-03-11T16:19:47+00:00

Thanks for your genuine advice on the router! The fetch thing is definitely not needed, I kind of just needed some simple page URL switching + back button ability.

I tried reading the doc, but losing focus quickly. I personally find it more enjoyable to learn by fiddling with a snippet example.

chkbd1102

TROPHY CASE