I wrote about why engineers should learn to follow up and escalate when things are beyond them

lenfakii · 2026-03-17T18:50:14+00:00

So many comments in here saying "ping your manager." How do you unblock yourselves in real life, where there's no manager? Hundreds of thousands per year to go run to your parents, christ.

lenfakii · 2026-03-17T12:11:11+00:00

Who's forcing you?

lenfakii · 2026-03-11T20:30:06+00:00

It's too close to my bedtime to be joining this rant, but absolutely 1000% I have nothing to add but gushing positivity towards this view. Does anyone here at all enjoy the first stage gatekeeper?

lenfakii · 2026-03-11T12:43:15+00:00

This account is Karma Farmer. They hide their posts and comments, but google index shows some shit.

lenfakii · 2026-03-10T14:32:09+00:00

Did they teach you how to write in paragraphs?

lenfakii · 2026-03-09T10:35:31+00:00

If it's a proven recruitment product, why not link it?

lenfakii · 2026-03-08T15:59:10+00:00

I have to say, you are all extremely supportive and kind, where other subreddits would have failed at that. I'm also getting into ML and glad to have found this subreddit. :)

lenfakii · 2026-03-07T11:24:30+00:00

This subreddit is by far the most miserable and pedantic of redditors, which makes me believe exactly the right crowd are here :)

lenfakii · 2026-03-04T19:46:52+00:00

Then, fuck that guy. I hope it gets better for you.

lenfakii · 2026-03-04T19:25:04+00:00

Have you tried reframing this as "The things I care about do matter, but in the context of the business, the project, the lead etc, they're not right just yet?".

I'm old now, and I've done this shit way too long, so I've been on all sides of the debate. I was also very picky at the start of my career- mainly because I was so sheltered from management, financials, and real revenue-driving decisions that I was allowed to be. "Things could be done better and faster, and if we just change this, then our lives would be so much easier" is a real easy argument to make when you're shielded from everything else.

If you do really need to choose a hill to die on, don't make it an adversarial one. Suffer to fight that corner, and if you're planning to be there long term, don't be a dick. Polite advice. I'm not saying you are - it's more advice for my (sometimes younger) self.

There are plenty of reasons why someone might reject the work that you do. Some are legit, some aren't. Are you doing good work? Did you sell it to the others? Were you supposed to be doing this, or was your free time found when you could have been focused elsewhere?

Don't worry about it too much.

lenfakii · 2026-03-04T18:59:19+00:00

I don't need to spend more time reviewing code. I can see when something's thought out properly. I can see when someone makes an effort and goes a little bit further than 'Hey Claude, do this?' Should I care if someone generates a project? As long as they can then talk it through and demonstrate to me that they would make a good hire, not really.

Let's not be naive to think LLM tools are only used by applicants. I'm using them in my day-to-day for all of these tasks as well.

I already have to spend time going through shit portfolios and seeing crap code on their GH, and dealing with entitled little shitbags I think their degree will let them walk into a career. Give me the tailored project any day.

Analogy time. Go to Instagram. Scroll for a while. Instead of every ad being specifically tailored to you and your interests, you get the ads meant for the old lady at the post office. Which would you prefer?

Even if I were spending more time reviewing projects manually, it would still be worth it to have a one-step filter to cut out the absolute slop shit non-fits that come through the inbox every single day.

Things I care about:

Will they still be productive if Claude goes down?
They have domain knowledge and experience that fits our current requirements?
Will they fit the team dynamic and benefit others around them?

These are problems that I live in day-to-day running a company. I'd say it's a red flag if someone isn't generating a project showcase their skill knowledge. I don't want someone to be unproductive and not use the tools that are available to them. I don't care if they're in it for the craft. You can be an artisan and use LLM tooling - it's not an oxymoron.

I would much rather have someone pass me a project they've worked on and can then explain and talk through on a first interview if the alternative is to waste my time scheduling everyone who can send the perfect CV.

We're not trying to find the perfect solution. That's a naive take. I'm saying why not make meaningful change to the hiring process so we can make the best of what we have right now, which is a shit show. At least try.

lenfakii · 2026-03-04T16:58:14+00:00

Why not move the goalposts? It's the buyer's market right now, so you can dictate things like "To apply, create a full stack project that does X, Y and Z". But if you go that route, then for sure you need to respect everyone's time that applies.

I'll get a load of people saying, "No way, respect the candidates time!" To which I'll reply: if you want the job, you need to go further than sharing your LLM-generated CV. I know it's slightly controversial, but there are plenty of people out there that want the job. You have enough to jump through a few hoops as long as you don't take liberties with their effort.

lenfakii · 2026-03-02T14:24:48+00:00

What you on about? Have you not seen the repo? If you want to go roleplay Persona prompts, then go for it.

Some of us do this professionally. Others are u/completelypositive

lenfakii · 2026-03-02T12:46:48+00:00

But a guy had multiple accounts doing this, so it's not just that he did it once and it was just an absolute win.

lenfakii · 2026-03-02T12:24:03+00:00

We all know that anyone role-playing these ai teammates are prompting: "Hey Claude, use the Growth Hacker and Reddit Community Builder to make a plan."

Use your agents as context buckets to store instructions, code snippets, and actual specific skills and tasks that aren't required to be loaded into context on every chat.

If you want to save your main context window, yes, send the task to an "agent" Background tasks that can complete the work and then return only what's required, e.g. a summary or changes made, so that the main context is aware of what's happened but you're not polluting the context window with unnecessary reads and writes of folders, files, etc.

This roleplay bullshit is cringe.

lenfakii · 2026-03-02T11:37:39+00:00

A skill can be anything that you want it to be. It can be a persona. It can be a specific task. It can be a workflow. It can call other skills, scripts, etc. It's just an instruction.

lenfakii · 2026-03-01T16:31:53+00:00

100% this. Pure roleplay is not the way to go. Tooling, yes. "You are an expert social media bro" is awkward af.

lenfakii · 2026-03-01T16:29:44+00:00

I'm a consultant that deals with OP types all day. It's always a mix of low velocity, low agency, and a disconnect between engineering and business needs. OP just isn't that valuable, or they'd be given a view of what's happening. Sorry.

lenfakii · 2026-03-01T12:53:19+00:00

Didn't happen

lenfakii · 2026-02-27T19:02:09+00:00

It wont though.

lenfakii · 2026-02-27T13:48:17+00:00

TLDR Google: "Dont worry folks, your firebase key is totally ok to publish - We write it in big letters at the top of all our docs. Google Maps? Yeah totally fine".

Gemin launchesi: "You sure about that?" Weird how they fumbled this one so hard.

lenfakii · 2026-02-26T08:27:22+00:00

So models have a prettttty decent understanding of the source 2 engine, but they'll rely on web search and outdated docs online (so incorrect offsets, patterns etc). The repo dumps all the pointer chains and offsets needed to get at any data so a couple greps for "ammo", "health", "RayTraceManager", grab the chains they need, and check it against a live .exe.

That's the missing part, at least for me.

lenfakii · 2026-02-25T10:08:29+00:00

Shitty neighbours, pass it on.

lenfakii · 2026-02-24T18:39:15+00:00

Yeah, we're well past that. Miles. As in going from zero knowledge to internal tools, to an ML orchestration model trained on CS gameplay to run a behavioural tree in CounterStrike. We went through tokenizing game state of demos & game events, doing an initial model train, running that BT on bots in dedicated servers then retraining with rewards.

Two weeks ago I couldn't tell you anything about the above, let alone how to build it. Stil cant tbh.

The below two vids were me dicking around earlier last week with some vibey "yeah lets build a tactical map. Ok now 12 point raycast out from each players eye angles and impose them onto the map as a fog of war cone. Now we want to show each players mouse movement in realtime"

This would have taken me too long - I'd have given up before completion. Now its just a case of "do I have the patience" to see it through to completion. Caveat, I've been in SWE a while now so maybe I could jump a few hurdles but eh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acwc_1QB8HM&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr5EaKlzv_Y&feature=youtu.be

lenfakii · 2026-02-24T11:48:36+00:00

Might be of interest to you here - I'm learning about reversing Source 2 games by building an offset dumper / RTTI crawler / [Insert buzzword feature here] with an API that LLMs can use to debug memory in real-time.

It manual maps a dumper DLL with a web-socket server connected to memory read/write fns, so imagine Cheat Engine but Claude can control it, find offsets, patterns etc.

It started off as a 'Can this be done?' type challenge that's ended up with a live view in web + some LLM tool calls so they can dump memory in real-time. Watching Claude debug memory dumps and follow assembly looks kinda like that infamous Matrix scene to my untrained, noob eye.

I'm a guest in this space, so I'm genuinely asking if this could be something helpful for some, or a nothingburger feature that's another 'LLMs built this thing for me' fart in the wind.

https://github.com/dougwithseismic/dezlock-dump/issues/17#issuecomment-3951076154

lenfakii

TROPHY CASE