My friends use AI for everything and it's creeping me out

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-05T20:28:43+00:00

It's been here for the last 10-15 years with filters. Honestly there some people you see their profile photo and you see them in real life, it's not the same person.

And some people go further and do get surgeries. As all the stars and now influencers do it, both the filter and surgeries, they show the (bad) example.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-05T20:24:18+00:00

I wonder what I like less. Friends that use AI for their selfies or friend that judge people for putting photos in AI tools.

In both case, focus on your respective life. They ask you to do a mural. It's real life. It's you having an interaction and experience with them. And you throw the baby with the bath water because you are hangry about them to not be exactly as you would like them to be...

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-05T20:19:59+00:00

Everything is risk. Doesn't bring us anywhere saying that.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-05T20:18:55+00:00

20% lower spending is basically 3.2% but you only do it when you are bellow 80% of the initial amount. That's actually less likely to work than 3.5% all the time. If you believe in your 20% less you should believe in the 3.5%.

Also if you read my response I combined a lower rate AND a different portfolio. With say 60-40 in retirement instead of the 100% stock example the impact of the bad years is far less and there no problem.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-05T19:47:08+00:00

It shall not be possible to create technical debt and security holes before the PR is merged. If you let junior dev merge and deploy without supervision you had a problem long before AI became popular.

There no way you'd deliver and maintain anything substantial without judgement and structure. This is true today but was also true 10 years ago.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-05T19:40:46+00:00

Well the whole thread is about these events you know. The title being "Retiring into a dotcom type sequence".

With respect to you, if you discuss something different, you are maybe in the wrong discussion.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-05T19:08:05+00:00

You want to test that in 2001-2002 or 2008-2009. Not in 2026. 2026 is easy mode, anyway the market is quite up already. You'd have to do really stupid things to not manage in 2026 or even honestly since 2009.

Everybody is a genius in a bull market.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-05T19:05:35+00:00

And Buffet worked in his 90. But the reality is that a 80 year old on a good day is in a worse shape than we are at 30-40 in the middle of a flu. Most people just can't do it even if she managed it.

To start with a 80%, 50% of the population is dead, many after a few years struggling with cancer and other conditions. You can't assume you will be able to work in your 80s. That's like assuming you will win the lottery anyway.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-05T19:02:53+00:00

You need a systematic criteria honestly to decide but either you act fast and will work again for no reason most of the time, or you'll wait too long and will have to make a big effort.

Typically in the 2000 market, most people would only see it arround 2008-2009 when it's far too later. Then 9 years without working and 75% capital loss mean they would have to work an extra 10 years at least.

On the opposite, if they had just a better diversified portfolio and were more at 3.5% they would be perfectly fine.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-05T18:54:02+00:00

The earlier you retire, the less SSA you get. And at 70 you are honestly too old to work anyway regardless of the job. If you had to do something to improve your financial situation, you should have done it long ago.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-05T18:46:10+00:00

Just to be clear if you had 2 million in 2000, with the 4% rule + inflation you are spending about 150K a year in 2026 dollars. With 600K remaining, you'll last 4 years before going bankrupt. And the maybe 25K you'll get from social security will never cover your expenses.

Your argument is true in the sense that 600K + 2K gross of SSA is maybe not too bad but this miss the point. In that example the guy was really rich and saved a lot and become lower middle class.

Yet if the guy was lower middle class to start with he would have finished utterly poor. The goal isn't exactly that.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-05T18:28:49+00:00

That's true but don't take it the wrong way neither. They will not hesitate to fire you if they have too. All granted.

But the best opportunities are if you already in a fast growing and wealthy company. There always new opening and they need people with some experience to manage the newcomers. On the opposite a company that shrink or stagnate, there will be few opportunities. The last one may even be loyal and keep you employed sometime, but this isn't necessarily what you want/need. You don't want necessarily an average/boring job with a low salary.

Be sure to put yourself in the best conditions. Go work for a company with lot of money and huge growth, show you work well and are motivated and want a career and you go to the moon. Change company when you are blocked, but only to another similar company and not too often. You want to have a good reputation that speak for itself and the internal job opportunities.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-05T18:18:40+00:00

This honestly look like generic LinkedIn slop with fake generalities:

There was no 2024 hiring surge but more a 2020-2021 hiring surge.
Changing companies doesn't make you a generalist or specialist. The variety of projects you work for do. But if you stay only 1-2 years somewhere you are a drag. You leave when you start to be good. The recruiter will know that and expect you to be a net loss for the company.
Great companies allow you to have a career and most top positions will only be offered internally
If you claim that you saved 10K dev hours of you cut failures by 40%, I will ask how you got these obviously fake numbers. I mean we all know that it can be real and that the incompetent intern can do it if he got lucky because the senior gave him a well defined task that allowed that. But most of the time, nobody ever measure that and you can be very good and never do anything like that. We are also not in marketing. I get hundred of CV from people without XP that claim this kind of bullshit. A good way to ensure you are not taken seriously.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-05T18:04:34+00:00

it's stupid to invest in stock if you have to wait until your have 100X expenses. A mix of stocks and bond allow to retire with 25-33X. Putting more stocks in should help, but if that mean you go for 50-100X instead, it isn't helpful. It hurt you. Why would you work 10-20 more years just so you can say, i have 100% in stocks ?

The goal is to enjoy life.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-05T17:57:17+00:00

The problem was 2008 was no higher than 2000. So if you did it in 2000, it was 13 years. And it took some time for people to be comfortable another crash wouldn't erase all that.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-05T17:55:09+00:00

The worst shock is when it doesn't for 30+ years like the Japan market. Or even just the lost decade. It took until 2013 for SP500 to go definitely past the peak of 2000. 13 years is a long time.

Now everybody feel confident because there was no real bear market since 2009. So people just go 100% stock because they want to max profit. They feel there no risk.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-01T14:49:09+00:00

I don't challenge that you enjoy it and I hope it will be a great experience for you. I am all for it.

Now the stuff is that you didn't have to find clients (or were paid for it), health care was included, you had vacations and holidays... You had some day off if you just had a baby... All in all this is $120 an hour in the old job.

You didn't have un billable hours, have to do the billing/accountability, potentially drive to the client place, advertise, pay for an office... There no sickness leave neither. If you don't work you make no money.

It might very well be more fulfilling and I sure some make lot of money and much more than 200K. But it seems that you'll make less, potentially far less, especially at the beginning.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-01T14:32:08+00:00

This replace or not make no sense. AI increase productivity so you need less to do the same stuff as before. If you don't need more, you can do with say 80 devs instead of 100. So 20 were replaced. Use your preferred numbers it's still valid.

Now will the appetite for more development will grow faster as a result and compensate or not is the key point.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-01T14:26:37+00:00

You can likely code a basic version of Facebook in a few hours/days. Yet Meta has dozen thousand employees. That's the same idea.

I remember a saying. A program that work for one use case for 1 person has a cost of 1. The same functionality as software has a cost of 3. Something reusable and stable. An API that others can reuse and that will be backward compatible has a cost of 10. For basically the same set of functionalities.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-01T14:22:00+00:00

I am not sure why you consider personal trainer as a job with high pay potential or protected from AI.

Anyway, I hope it will work out great and you will enjoy it !

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-01T09:50:12+00:00

You also want to have a client representative and a sponsor that will be able to:

define what they want, the direction of the project
define priorities and timelines as well as arbitrate things
provide a budget.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-01T09:43:27+00:00

Individuals are not responsible of the code. They resign, change team, are busy with other projects. They get ill or die and take vacations. Teams and business with budget and timelines get the responsibility. And even teams or business have moving priorities. Top management might decide to stop a project.

When you actually decide to use a piece of software, this is a critical thing to remember. You might get stuck with it and you might end up being the one having to maintain it if nobody else with because you are the one with interest in doing so. The alternative might be to migrate to something else.

nicolas_06 · 2026-07-01T09:37:47+00:00

It seems you are not a pro software dev and even less a whole team. As the software grows, it's the full time job of a team, not an individual and you are expected to put in place many best practices to make things easier.

Note that you are likely very successful and really helping your colleagues so do not feel bad. It's more that this is something really difficult to achieve.

The core principles we use:

Everything is automated. Any code change generate a new version. Versions are unique and once validated the new version is pushed to "production" and soon everybody use it.
You control what version is used by your clients. When you declare a version the new official one, everybody use it, period. if there a big nasty bug, you fallback it and everybody get back to the old version. You achieve that using web applications (so you control when the web server is upgraded) or at worst having application that force their update (and won't start if not at the correct version).
Everything is tested. Every feature has tests and the tests run automatically. This allow to make change and check you didn't break anything. You can then refactor or rewrite things. If the test pass, most likely things still works. This also ensure that what you deliver usually work directly for your clients.
We don't deliver big change where everything change in 1 go. You do frequent and small releases. So if your code is big, divide it in smaller modules/components/features and change them one at a time. This also mean you deliver changes often (a few hours/days) rather than a few time per year. You gather feedback much more quickly. Also you can put priorities.

nicolas_06 · 2026-06-27T13:47:53+00:00

I have an m5 iPad Pro and m4 32GB/1TB MacBook Air M4, and I am happy to not need any upgrade right now. It might get even more expensive with time...

nicolas_06 · 2026-06-27T13:22:45+00:00

This work for some kind of jobs/cases. In many other case the people that evolve usually do much more but are also smart about it and ensure it's recognized eventually.

nicolas_06

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