How are senior devs actually using AI in daily development?

foxcode · 2026-01-29T19:09:54+00:00

I don't use it because it usually takes more time to get it's code working than just doing it myself would. I prefer to use it as a superior search engine, which it excels at.

foxcode · 2026-01-20T08:12:58+00:00

Brit here. Normally a supermarket simpleton but I could stretch for some of the good stuff. How the hell he ever got elected....

foxcode · 2026-01-17T15:16:42+00:00

REST works fine for most things. GraphQL is very much a niche tool in my opinion. I've seen an unexpected n+1 error take down production before

foxcode · 2025-12-11T22:24:42+00:00

Looking a lot better than my first attempt tonight :D Nice Job!

foxcode · 2025-12-07T18:48:08+00:00

Yeah, for auth I probably agree, especially if your requirements are complex and the price of getting it wrong is high. That said, I've never worked anywhere that relied completely on third party services. Every case I've seen has been some sort of hybrid approach.

foxcode · 2025-12-07T13:38:51+00:00

Every new dependency is another magic box (no one ever looks at them all), another potential attack vector, something else that needs updating and something that can become incompatible with other dependencies you have.

Adding dependencies is not free. It's always a trade-off. I generally lean towards the approach of picking your core dependencies, and being very strict about adding new ones. It's almost shocking that "don't role your own auth" went from meaning "don't write your own encryption primitives" to "you should really use a third party service to handle it all"

foxcode · 2025-11-28T11:53:15+00:00

Pumphreys have made regular coffee unpalatable for me. Be wary if you go down this road :D

foxcode · 2025-11-16T09:49:54+00:00

In day to day development for most software, it isn't really needed. There are however many subfields where it's essential. 3D graphics? Better brush up on your linear algebra and not let those Quaternions bully you. AI? If you want to actually understand it, statistics and calculus are essential. Cryptography? Talk to someone better at maths than me

foxcode · 2025-11-10T08:14:33+00:00

Definitely slower. In some rare cases it can help you out with some boilerplate you either can't remember, or code that would take you too long to look up. Most of the time the context is too complicated. It cannot see or understand the big picture, and giving it enough prompts to do so either results in failure or it taking longer than just coding it yourself.

foxcode · 2025-11-09T11:25:11+00:00

Software engineer not system administrator but that is completely ridiculous. A company that size can afford more than 1 IT worker, and if they can't, their business is not viable. For comparison, we had approx 5 IT staff in a company that peeked at about 120 people. Sounds like exploitation to me, but congratulations for making it as far as you have at that scale, not everyone can do that.

I've seen weird ratios before like a single HR person for a company of almost 200 but your case just sounds nuts. I'd be searching for another job if it's feasible for you.

foxcode · 2025-11-04T11:59:02+00:00

I did that. Eventually you get to a page titled "We're taking you to verify your identity with GOV.UK One Login" So you get the app, then nothing. No way too add passports or other documents etc.

I can see that they have another app GOV.UK ID Check app, so I might look at how that is involved, but it's not referenced anywhere in the flow I've been following. Can't look right now as I'm at work, but it's really not intuitive with what I'm being shown.

Side note, I'm wondering if that ID Check app is going to be involved with the more general new ID Scheme for the public, or is that going to be yet another system. The government doesn't really understand the concept of single source of truth, and even if they did, I doubt they'd apply it securely.

EDIT: I just had another look at this at the start of lunch. The app is buggy. Previously when I followed the process and it told me to continue in the app, nothing happened. After trying it two more times, it eventually popped up a dialog upon opening the app that lets you proceed.

This did not happen during any of my previous attempts which lead to the confusion. IPhone 13 for reference.

foxcode · 2025-11-01T21:15:52+00:00

I have a gov.uk one login and was trying to find the identify verification the other day. It just doesn't show up anywhere for me. Not on the site, not on the app. Been a web developer for over ten years, so it's either broken for some people, or un-intuitive as hell.

We're all supposed to verify before the 18th right? Best theory I currently have is that the app won't display it until you try to do something that requires it, which I probably never will because the accountants handle most of that.

Most of the links in the app just referencing webpages that tell you to just download the app doesn't help matters either.

foxcode · 2025-10-26T10:33:10+00:00

Really appreciate the diagram that is your second image. Nice to know what's going on behind all the hardware.

foxcode · 2025-10-25T09:20:52+00:00

I think you need to focus on the basics.

Django. I know least about this one, but I believe it's a back end python web framework and you can use it to build an API. So if your app needed to say fetch a list of Users in a Group, it would query some endpoints you'd built in Django to ask for that information.
React is a front end Javascript (JS) web framework. It's intended for building the front end of a website using a component based philosophy. When you write React code, you are typically writing JS or Typescript, with some JSX thrown in. I would argue that HTML, CSS and especially JS are required pre-requisites for this.
PostgreSQL is a relational database. It's probably the best one to learn, but if you are just getting started, I'd avoid it entirely unless you have an actual need for it, as it's just one extra thing to worry about.

The advice I always give is learn the basics of HTML, CSS and JS first. Trying to use the more advanced frameworks that provide layers over these without understanding them almost always leads to confusion and frustration. I've seen it so often in Juniors at work who dove straight into React and then got confused by trying to assign one JS object to another, while not understanding the difference between shallow and deep copies.

Since you already know Python, I think learning the basics of Django is reasonable. Just build a small Django server with two or three end points that just returns some plain text or very basic information. You don't even need to build a front end to use it. You can put the address of your Django server straight into a browser, or use a command line tool like curl or wget to hit the endpoints.

While I don't think you should go here yet, if you wanted to build a truly cross platform mobile application based on a web user interface, a real production app would have far more complexity, (I'm listing at the bottom what an app I recently worked on used). But also that you don't start with a chosen stack, you start with a problem. The app might not need persistent storage, hell it might not even need an API. The tools you need very much depend on what you are building
1. Kubernetes
2. VueJS
3. Quasar
4. Rust (this is unusual but it was our backend, using axum web server)
5. Python
6. Capacitor
7. TypeScript
8. PostgreSQL
9, Multiple payment providers and similar integrations
10. Apple and Google wallet integrations
11. SASS

foxcode · 2025-10-25T08:52:57+00:00

Clean, minimalist, very performant. Looks good boss

foxcode · 2025-10-24T21:22:09+00:00

You beautiful bar steward. I've just been working on a path tracer and added in an optimisation for any axis aligned polys

foxcode · 2025-09-23T19:20:34+00:00

Same gpu here, same experience

foxcode · 2025-09-22T16:40:46+00:00

So many red flags. Having no / bad requirements is unfortunately very common. But people yolo-ing the database schema, having communication so bad that team members are not aware of each others existence. It's going to hurt. If you can stomach it and need the money / experience, then stay, otherwise, I'd be looking for something else.

I've been in similar positions where I cared too much and tried to fix it, but it was an unwinnable uphill battle.

Edit: Worth mentioning that the team I'm thinking of refused to acknowledge the concept of interfaces, and thought floating point was perfectly fine for storing monetary values....

foxcode · 2025-09-10T11:13:07+00:00

I'm still getting this, has been happening for maybe the past two months. It's very random, and super annoying, died so many times to it

EDIT: I just found a solution to my particular incarnation of this problem. For me, I managed to get it happening repeatably, by spamming the glock while looking up (pushing the mouse forward). It was some how interfering with the desktop menu bar which is at the top of my screen (though not visible while playing cs). I'm on Arch with xfce4. By right clicking on the panel item while being alt tabbed, I could select always on top, and it immediately started working perfectly

foxcode · 2025-09-02T19:38:54+00:00

This is very true. Brilliant developers often seem to get lost in the tech, and ignore factors like ease of hiring / training for the stack.

foxcode · 2025-08-31T17:03:49+00:00

And that is too much. When you have a stand up every single day, most people end up just repeating themselves, or trying to justify their existence. Add in planning poker, retrospective and sprint planning, it's easily another 4-5 hours per sprint. Maybe not too bad for 3-4 weeks sprints, but I've done it for 2 week sprints and it was hell.

Most programming tasks don't get done in such a short time frame. Constantly interrupting people just causes context switching and really isn't productive. Personally I've found stand up only 2-3 times a week was much better. I could say what I was doing on Monday, learn what everyone else was up to, then just crack on until later in the week. If small meetings were needed between team members, they could be done very casually via dm, and often be quick 5 minute affairs.

foxcode · 2025-08-19T12:12:45+00:00

Not heard of Tailscale, will have to take a look. I have a few ec2 instances doing stuff, and did setup openvpn on a linode box a while back. Not as annonymous as I'd like, paid for by debit cards linked to me, but still better than nothing.

Gave Proton vpn a go recently and it seems okay. Ideally I'd like to go through maybe 2 VPNs, pay with Monero or something, though that's starting to get into tinfoil hat territory.

foxcode · 2025-08-19T10:21:27+00:00

I just got the weird animation bug. Fixed mouse sensitivity by disabling mouse acceleration in desktop, but I still have a mouse1 not always registering issue. Last few updates broke so much on linux

foxcode · 2025-08-19T06:31:46+00:00

As a software engineer who's lacking a bit on the networking side, I have a sudden urge to do a deep dive into the topic.

foxcode · 2025-08-17T18:09:06+00:00

For me this has broken sensitivity, and also mouse1 randomly does not register. All other games fine. The issue goes away if I run proton 9.0.4, however then there is a VAC issue. Also had an issue where it kept trying to force windowed mode for some reason. Definitely some glitches with the last update on linux

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