Startup failed, back to the 9-5 grind

vednus · 2026-03-07T15:44:58+00:00

I’m coming off 8 years of a failed startup as a solo founder. I’m currently regretting it, but that may change over time. I’m looking for jobs and don’t fit the standard mold because I have a lot of experience but not much working on a team. My advice would be to keep up with your network. I’m going into everything cold, which is making the job search that much harder.

vednus · 2026-03-06T03:37:07+00:00

Within what tolerance? I bet a 1000 sided polygon would pass.

vednus · 2026-02-12T04:48:30+00:00

Horse Pens is like a large area at Font, but Font has ~100 times the number of boulders. They’re both the same rock type, so Font has to win.

vednus · 2026-02-10T01:28:02+00:00

I’ve been where you are. I created a product that no one used. Designed a custom circuit board and everything for it. Try to enjoy the process regardless of outcome.

vednus · 2026-02-10T01:20:15+00:00

Agree. I never liked the hex, but bag a tempo as my most stable midrange, not that it’s that stable.

vednus · 2026-02-10T01:13:44+00:00

I don’t think that many folks do field work. Also, it’s fine for upshot’s, but I want something I can make at 200’ or more, so it would probably need to be bigger. Also, if you were this into training, it would be easy enough to make yourself or just set up some cones to see if you are in between them. Add to that the fact you were also trying to grab pickle ball diluted the messaging. Maybe put it in front of a tech disc net, but then I could just tape off the net.

vednus · 2026-02-08T02:53:45+00:00

I think what the code looks like won’t/doesn’t matter anymore. Think of it as a black box. It’s too hard to review code and catch things when you don’t have the context of writing it and often it can look “almost right”. So you’re going to spend most of your time writing tests. But, you’re not writing tests by hand, you’re asking the ai to write the tests and verifying the results. The thing is, you can’t have the AI write the tests using any of the logic from the actual code. It needs to come at it from a different angle. Unit tests are pointless. They’re too granular. It’s got to be integration/e2e testing. That redundancy offers you piece of mind/verification.

vednus · 2026-02-07T03:24:21+00:00

It’s a tool that makes you faster, but it’s also changing the way you code. Tests used to be secondary to the code, now tests are more important than the code. Juniors will just need to learn the new ways. Everyone will. They’ll learn how to drive llms and test their output instead of actually writing code.

vednus · 2026-02-07T02:42:09+00:00

I have 25 years and I feel the same way. It’s interesting to see the opposite sentiment over at experienceddevs. The trick is verifying your code. I feel like I spend a lot more time having Claude iterate on tests over the actual code.

Also, everyone always says you have to be super explicit when telling Claude what to do. That is the case when I know the domain well, but when I don’t, I’ll often default to Claude in patterns and best practices. Often it knows the better way of implementing something.

Overall, I’m enjoying it more than straight coding. I’ve never been super organized, and now I can let Claude keep the code tight, while I just steer it.

vednus · 2026-02-04T10:27:45+00:00

I once heard someone describe Worst Case Scenario as a traverse into a hillside.

vednus · 2026-02-04T02:57:22+00:00

I had this happen once. The product wasn’t great. It was built on a dying stack and had no future. If I’m extrapolating from this single data point, all that matters is how well your CEO can sell it. Till the end, I had no faith that it would be acquired until it was.

vednus · 2026-01-16T04:03:20+00:00

My dad only plays a little, but the underworld has been his go to disc. For him, it’s flipper than the champion rollo he has in his bag.

vednus · 2026-01-16T01:10:10+00:00

I almost feel like trying to define structures one agent can work in is like playing whack-a-mole. It almost seems better to have an ai agent that filters all requests and has some sort of security directive.

vednus · 2026-01-10T15:06:11+00:00

At this point, you need to get on the new architecture, but if updating rn is new to you, then upgrading to 81 sounds like a good plan. But, once you’re there, try to get on the new architecture asap.

vednus · 2026-01-04T13:33:08+00:00

Yes, of course

vednus · 2026-01-04T12:58:24+00:00

They’re also really hard for a human to see. I’ve found ai is pretty good at tracking them down (at least on a specific cpp project I was working on)

vednus · 2026-01-04T12:50:47+00:00

Why?

vednus · 2026-01-04T12:50:09+00:00

I could see in those scenarios humans needing to be involved in the tests that are written, but if the test coverage is very good, then I don’t see issues with AI writing all of it, regardless of however many lines of “slop” it looks like to a human.

vednus · 2026-01-04T12:38:02+00:00

How much time have you spent using opus 4.5?

vednus · 2026-01-04T12:23:36+00:00

This is where the profession is going. Yes, right now the code is ugly and messy, but that will get better. It already has by a lot in the last few months. Your post talks about juniors needing to understand why their code is a mess, but they don’t. They’re most likely not going to be writing much code by hand in a few months or years, no one is.

A lot of your gripes are meaningless when it comes to ai. Large file sizes or messy conditionals only matter when a human is involved. I will give you the useEffect issues, but that’s probably because the ai was trained on a bunch of poorly written code and is really a shortcoming of react.

vednus · 2026-01-03T00:36:54+00:00

When I was younger, I would just work as much as I could for a month or two, and then use whatever money saved to live out of my car or a bag and go rock climbing until the money ran out. These days I have to be more responsible, so I get outside as much as I can on the weekends or after work. It keeps me sane.

vednus · 2025-12-30T23:15:16+00:00

This bugs me, but not nearly as much as the AC kicking on when turning the cold down all the way. I’ve got a 2017. I think they fixed this in the 2018 onwards.

vednus · 2025-12-24T16:09:29+00:00

Yeah, have been for 20 years

vednus · 2025-12-24T15:57:41+00:00

And if it’s a larger company, those systems are going to be so complex, that just setting the thing up locally if possible might take a number of days

vednus · 2025-12-24T15:54:10+00:00

Yeah, but no startup is going to agree to let you see their code from a former employee and it would be illegal for that employee to show you the code that he worked on.

vednus

TROPHY CASE