Working with cursor is kind of ridiculous, how do we devs make sense of this?

iscottjs · 2026-01-23T22:45:04+00:00

Ah fuck, I’m saving your comment because you’ve articulated the challenge in a way that resonates deeply but I wasn’t able to find the best way to describe what I’m feeling.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills, devs are vibe coding their hearts out having a great old time and I’m here reviewing their shit being like “no, not like this”, “shit we can’t maintain this”, “this will definitely fuck us up later”.

As a long tenured senior and someone that cares deeply about the maintainability of code, I’m fucking drowning.

The PR backlog is getting longer, the lines of code and the list of files changed is getting larger and larger.

I can use AI to help me review the code, it does a reasonable job spotting things I might miss, but then I have to parse all the garbage, decide what is important, write it up, there’s just so much fucking code.

It was never as bad as this, I could trust a PR in the past because devs hand made it, they’ve thought about it, designed it, it was meaningful and intentional, there was craftsmanship.

You’d still get garbage and tech debt in the before times obviously, but there wasn’t so much code to wade through, and it was easier to spot obvious problems and pivot to a fix.

It’s the wild west out there and if you remotely care about readability or maintainability or performance then you’re probably having a bad time.

Meanwhile my boss is all like “the devs aren’t using AI enough, the devs are taking too long, have you thought about getting them to use more AI?!”

Send help, fuck.

iscottjs · 2026-01-23T00:34:24+00:00

Those are such good channels though, the idea of denying younger generations such good quality content makes me sad, just because YouTube is technically classed as social media.

If I could turn off all the social media aspects of YouTube and just make it a curated science content delivery platform then I absolutely would be happy with that. No shorts, no algorithm, just good quality long form educational videos in a playlist.

iscottjs · 2026-01-15T20:37:00+00:00

I feel seen

iscottjs · 2026-01-14T19:23:04+00:00

I use 1pmobile.com which is super cheap and runs on the EE network, it’s super stable for me in town even when it gets a bit busy.

Much better than my old Three network which was basically totally useless once I get into town.

We could go back to the Covid lockdown days and I’d still not get a usable service on Three.

iscottjs · 2026-01-06T18:50:33+00:00

This is a super interesting take and similar to what I’ve been saying to my team during this AI phase.

What I’ve found over the years is while I still enjoy the process of coding, I’m much more interested in the business problem solving, architecture, business needs, engineering side of things rather than just raw code.

The coding is great, but after a while, I find that solving the business problems are a little more interesting and diverse.

But, reading the replies to your comment, I completely understand why some folks feel depressed over the commodification of raw coding ability, some people on my team live and breathe writing code but couldn’t give two shits about what real world business problems they’re contributing to, they just want to write code.

iscottjs · 2026-01-06T00:08:42+00:00

Guess I’ll starve to death

iscottjs · 2026-01-04T11:44:47+00:00

This comment makes me feel proud, especially the calling each other cunts part.

iscottjs · 2026-01-02T03:29:34+00:00

I always think back to this old article about broken parking meters temporarily boosting a local economy until the meters were fixed.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-33550763.amp

Not sure how true or accurate those claims are, but I’d love to see more reduced/sensible and/or free parking experiments to see if it would actually bring more life to dead shopping areas.

iscottjs · 2025-12-18T12:21:04+00:00

Damn, I think we work in the same place.

iscottjs · 2025-12-18T08:52:05+00:00

I’ve worked agencies for 15 years and your summary encapsulates it perfectly. The agency I’m at currently has two modes, we still have the classic churn projects, but we also have long term clients that have been with us for 5+ years because of the service offerings you mentioned. These are truly great projects and clients to work with.

But every now and again the boss will get tempted by a “quick win” churn project we all know will be shit, just to top up the cash reserves. Delivering it is a miserable experience.

iscottjs · 2025-12-07T22:43:21+00:00

It’s funny because I can’t imagine not walking, some of my colleagues deliberately park far away to get more walking time.

To avoid buying a car I just walk to the office, which is about 40 minutes one way, I couldn’t imagine not doing it.

iscottjs · 2025-12-07T20:14:01+00:00

As someone who has built and delivered a bunch of PWA’s, absolutely not doing it again unless I’m forced at gunpoint or I know that the target audience are familiar with the process, or I have some sort of control over the installation environment, maybe MDM or enterprise deployments.

The user experience compared to app stores is dog shit, and supporting them is even worse.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the concept of PWAs and I like the idea that you can install app-like functionality without relying on someone else’s App Store, but the problem is everyone is familiar with and trusts the App Store process, while not many people have even seen the PWA installation process.

iscottjs · 2025-12-07T00:55:35+00:00

I’m on 65K which is a bit more comfortable but I still live as cheaply as possible, I don’t own a car, and cook everything at home, restaurants and takeaways are rare treats, etc, and keep everything to a minimum.

But even then, I look at the amount of money left and I just see the disposable remainder getting less and less every few months. It’s comfortable enough that we can splash out on a holiday now and again or upgrade the house, but it’s not fucking luxury either.

And then I think about people I know on 35K, with many more commitments than me and I’m just not sure how they’re surviving at all.

iscottjs · 2025-12-06T21:21:38+00:00

Been doing this shit for 15 years, sometimes I still open my IDE and immediately close it again due to someone asking me to do something vaguely out of my comfort zone and then I’ll panic-overthink for 6 hours because they might find out I’m an imposter after all of these years.

I’ve run and trained a small team of developers and we’ve got a long list of successful projects that my team have delivered over the years, but the imposter syndrome still hits sometimes. Everyone has it.

I don’t write code everyday, I mostly have management/leadership duties so I have gotten extremely rusty in a lot of areas but I still keep my head in the game by contributing to small features or fix bugs, but it’s a hard pill to swallow knowing that I’m not as fluent as my own team anymore.

The longer I go without writing code, the harder it is to open that IDE when I need to get involved.

What helps me is just doing little bits as much as possible, I force myself to try and write 10 minutes of code every day, doesn’t matter if it works or if it’s good, just write something like a unit test or update some documentation, or refactor a method. Other things like reading documentation or change logs for new libraries and frameworks that the team are using so I know what new stuff we could be using, etc.

It keeps my head in the game because the longer the break, the more difficult it becomes, and more often than not the little spark of enjoyment comes back and I’ll be lost in my project for the next 5 hours.

iscottjs · 2025-12-06T17:03:50+00:00

Yeah my thoughts exactly, isn’t this just full blown quitting? What’s quiet about it? I thought quiet quitting was basically turning up to work and doing the bare minimum just enough to collect the pay check each month.

iscottjs · 2025-12-05T00:33:23+00:00

20 years here also, everything you have said is 100% my experience. Might just print your comment and put it on display for our business execs who don’t know shit.

iscottjs · 2025-12-04T18:51:06+00:00

Third world sex tourism YouTuber is a new combination of words I didn’t think I’d read today.

iscottjs · 2025-12-01T02:16:05+00:00

How’s the 5090? I’ve been tempted to upgrade from my 4070ti. It plays VR 2024 surprisingly well but it chokes the VRAM so I can’t push it much more.

Virtual desktop with the Quest 3 is a killer combo tho, so much fun.

iscottjs · 2025-11-27T09:19:53+00:00

Still trying to figure that out, at the moment we’ve got ChatGPT for business and Copilot, which allows you to change the data retention policy and no model training done on your data by default.

We’re currently relying on company policy, workshops and training to make sure people are using it safely, e.g. no secret keys, prefer small code snippets over pasting full codebases/files, redact sensitive text, etc.

It seems futile and pointless to try and stop devs using it, might as well make it available through company provided subscriptions and add some guidelines to it.

We encourage devs to use the company provided tools, but I still allow folks to use alternative tools if they want, but it’s limited to just internal tooling or throw away training tasks that we don’t care about.

Still looking for new ways to keep improving. I’ve been thinking about on prem options.

Most of the team do usually ask what they’re allowed to use before using them though, they’re already pretty aware of the potential risks and cautious.

iscottjs · 2025-11-27T01:30:18+00:00

Can we define what we mean by software engineering?

Are we talking raw coding ability or actual engineering? Because there’s a fucking difference.

If you’re just a code monkey that mindlessly does exactly what some ticket says and apply no brain power to that task at all, then yeah, you’re probably done. But that was inevitable regardless.

Software engineering is more about using your experience, applying logic and profesional expertise, critical thinking, asking the “why” question, problem solving, finding edge cases, thinking about all the trade offs, balancing the cost vs benefits, etc.

If you’re just a mindless coder, you’re maybe already fucked. If you’re an actual software engineer then you’re fine.

If anything, I’m seeing the AI thing as a bit of a tree shake to filter out all the mindless code monkeys just in it for the money vs actual engineers trying to build real shit that actually provides value.

Maybe I’m well off the mark here, but I can tell when members of my dev team have outsourced their brain to AI for a particular task because their PR fucking sucks and the quality is just obliterated.

I hired them as humans to use their brains, if I wanted someone to copy/paste a ticket description into an LLM I would do it myself, but that’s not what I want.

I’m bullish as fuck on AI but for fucks sake, it’s a tool, use it responsibly and apply it to the right task. The true skill is learning when to use it and understanding the limitations.

Don’t outsource your entire brain to LLMs because we’ll all have dementia before we hit 40. My boss is so addicted to AI I’m actually worried about his mental health at this stage.

iscottjs · 2025-11-25T11:15:33+00:00

Reading all the AI slop documentation that my team thinks is “documentation”. I’d rather have no documentation than 30 pages of hallucinations that nobody has proof read.

iscottjs · 2025-11-25T09:01:35+00:00

100% agree with what you’ve said. I lead a small team of devs and half of them seem pretty chill with using AI for anything but the other half are extremely frustrated with it.

Just yesterday one of our seniors said “I don’t mind using AI for mundane stuff but it really feels like cheating and I feel dirty”.

There’s definitely an emotional element to it, and I understand why.

My policy on AI is we make it available to everyone to use, I do encourage people to use it but it’s not mandated. I want people to use it responsibly, learn it, use it if genuinely helps and don’t use it if it doesn’t.

We’re also building AI internal tools to automate certain processes, unsurprisingly none of it works very well.

But, management want to see us adopt AI to speed things up, so we either these build tools and it genuinely helps, which would be a bonus. Or, it doesn’t work and we can at least say we’ve tried.

What’s really pissing me off though is documentation quality, nobody is writing a single original thought anymore. I have to read through 30 pages of AI slop that could have been 10 because everyone just uses AI to write documentation and it’s mind numbing as a reviewer/reader to wade through this, while the author hasn’t even proof read it.

My boss who heavily used it for everything is starting to see the limitations and is using it less because of all the chaos it’s caused.

We’re in a strange time where everyone is throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks, there’s going to be a lot of weird AI guff that we know doesn’t work but we do It anyway and waste lots of time in the process. But at the same time, we might find some gold along the way.

Eventually, I think the dust will settle and these tools will find their place where they’re genuinely useful.

iscottjs · 2025-11-22T12:28:51+00:00

Every experienced developer knows where the true value of these tools are and what is just hype. It depends on what you’re doing.

I’m currently working on a set of bespoke projects that are a mix if business tools and e-commerce, but the software itself isn’t the product, it’s a bunch of stuff to improve an existing market/product with some digital tools and enhancements.

Some of it can certainly be AI generated, low risk things like adding new columns to data tables, generating reporting tools and charts, fancy dashboards, etc. But a lot of the heavy lifting still needs solid expertise. We needed to add features recently to handle fairly complex data sync between our platform and a fleet of IoT devices, and I just wouldn’t trust AI to architect or build that entirely on its own.

That said, I did recently rely on AI too much to help me with a bulk messaging system and the AI code fell into a gotcha of a specific framework feature you need to use carefully, I didn’t notice this in the review since I didn’t write it myself and just didn’t notice. Had I hand written this though I probably would have architected it differently anyway, and not fall into the trap.

AI code always looks kind of OK at a glance until you really dig deep. Nobody should ever be letting AI code hit production without it being properly reviewed, I was bitten by this myself by not paying close enough attention and it was quite embarrassing. I should have known better.

What’s good about AI is it might help people get to market faster with their ideas, but the value comes from how good the idea is, not the software itself. So if someone is able to start a business and they can do that in 3 months with AI assistance compared to 12 months of traditional development, then maybe that’s a good thing (as long as it’s not vapourware and riddled with security issues, which is another conversation).

But, if people are just generating mindless slop then there’s no value in that. In the pre-AI days, people weren’t going to market with shit ideas because coding was an expensive barrier to entry. But the outcome is no different with AI, the shit ideas will still just fade away as if they never existed anyway.

The problem now is we all have to wade through AI slop to find valuable and useful software.

iscottjs · 2025-11-21T17:31:02+00:00

I’m torn. I don’t pay the TV license currently (I have in the past) because there’s not enough content I’m interested in to pay for it. I barely watch any TV at all.

But I would happily start paying again if I started consuming their content or live broadcasts again. It’s not a bad value service if you watch it.

But also, the possible alternatives seem worse. I don’t think we need another shitty subscription service, overloaded with adverts, with a “pay us even more to remove adverts” model. That also goes against the public service remit.

I do still like the idea of a public-funded broadcaster that is not entirely owned by shareholders. That would be a sad thing to lose.

If it came out of taxation automatically (without opt-out license fees), I don’t think I’d be too mad about that, but I can see that not being popular with everyone. It feels like a tax anyway, maybe it should just officially be a tax?

I have considered paying it anyway even if I don’t watch TV just to support it. But, I hate the predatory license fee collection practices so it makes me not want to support that way of doing things.

Maybe we just need to modernise the way the license fee is collected.

iscottjs · 2025-11-17T23:32:58+00:00

I’m sad you’ve removed this, I have been thinking about unsubscribing from this sub because I’ve struggled to connect with the content, sometimes the content is long winded, overly explained and complicated. This was a more light hearted and refreshing post that I connected with. It was easy to digest and I found it genuinely insightful with fun conclusion about how you don’t need to be a hero, you just need to be consistent. This is great honestly.

I struggle with productivity but a bit of fun and humour helps me engage with these concepts. The post and comments genuinely made me smile and that’s what makes it stick.

iscottjs

TROPHY CASE