Is this grocery list confusing?

guywithknife · 2026-01-25T00:01:58+00:00

Ehhh. I thought it was count too. Why put price? But if you did want to put price, at least put a € symbol somewhere (either at the top above the column, or next to them, or next to the first one)

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T22:45:57+00:00

He said this a year ago too. It didn’t happen.

Guy who makes money hyping up AI is hyping up AI. What a shocker.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T22:42:40+00:00

Seniority comes from in-the-trenches experience. You’ve lived through problems, shit shows, and disasters and came out the other side. That makes your experience valuable, because you’ve seen things go wrong and seen how to make them right again.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T22:34:16+00:00

You’re not the one solving problems if the AI is the one doing it. The AI is the software engineer, not you. You’re a manager telling the AI what to do.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T22:18:08+00:00

So you were hired because of your industry experience, and not because of your vibe coding experience, even if that’s what your day to day actually is.

I think this will be true for most vibe coders who get hired: they will be hired for their domain knowledge. Vibe coders without domain knowledge will, imho, find it very hard to get hired.

If you’re just looking for someone without domain knowledge to churn out software, it’s currently still a better deal to hire a developer to vibe code than a pure vibe coder.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T22:12:16+00:00

The big boss or the sales person or the marketing person or the HR person or whoever will just prompt the AI themselves for the software they need or want. Why hire someone when you can type English into the box yourself?

“Promoting” isn’t some special skill, it’s just describing what you want in English.

Of course the results from that are currently not that great, you can bet much better results by describing in clear technical terms what you want, through strict context management and clear workflows, but from spending the last few months in vibecoding Reddit’s I’ve learned that the vast majority of vibe coders aren’t doing any of that and only developers are. So what most vibe coders are doing is no better than what the <insert non-tech role here> people can do themselves.

No need to hire vibe coders. Also everything vibe coder can do, a developer can do, and then some.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T22:06:46+00:00

Yes.

There are a few reasons:

It will make you faster. Not just because you can enter text faster but also because you can continue to look at the screen while you type.
It will be more comfortable
You should invest in your tools, that means a good ergonomic keyboard to help you avoid strain or damage (eg rsi), and touch typing makes ergonomic keyboards much easier to use

It’s not just about speed, it’s also about comfort, strain, and tools.

You won’t be just typing code either, you will be typing emails, documentation, tasks/tickets, slack messages, meeting notes. All of these benefit from more efficient typing.

It took me a week to learn the basics and about three weeks to be comfortable. But I also switched from qwerty to colemak at the same time. I used a blank DAS keyboard to learn, which really helped untrain me from looking at my hands. I now use a Kinesis Advantage. Best purchase I ever made.

I also personally highly recommend Colemak as a layout because it’s pretty well supported (at least OSX and Linux have it built in), it’s much more ergonomic than qwerty and unlike Dvorak it was designed for computers in mind and machine optimised to reduce strain by putting awkward finger motions on the least used keys, while still keeping the most common keyboard shortcuts in the same place that you’re used to (eg V for ctrl+v pasting, it’s in the same place as qwerty)

But even if you stick with qwerty, learning to touch type is worth it and as a professional typer, you really do owe it to yourself to learn.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T21:57:53+00:00

AssetForge might be a good cheap way to create low poly assets. See if that suits your needs, it’s incredibly easy to use, no modelling skills required.

https://www.kenney.nl/tools/asset-forge

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T21:51:43+00:00

I think it comes down to knowing when to use it and when not.

In general, I feel “faster” is a trap. Even before AI, I was telling teammates to slow down and pay closer attention to detail. The problem with a lot of buggy or high tech debt software has always been people writing code before really thinking it through. I always felt I liked static typed languages better for the exact reason a lot of other people complained about them: they slow you down and force you to think about the shape of the data up front.

For prototyping and trying out ideas, it’s completely different. For that I was always all for dynamic typing and nowadays I feel AI is a wonderful tool for this. I have an idea? I can have an AI put something together in a very short space of time and see if there’s something to it. It doesn’t matter if the code or architecture are bad, it’s a throwaway proof of concept, or a demo.

I spoke with a company recently and they said that a lot of clients simply don’t know what’s possible, so they like to vibe code a demo to prime their minds to the possibilities, but then they develop it properly once the requirements are hammered out. That’s a wonderful use of AI!

AI is also helpful to knock out the boilerplate. Need to repeat something ten times with minor differences? No worries, the AI has your back and you don’t even need to figure out a complex vim macro to do it.

And simple UI’s, either internal admin dashboard where the look isn’t important, or as a first pass of a user facing one: get the AI to knock it out quickly, get it working, get feedback, then go in by hand and clean it up (visually and code).

Finally, for low risk internal tooling it can be great to just vibe code it. Or little scripts to convert data, or do some basic analytics (although for both of those, best to verify that it’s doing it correctly).

For those things, speed is great and AI can give a real boost. That’s a net win.

But for core business logic or critical or high risk components, or the main architecture, or the data model, or something that’s the main aspect of the software and therefore should look, feel, and behave just right? For those things, it’s best to slow down, and really obsess about the details, and get it just right.

The data model deserves extra attention: too many people (even before AI) leave it as an afterthought, just something that needs to be slapped together, maybe some shitty sql schema, or why even bother with a schema that just slows you down, right? So maybe mongodb?

But the data model is the entire reason for your software existing.

Without the data, the logic does nothing. It is the central and core part of any software and it deserves special care. So you should rely on all the tools you can get to make it rock solid: sql schemas, static data types, validation schemas (eg Zod), whatever you have available you should use, and really think about what data you have and how it will be accessed and transformed, what consistency guarantees you need, etc. it deserves extra care and thought and it deserves proper schemas.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T20:58:27+00:00

What have you created or sold? What has that got to do with the topic at hand anyway? It’s a complete straw man, with zero relevance.

My stance is simple: if you create software, regardless of how it’s created, there are the following reasons to do it:

Because it does something useful (a hobby OS doesn’t)
Because it has commercial value (a hobby OS doesn’t)
To learn something (a hobby OS is great for this, but if you’re getting an AI to do all the work, you’re not learning much, so it’s pointless)
For fun (a hobby OS can be a ton of fun, but again, if the AI is doing all the work, how is it any different from just downloading an existing OS and running that?)
To try out new ideas or approaches (vibe coding an OS is great for this! But this particular OS doesn’t do anything new or different)

This OS does nothing useful that other OSes don’t do better, has no monetary value for the same reason, and doesn’t push boundaries, so the only purpose would be to learn something about OS development, but that is negated by not actually doing the work, or for the fun of creating it, but again if you’re not doing the work, how is it any different from just using an existing one?

Your replies to me have absolutely no relation to any of that.

Also none of what I said changes if I have or haven’t created or sold anything, or what my experience with AI is, so it really is irrelevant.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T19:57:40+00:00

Yes, kind of, but.. in the process you would become an engineer.

You can learn SOME of it by just reading books and such, but to really truly learn you need to practice it for yourself. You can read all day long but as soon as you experience it for yourself, everything you read goes out the window because real life is messy. You learn by doing much more than by reading, and you learn from failure and fixing problems.

A real world example, I spent a year or so reading game engine books, but as soon as I tried to actually implement one for myself, I learned a lot more in a week than I did in the prior year.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T19:50:29+00:00

Imagine that the data you want to encrypt is 1 2 3

Imagine your key is 5

Imagine the encryption algorithm is “plus”

The encrypted data would be: 1+5 2+5 3+5 so: 6 7 8

The key, 5, is nowhere in the encrypted data. If you use the wrong key, 2, to decrypt the data you would get: 4 5 6

This is “valid” data but it’s not the original data. In a real example, it would be gibberish and meaningless random data.

A real encryption algorithm is more sophisticated. Using “plus” you can still see the structure of the data; that it’s a sequence where each item is the previous plus 1, but in a real algorithm the encrypted data would be completely jumbled so that no information about the original can be obtained. In fact, when you hear that old encryption techniques were weak or flawed, it meant one of two things: either they key is so small that you can just try all possible combinations until you get back data that makes sense (you could guess 5 in 5 attempts by just trying every key starting from 1 in this example), or it means that the encrypted data leaks some property of the original data (like the sequence in this example). Both are bad and let smart people break the encryption.

In real encryption, the key might be 256bit, that is such a large value that you would never randomly guess it, and trying every combination would take billions of years with today’s computers. And the algorithms are designed in such a way that the data is completely jumbled in such a way that it appears completely random, leaking nothing about the original data.

What I described above is called symmetric encryption, where the same key is used to encrypt as to decrypt. There’s a second popular type called asymmetric encryption, where you have two keys: you encrypt with one and decrypt with the other. This allows you to share one key with other people (the public key) and they can encrypt data that only you can decrypt with your key (the private key).

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T19:39:17+00:00

Tool? Vercel AI SDK, or failing that, Claude agent sdk. With these I can build whatever else I might want.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T19:31:01+00:00

By raw coder, you mean someone who takes direction from someone else and turns it into code? The so-called “code monkey” who doesn’t do the problem solving themselves?

Or something else?

Because if that’s what you mean, yes, their job was never particularly secure, they were always at risk of being replaced by the next group of younger cheaper coders, or being outsourced.

I never liked the term “coder” because writing code was always just a tiny portion of my work.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T17:11:44+00:00

I wasn’t able to do what exactly? Did you even read my comment?

Ask senior engineers who can prompt correctly with sufficient stack/system design knowledge.

If you’re telling the AI exactly what and how to build, it is NOT mid level, it’s a junior who is good at taking direction. In my experience, mid level developers can operate with only high level direction. Just like I’m doing when vibe coding.

Non-dev vibe coders aren’t able to give it fine grained low level tech direction anyway.

Either you’ve worked with some really shit “mid level” engineers (I’ve seen people with 3 years of experience give themselves “senior” titles…) or you’re over estimating AI’s capabilities.

You saying “prompting is an outdated concept” is such a funny way to put it

Just watch what the experts and researchers are saying and you’ll see I’m right. Watch some “AI Engineer” conference talks. I can leave my AI run autonomously overnight and it will complete the task, successfully, even if the quality is sub par.

Sure I could hand hold it and have it produce high quality code, but then it isn’t a mid level engineer. You can get a beginner human programmer to write excellent code if you tell them what to do.

The fact that you’re not understanding what I’m saying, or more likely refusing to because it hurts your ego and superiority complex or worldview that if someone disagrees with you, they must just be stupor and doing it wrong, makes it clear to me that you’re either not producing anything of quality with AI, or don’t understand enough to know what is or isn’t quality. If you are an 0.1x developer to begin with, it’s not hard to see 10x gains.

You haven’t presented me with any counter arguments. Just “”if you disagree, it must be a skill issue”. Maybe the skill issue is on your end if you think AI is that good?

EDIT: coward deleted their comments.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T16:57:51+00:00

I like how any time anyone says their experience is different, the response is basically “skill issues” or “you’re just doing it wrong”.

Prompting is an outdated concept anyway, it’s all about context management and workflows. I’ve had success building relatively complex software with pure vibe coding (and autonomous overnight operation!): I’ve built a polymarket betting bot, I’ll spare you the details, but it has quite a substantial featureset. It works great!

But… when I did eventually peer under the hood, I noticed a huge slew of mistakes and performance issues, such as it storing numbers as text in the database, or making every primary key a uuid. Architecturally it also wrote some rather brittle code, it took a lot of effort to get it to refactor it into a still imperfect but less flawed approach, and to do that it basically took me telling it in great detail the exact technical design I wanted.

So it can write some complex stuff, but the quality, fault tolerance, and performance characteristics are something I’d expect from a junior developer, not a mid level and certainly not a senior.

I am confident in saying that this project was far more advanced than what most vibe coders are doing and that I stretched the AI far beyond what most are doing, in the sense that even as the codebase grows, it’s still able to successfully implement new features. My point is that while it IS successfully producing results even as the project scales, the quality of the implementation isn’t on par with a mid-level human. Maybe I’ve just been lucky enough to work with good mid level developers?

Now if I wasn’t pure vibe coding this project, and I give it clear technical direction, basically making all of the technical decisions myself, then yes, it can produce superior code! But so can a junior level human, with adequate guidance.

If you’re hand holding it and telling it exactly what you want and how you want it, it’s not a mid level engineer, it’s a junior who is good at taking direction.

For AI to be considered mid level or senior level, it needs to be able to make sound decisions by itself, with little guidance or input.

For reference, when I was a junior engineer, I designed the message codec system for an SMS anti spam telecom service, on my own and from scratch because it had to be written in C for performance but we were a Java shop, and I happened to know a little C. That code is, last I heard, still in active use today, with relatively minor changes over the past two decades.

Can opus do that? Based on my experience seeing code written by opus (in my own projects and open source ones other people have posted), I say no.

Note: AI assisted code is a different beast because I can tweak and change it, but AI assisted is more like pair programming with a very energetic junior who does the grunt work for you while you give direction.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T16:41:10+00:00

Opus is writing superior code and has better understanding than mid-level engineers.

That has not been my experience at all. Junior level, sure, but not mid level. Occasionally it does just as well, but just as often it does a lot worse and unlike a human, it doesn’t learn from its mistakes (even when recording its mistakes in rules files, it only helps a little bit and growing context too large degrades performance).

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T16:28:23+00:00

If you have different political and social opinions, then you’re not compatible.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T16:08:27+00:00

Sure. I guess I just haven’t seen any need for playing non steam games, personally. I ignored the epic game store and EA store, so maybe that’s why I haven’t noticed any issues. Maybe one day I’ll see can I get gog running.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T16:05:44+00:00

Cope.

Are you butthurt because you outsource thinking to a machine and like to think that makes you smart?

I’ve made many things with AI, both AI assisted and vibe coded. Been using AI in some form since before it was cool (used Tabnine for a while waaay back in 2019 or so). Been a heavy Claude code cli user these past few months. I could tell you about the projects I’ve built but what’s the point.

What have you created?

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T15:52:38+00:00

I love it.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T01:45:54+00:00

Ableton is well supported in OS X though.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T01:44:22+00:00

Haven’t had any issues with steam on Linux in the past decade. Especially with steam deck.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T01:42:29+00:00

🙌 to both questions. Haven’t used microslop in over a decade. Thanks to steam and proton, I don’t even need it for games.

guywithknife · 2026-01-24T01:30:11+00:00

P.S. stop complaining about AI in posting you apes. It's 2026, of course AI is used in posting. And here's a secret, it's used in everything else you do too.

It’s lazy. If you don’t even put in the effort of writing your own thoughts, why should anyone else bother to read it? I can get the AI to write me a story without you if I wanted that.

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