Same. Claude/Gemini/DeepSeekV4/Qwen3.6 are enabling me to do way more experimentation than I could do on my own. 10X at least. Not getting paid for any of it, but that's OK, getting paid imposes limitations on what you can work on and imposes responsibilities that I don't care to have anymore. There's a certain kind of integrity in that as well.

Sounds like you like having stuff, not building stuff.

Did you ever bring anything to life? Whatever it is, you are also relying on the work others have done before you and standing on the shoulders of giants.

It seems you wouldn't give them credit for it, but most of them appear to feel quite a bit of responsibility for bringing those to life.

I plant a seed, a human being carries it to fruition for 9 months through her determination, love and literal life blood, and I can claim I brought the seed to life.

He plants an idea and patiently coaxes a machine to spit out the code that matches it, you're giving the machine the credit.

I don't get it.

A carpenter can build a house with commercially produced dimensional lumber without having to harvest the trees, cut them into boards of standard dimensions, kiln-dry it, and transport it to the building site. We still say he "built" the house.

At some point, though, it's fair to ask "what did I add?"

If you are directing other people (or maybe robots, someday) to do the actual building, you can't really claim to have "built a house" even though it all happened under your direction.

I guess bottom line for me to feel I had a real part in "building" a thing would be whether I added anything I am specifically qualified or skilled at doing, or did I do what anyone could have done?

I use the standard $20/ChatGPT Pro sub, and run Thinking 5.5 as a chat interface.

I use it like a "trusted personal advisor," as opposed to a "black box employee."

I'm intimately involved in almost every step of the development process. Most of what I ask from the LLM, is function-length snippets.

It's made a huge difference in the velocity and scope of my work.

I have learned that I need to be very careful, though. The LLM sometimes really borks things, and I have to rip out the garbage, and rewrite the code, myself. I can't even imagine the quality of "vibe-coded" software.

Maybe I'm wrong, but these comments sound more and more advertising than personal experience.

I didn't see any reason for you to type the whole LLM version following the casing so precisely, why would it matter?

I love this place, I really do, but this stuff gets a bit tiresome.

No intention to disrespect anyone, I said what the comment felt like.

But hey, maybe I'm really over-thinking, so I'll go off.

It is not a common theme. However, when I do post something like this, I find a lot of kindred spirits, so I guess we are the "quiet ones."

Most people -the vast majority- use agents and IDE integrations; sometimes, in amazing ways. It's a very different way of using LLMs from the way that I do. Maybe the way I use it is considered "quaint," and people don't want to admit it, because they are afraid folks will make fun of them. I don't really give a rat's buttocks. I'm retired, and long past the need to feed my insecurity by accepting the judgment of others.

I am big on checking out people's profiles, when I am interacting with them. Sometimes, it makes a big difference in the way that I approach them. That's why my own profile is packed full of information. I'm not showing off -many folks here, are a lot more impressive than I am- I just want people to know who I am.

But that doesn't prevent the usual Internet Ready, Fire, Aim approach.

And one habit that I deliberately foster, is not engaging folks that want to attack me, beyond one or two mild responses. Once I say "Have a Great Day!", we're done. You can add whatever last word gives you good feelz. I won't respond.

I also don't attack. I respect this community, and engaging in troll-battles, just makes it ugly. And I could be really good at trolling; I just feel as if you can't shovel shit, without getting it on you.

But true, I didn't check your profile initially, so, my conclusion was uncalled for, and wrong.

So, really, was not trolling, and no attacks intended.

We probably have a lot more in common, than differences. I'm always glad to find people to interact with.

I know that my HN persona is a bit "stuffy," because I'm going out of my way, not to be abrasive, and to contribute to the community, but there are folks that absolutely hate me -in a Commissioner Dreyfus kind of way-, and I'm not really sure why. Maybe it's the Apple thing.

Eh, whatevs. I'm "on the spectrum," and got used to people disliking me for no reason that they can even articulate. It used to really bother me, but these days, it's just background noise. I'm actually a fairly decent chap, and probably worth getting to know.

And, I really believe you are, and glad for having this conversation, This is something, I believe we all fell in love with the internet heh. As I'm going through a bad patch of life, this made me smile. Thank you.

Hopefully, it’s a short patch.

I sincerely wish you the best.

No stranger to bad patches, myself, but overall, I feel blessed.

But if you are using AI to write all your code, I think you are missing a lot. It is like when you use LLMs to write your whole paper for you, rather than to check your grammar or offer critique of something you actually wrote.

All of those elements are present for me while using AI to augment my output. I have started using voice to interact with my coding harness though and I think that has maybe influenced my opinion. I also don't let things go fully autonomously and look at the diffs along the way.

I asked for examples of how the algorithm worked. I asked for examples of how to call the code. I asked for a happy-path unit test and a simple error-handling unit test. I asked it to rewrite something as a pure function. I pointed out an obvious race condition and told it to guard against that issue. I asked it to rewrite a function in the style of this other function. I told it to separate one function into two separate functions that handle the first step and the second step separately.

Etc etc.

If you don't understand it, ask for more or better comments, or better variable names, or cut down the scope into a smaller section, or more examples.

Edit: also I almost entirely leave the LLM in read only mode... I tell it to make the smallest change possible, and tell it I will only copy paste it in its proposed change when I understand the change and where it needs to be made. That way it's my hands on the keyboard, interacting with the code by making recommended changes... 80% of the code is touched by me (via copy-paste) most-of-the-way before I will 'git commit'.

Sure, there was one recursive folder descent function that found the most recent file modification time that I didn't fully understand, but it's self-contained in a function, I don't care to learn every corner of file modification times, and it appears to work, so I left it as is for my static site generator.

The salary expectations exploded when the VC/PE-bobos went into the space and started "build-and-sell-high".

Sure there were Billionairs made before tech & internet, but public was not aware of most such transactions.

that term is great, thanks! because: Outside of the "online community", a SWE salary is just a normal salary, all these superhigh salaries only came around the corner when it started to be about "international!" and "global scale!" and "disruption!" (of course LOL) and other things like these.

In the 90s, a "SWE" was just a normal employee doing some IT dev stuf & co, but after DotCom-boom SWE et. al. became the heroes, esp. for scaling and selling companies quickly because they had their MBA-colleagues in mind :-D

I get a real joy out of developing software. I have, for all my adult life. The fact that it paid well, was gravy.

I do feel that I was incredibly fortunate to have landed into a field that I already loved. I guess that my loving it, made me much better at it.

Of course, there were lots of "friction points," along the way. Working for myself, in retirement, has removed all of them. The one thing that I miss, is working in a team.

Or as the sibling comment said, do you enjoy the vocation or the vacation more?

(Everything in moderation of course: Even the most interesting and meaningful project will turn into drudgery to some degree, simply due to the amounts of time involved. Also we're in the attention economy, so there are lots of things specifically designed to feel more rewarding in the short term than to work on a long-term project. Maybe the difference is how much meaning and reward there still stays besides the day-to-day drudgery)

The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble.

I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject misery because of this. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but a large part of the problem was working with people who had very little integrity. They were great at masking it and presenting a different persona, but ultimately, we did bad things to people and made filthy money. I don't miss anything about it.

Not in a "new-grad or corporate PR appropriating meaningless platitudes" kind of way. But in a "I have seen multiple times how one untrustworthy person can easily wreck all the work of a team or organization, and make their lives miserable, so averting that is a high priority" kind of way.

Lately, in business context, I tend to characterize what I seek from people as "alignment". I think that many (not all) business people are still willing to buy in on that.

And it will just have to be a given that the company and team goals with which people are aligned are respectable.

What seems to be getting more difficult in the last few years is finding companies with respectable goals. Of course you knew to avoid any company in crypto. But now, with with a new VC gold rush of AI (often involving the same people who were happy to run crypto scams), there aren't a lot of startups that look respectable.

Not all AI companies, nor all companies doing AI, are bad. But how do you find a respectable one, in a gold rush?

Look for those who are trying to serve established respectable professions, ideally have already done so for many years or decades. Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism (in the ideal sense).

Then look at their own mission. Then look at their own work. Do they show their work? Are they open? Do they willingly allow their customers to audit their work product? Does how they talk about their work match the work product itself? Does the thing do what it says on the tin? Are they hypocrites with respect to those they serve or those they manage?

These are my strategies and I’ve found they lead to working almost exclusively with people who have high Integrity.

>Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism

In America, in 2026, this is a particularly dark joke.

I studied accounting in part because my father was an engineer at a public company that was rocked by an accounting scandal. It impacted my family in many ways for years and left deep impressions on me during my formative years.

There are many CPAs who believe strongly that part of their job is protecting the public interest. I have seen more than a handful go to the mat for things that were highly principled. Sometimes they did so knowing that they were risking their job / career / reputation. It's not a patient dying on the table sure, but I know many who take enormous pride in their responsibilities as accountants. I have seen lots of CPAs standing up for what is right, and I have watched executive teams yield to them almost as often.

It's easy to get cynical, but there's lots of good ones out there.

My point is just that there are lots of people that wake up every day and make serious, sustained efforts to exercise due care in their professional duties.

The giveaway is the "in 2026", which implies that it would not be a dark joke in other years.

Thus the poster is evidently indicating that:

The legal system has been undermined and been shown to have no integrity because it allows illegal actions by the rich and the political class.

Journalism has been undermined because major media outlets have been purchased by rich people who only allow the media to publish pro-conservative, pro-rich, talking points.

Healthcare is a larger stretch for their dark joke, but the governmental agency that sets the rules for healthcare research and what are the socially approved recommendations is run by RFK Jr. who is a well-known anti-vaxx guy, also the U.S has left WHO and may not get access to WHO data anymore, and last year the CEO of an insurance company got shot basically for denying insurance claims for healthcare, indicating some level of corruption. There may also be more dark joke levels in regards to healthcare if one is a female.

Accounting is also something of a stretch, but there are governmental shenanigans where common accounting practices are involved that indicate corruption and that might make you feel like "accounting, what a joke" /strawman quotes there

That, at any rate, is what I suppose can only be meant by the somewhat obtuse phrase dark joke in 2026.

On edit: no wait, CEO of United Healthcare got shot at the end of 2024.

Speaking as a USian:

If one hasn't been paying attention, one might have missed the deterioration of the courts and law enforcement apparatus, the normalization of many types of fraud (accounting included), the consolidation of news companies and subsequent decimation of effective investigative journalism, as well as the gradual deterioration of healthcare over the past several decades (with bonus acceleration of the healthcare deterioration around 2019 when folks decided to get the fuck out of a profession run by people who evidently gave few shits about the safety and wellbeing of its practitioners and the efficacy and timeliness of the care given to those served by it).

I'll not claim that this Administration isn't the most visibly worse one we've had in quite a while, because that's plainly untrue. This Administration does do absolutely awful things that -in a just world- folks would be tried and imprisoned for, and do those things very loudly and visibly. But, well, there's a lot of precedent for Administrations doing (and/or turning a blind eye to) just godawful things.

To be very clear, one of the things from the original Trump platform was to "drain the swamp", right? Now, clearly that's not what he meant... or maybe he did from different terms maybe from you and I. But for supporters? They saw a government that they felt was corrupt, wasteful, and out of touch. Propaganda or not, it doesn't matter.

That whole idea of the government being wasteful and untrusted reared its head again in the 2024 election with DOGE.

Now things politically have flipped, and more non-partisan or less radical individuals have been pushed out to make way for partisan yes-men. Now the people on the other side of that political equation no longer trust things like the Federal Judiciary, Department of Education (or that it will even be funded), things like the Center for Disease Control, etc.

Oh and journalism! Everything has been bought out, and been allowed to in massive mergers by the Trump administration. Then they stuck government-approved heads at each of them.

Not acknowledging these realities is the first step toward repeating them.

Somehow, trust in institutions in this country will have to be rebuilt.

Yes, and his WHOLE THING that got him elected was that he was going to "fix it".

He got a lot of independents too.

The problem, or perceived problem, predates Trump and will not end when he is gone.

Suffice it to say, it was not a response to "the very ideas" of those fields, but to their state "In America, in 2026". GP suggests that people working in them automatically assume a sort of virtue just because they overpaid for an advanced degree, and I reject that, in light of how they've operated for most of my life.

>you're making things worse and creating cover for unethical people

This is, ironically, my own point about what GP said.

Also, you can do your own job with personal integrity regardless of what others are doing.

Like everyone else at the moment, you're living in interesting times.

AFAIK, there are not enough respectable companies for even the senior engineers.

(And you may have already noticed that a lot of companies are run by people who make a half-hearted effort to drape the company with positive PR language. But they'll soon hint at their true intentions with their actions. Even in a brand new startup, you can simply look at equity allocation, to see what the founder actually thinks about warm-fuzzy ideas like social equality and valuing others: compare their allocation of wannabe-billionaire founder shares, to the token amount of peanuts in stock options that they think the first hires deserve if the company is successful.)

The good news is that a lot of people are looking for high total compensation, or career stability, as higher priorities than respectability, so... less competition for the respectable jobs.

One idea: make a ranking list of companies based on how respectable you think they are (recognizing that most have downsides), and then see how close to the top of the ranking you should focus your energies. Do a first shot at this ranking early on (and revise over time based on actions, not overtures), and you might check yourself when a company with low respectability ranking approaches you.

When you find a good company, let people know.

I worked for a Japanese company, for a long time, and the Japanese were really big on personal relationships.

They weren't necessarily "warm and fuzzy" ones, but they were based on mutual respect and shared interests. I worked with many folks for decades, and we got to know each other well. We didn't always like each other, but we respected and supported each other.

Personal Integrity isn't something that can be faked. If you are in the kind of relationship I just described, fake integrity will be exposed fairly soon.

That's because of the business culture we have here.

One of the more amusing things, while I worked there, was watching Americans thinking they had the Japanese fooled.

I hated it, and wrote my resignation during one of these meetings without even having a solid plan of what I would do next.

A company can make money and provide a good service and experience for clients at the same time.

Also, it's just two sides of a point of view to see something like "upselling" as pressuring clients into buying things they don't need, or making them aware of things they didn't know you could provide.

I definitely agree with you though: it seems like the need/desire to pretend isn’t even there now much of the time, and I suspect that overall this means there is less integrity: some people who were pretending in the past may have “faked it til they made it,” and even if not, it at least faking it would have led to fewer obviously integrity-less actions being committed in the public sphere.

Teaching of right and wrong in school has fallen off. Anything touching on traditional morals risks being conflated with religion, which is kryptonite in the public schools. So now it's much more about how you feel, and excusing bad behavior because of hurt feelings, "disrespect," or some culturally or socially disadvantaged group you might claim to belong to. The soft bigotry of low expectations. We've stopped demanding that people follow the rules. If a kid got in trouble in school, he could probably expect to be in trouble at home too. Now, it's more likely that the parents will call the school and complain.

I blame society. It systematically rewards sociopathic behavior.

I was raised with integrity and honesty as core values. Every single day I am psychologically assaulted by the fact we not only have all these sociopaths running around but also the fact that they are the ones making it.

It makes me wish I was one of them. Maybe one day I'll finally break and start carelessly exploiting others for my own gain.

I hate this kind of people. But some of them simply can't afford not acting this way, more than you do. Instead, people of power, who can and do set the agenda, don't care about it, because again, incentives problem - they won't change the system to one in which they make less money.

Part of this in my opinion is the fact that the western world ideology, the trash can we are all eating from, is simply money.

I wonder what Slavoy Zizek would say about this.

Imagine feeling starved no matter how much you have, knowing the vast majority hate you and would gang up on you, so you form close alliances with others who (like you) would mercilessly betray you if they felt it would benefit them.

Society doesn’t reward every sociopath or even most of them. It rewards people who are smart, disciplined, charming, and (in other ways) lucky.

But society is not the true reward granter, the self is. The real winners are those content with what they have.

It have a sense of relief that I’m content with so much less. Yesterday I made some sourdough bread and it was so gratifying. They cost around 70 cents CAD when you break down the costs for flour, salt, and energy to cook them. When you pull them out of the oven they do this incredible thing where they crackle and pop as they cool, and the rock-hard crust gradually softens. The smell is incredible. The first slices are always this impossible combination of crispy, glass-like crusts with a chewy, pillowy, delicious interior. It’s so good.

I’m in the worst financial condition I’ve been in my life. I earn less than half as much as I used to. Yet I enjoy things like this, I love my job, I can afford to take care of my family, there are countless things I want to do that I can still afford to do. Explore the outdoors, swim, dive, read, fish, spend time with friends.

That stuff is making it. I don’t need to exploit anyone to enjoy those things. In fact, I can make people’s lives better! I can give my neighbours nice bread. I can share fish I catch. I can take someone to an amazing spot I found.

The world doesn’t ask anything of us beyond that. It’s a choice to pursue more, and it’s a choice to pursue more at the expense of others. I really believe that choice comes with a consequence, too. My impression is that people who choose poorly tend to live hollow and discontented lives. I don’t think there are many exceptions, and when there are, these people tend to share a lot of traits with psychopaths. I don’t envy them either.

I am focused on the first part of the original line, however:

> pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it.

When I was ~20 years old, I thought I should avoid working in a job based on computers. I didn't want my hobby / passion to become my work and ruin it. It took several years to realize that I should obviously be in the space because I was good at it. It still took many years to figure out and understand what fine-grained details about the work must exist to do so successfully. I had some misery before finding what I love.

It's easy to have wisdom after experiencing life for a long time. I'm not knocking wisdom or older people who have it (it's hard fought to win it). I'm just lamenting that it's very hard to know these things before you have experience. What I thought would be my dream job was the one I hated the most.

You gotta do it for a while before you can truly understand what and why you love and hate different aspects of a role. Then you extrapolate after multiple variations before you can really apply the knowledge holistically.

I genuinely feel bad for people who get into the space because money. When I joined, it was still all passionate nerds who were excited about what we were doing. Now it feels like the space is full of people who had to pick from "lawyer, doctor, coder," without really wanting to do any of them. I'm one of the luckiest people in the world since I actually wanted to do this and it turned out to be a good career. What a shame for them.

Integrity is great. Their dapp is solid and currently offers 2,000 free prediction market tokens when signing up with your biometric data.

If you haven't signed up yet hit me up for my rec code: you'll get an extra 1,000 tokens and I get 5x credits!

Why the need to insert this crypto spam ?

The better places to work have some ability to filter it out. Not perfectly, but enough to make it hard to be there if your goal is to max your paychecks while minimizing and/or hating your work.

People around you can "smell" your passion and sometimes it energizes your team. It makes people around you give more of a damn.

You really just have to find something you care about. This is especially easy at the big tech companies, but for some reason, most engineers don't even think about it - they get stuck in this miserable loop of stress and hating their work.

> People around you can "smell" your passion and sometimes it energizes your team as well.

When hiring I always look for this, if someone is passionate about the work it often means they will put the effort in to be good at it, and it raises the team in a lot of ways.

I am not. And I am really wary of retirees giving advice on skipping the grind, enjoy life and choose a warm feeling job. I don’t have a house and if next round of layoffs hits, it is a ticking clock for my family. I’ll take extra bucks please.

BTW: I’m not retired by choice. I just found out -the hard way- that a significant portion of today’s tech workforce doesn’t want to work with people with gray hair. It’s a possibility that this could be a shared experience. We all get old, at some point.

I’m extremely grateful to advice I was given, decades ago, about the importance of saving and investing for retirement.