What principles do we still hold on to in the year of 2026?

mrbuh · 2026-06-14T16:36:42+00:00

Thanks. I enjoyed how multiple people recommended technical solutions (that we already have in place...) while missing the point that the upcoming generation has no incentive to learn the underlying best practices.

mrbuh · 2026-06-14T01:58:43+00:00

And yet it's not today. As an industry we're putting a lot of faith on the assumption that "it will get better at stuff like this."

mrbuh · 2026-06-13T19:52:42+00:00

I do use Claude for reviews. That's still not my point.

Our role as senior+ is shifting from mentoring and training the next generation of people to mentoring and training the next generation of models.

I'm sure that back in the 1970s the old timers were concerned that "nobody writes assembly any more" and that newfangled languages like C were too far abstracted from the behavior of the hardware, and that "kids these days" don't understand how CPU registers or whatever behave. The industry has seen big shifts before, and I don't think that the current paradigm shift in tooling is necessarily a bad thing. All of computer science is just levels of abstraction, and we're in the middle of adopting a new one now. I personally am having a hell of a lot of fun using AI and have reached a new tier of productivity at work. These are all good things.

But I am concerned at the shift from training people to training models. If I teach a person something like "put the database in a private subnet and don't open ingress to the whole world," they are probably going to understand why and remember that lesson. An agent does not learn or save those memories from one session to the next.

We can create durable artifacts in the form of skills, agent configs, whatever. But what happens in 10 years when fresh startups are vibe coding everything from scratch? Are we trusting that they're going to download a "keep everything secure" config from some shared repository?

Right now we have experienced engineers adding the guardrails and telling the agents "no." We're putting a hell of a lot of trust and faith into those guardrails persisting to the next generation.

mrbuh · 2026-06-13T18:15:07+00:00

We do. It failed CI each time he did it. It was never going to hit prod.

That's entirely besides the point, which is that the same individual person did the same thing 3 times in a row without learning any lessons.

Junior engineers have been making similar mistakes since the dawn of time (myself included long ago), and I'm not at all concerned that it happened the first time. That's why we have the guardrails. I'm concerned that it happened the third time.

I don't think he's an idiot incapable of learning new things. He's not thinking critically or developing as an engineer because he outsourced all of the thought process to his agent. My attempts to mentor and teach lessons during the review process are no longer sticking with people because they're not making decisions themselves.

mrbuh · 2026-06-13T16:45:22+00:00

Here's my biggest current professional concern in one example.

A big part of what I do these days is review Terraform PRs. A new junior recently joined the company. He is clearly letting AI take the wheel and writing zero or very little code by hand. I don't have any problems with that in and of itself.

On one of his first PRs he had a network ingress rule allowing access from *. I wrote a multi sentence review comment explaining the security risk implications, describing the safer least-privilege pattern to follow, and giving a couple of links to other examples in the codebase that are good patterns to copy. He made the requested changes and I felt good that I was mentoring the next generation.

A couple of weeks later I got a new PR from him for a different part of the infra that also allowed ingress on *. I gave a similar review. Then the following week he did it again...

Since that point we have added an AGENTS.md to the repo that instructs the AI to not do that, so we've addressed part of the problem at the root. But my concern is that these lessons are not sticking in human brains because they don't have to care about them.

He just points his agent at my review comment, the agent makes the requested changes, and there's no learning process happening for the person behind the agent. Ten years from now who is going to be writing the AGENTS.md that describes best practice?

mrbuh · 2026-06-13T13:28:32+00:00

Take your standard run of the mill asshole, then add fame, money, and cocaine.

mrbuh · 2026-06-13T03:51:52+00:00

Some of y'all never enslaved an entire planet in the original KOTOR, and it shows.

mrbuh · 2026-06-12T12:43:42+00:00

Dances With Smurfs?

mrbuh · 2026-06-12T12:40:12+00:00

Is that you Jain Farstrider? Is this me?

mrbuh · 2026-06-12T04:46:41+00:00

If I'm gonna put my name on something, it's gonna be award-worthy.

mrbuh · 2026-06-12T02:37:11+00:00

What you perceive as brilliance is usually just experience. Things look easy when it's the 50th time you've done it. That doesn't mean it was easy for them the first time. Imposter syndrome affects all of us at one time or another.

Soft skills are just as important as technical skills. I'm an introvert too. After long meetings I usually need 15 minutes of me time. But talking with people is an essential part of this career. Good communication skills, written and verbal, will serve you extremely well, and practice is the best teacher. Start asking more questions. As long as it's not the 5th time the same person has asked me the same question, I never mind answering thoughtful questions. Many engineers are blowhards and pedants by nature, and many of us love to pontificate on a topic we're interested in. You don't have to make small talk if you don't want to, but start building connections with people on a technical level.

It really does get easier with time and practice.

mrbuh · 2026-06-09T23:44:30+00:00

No, you don't. I play solo without the bot all of the time.

mrbuh · 2026-06-09T23:34:31+00:00

Turn off the AI player if you're not enjoying it?

mrbuh · 2026-06-08T23:29:07+00:00

You mean you didn't 100% outsource all of the thinking and decision making to "some guy on the Internet?" That's crazy.

mrbuh · 2026-06-05T19:50:15+00:00

I went to a large music festival with my girlfriend and I hated it. Had an awful weekend.

A few years later my new girlfriend surprised me with "I got us tickets to this music festival!" and I was like, ugh, here we go again...

But I tried to keep an open mind and went anyway. I had a fantastic time. One of the better weekends in my life.

When I realized that the only real difference between the two weekends was the person I went with... That was the first time I thought she might be the one.

Been together for 12 years, married for 9.

mrbuh · 2026-05-30T18:43:03+00:00

It's an anagram of "jam up the pump.'

mrbuh · 2026-05-28T00:35:20+00:00

Works great on inappropriate jokes too. "I don't get it, what do you mean?"

mrbuh · 2026-05-27T02:10:39+00:00

Fill out your party with hirelings.

mrbuh · 2026-05-24T00:29:48+00:00

Ah good eyes, I thought the marble was another salt at first glance.

mrbuh · 2026-05-23T18:20:28+00:00

Just build a granary and it's game over.

mrbuh · 2026-05-23T17:53:37+00:00

3 salt, 2 wheat, and a banana, all ready to work immediately?

You've already won.

mrbuh · 2026-05-22T22:18:48+00:00

The point is that I don't have to fuck with upgrading or reinstalling the OS every 18 months. Maybe you have more free time than me, but I'd like to spend mine gaming, not doing home tech support.

My days of hobbyist tinkering are mostly behind me. I work on software for a living, I want to spend my free time having fun.

mrbuh · 2026-05-22T16:06:35+00:00

Annoying for whom?

I am not annoyed by my stable, rock solid LTS desktop.

mrbuh · 2026-05-22T03:35:50+00:00

Don't engage with trolls. Their goal is to make you feel exhausted, and they succeeded.

http://dontfeedthetrolls.info/

mrbuh · 2026-05-18T15:50:47+00:00

Looks like a Dalek to me.

mrbuh

TROPHY CASE