I went with Arch and wanted to take a few days to actually go through the Wiki and setup something completely from scratch and learn along the way. I had my laptop next to me and AI was a huge help. I went with Hyprland(Fish for shell, Kitty for terminal, Ashell for my bar, Walker for launcher, Yazi for explorer) and tried installing a bunch of pre-made .config files, but that was a big mistake, just take the time and get everything setup yourself, it's worth it in the long run to learn how all this works under the hood.
I think it's important to point out that my switch was also motivated by a desire to learn about the guts of a linux system and not just go with Ubuntu or a ready made one. I run Ubuntu on a home server and it runs great, but I am a full blown Arch snob now and I could never daily drive it.
I’ve really enjoyed the switch so far, having attempted it a few times in the past and ended up going back to windows (once in 2003, another in 2012). It’s encouraging to see MS continue to get the developer experience right with improvements like this, but unless they make significant improvements to the OS itself, I won’t be going back.
Vibe coding means you have no idea how the code looks or works or the architecture. Agentic coding is the same as regular coding, just you had an agent do most of the typing.
I personally really really don’t like working on a code base where I have no idea what the code is actually doing or looks like and I find even the best models eventually start tripping up on messy bloated code bases, though that takes months now vs days like a year ago. I think we’re still early days in the vibe coding experiment and as vibe coded products push into 50k LOC, you start to see the parasitic drag caused by a messy code base on the agents.
I absolutely love the speed that agents give me!
So what I’ve been doing is working myself in a main branch where I’m just tending to the code and writing high level types and architecture, then spinning up agents into work trees and having them work on specific, focused tasks. Then I get and agent to do a merge into the main branch, fix up conflicts, help me go over design decisions etc.
So it’s trying to get the best of both worlds, I’m getting the speed and also my head is in the code and working on the most challenging / important aspects of the code base so my actual technical skills are always improving.
I’ve been using AI as a great pair programming partner for about a year now, but every time I prompt it to write code agentically, it just makes a pile of crap that I end up spending more time fixing. This is so very quickly becoming not the case anymore.
I think core engineering skills are never going away (I’ve been doing this for 25 years and come from a background doing C++ for video games), that you will always need to have a mental model of the code and if you’re going to call yourself “professional” you need to be able to go in and fix/build by hand. But you’re going to get left behind if you aren’t at least willing to eat some humble pie and re-evaluate your views on agentic coding every few months as these tools get better.
Grieve, I know I have, but there is joy on the other side. I used to love getting lost in flow state with Soma.fm playing and the phone unplugged, that is still there, but what that looks like is changing fast and table stakes in this industry has been “adapt or die” for as long as I’ve been in it.
You absolutely do get used to it and I really like the built in formatters. I would write everything in Rust going forward if I could, it really is a different way of thinking about how to write code. I don’t agree it’s the right tool for every job though.
I’ve also tried the agentic thing, but I find it so draining laying out in such explicit detail exactly what I want and then cleaning up what it’s messed up, like it’s easier to clean it up than just keep prompting and pulling the magic “Do This” lever.
I probably will never code without AI again. I’ve been doing this for 30 years since I was a teenager, was very fortunate in my career and don’t have to work anymore, but I still code and build because I love it, maybe even more so now with AI, but I would absolute hate my life if I was forced to just run agents all day long and never actually write or be the primary thinking driver for code.
This is familiar territory for me as I prefer to do a breadth first survey of something I’m trying to learn before digging in to an actual project with depth to make all the mistakes and blunders that make you actually good at something.
AI can still be a huge help here. I don’t really use AI to write the actual code. I will be tooting along, in the flow state, and then bang off a question or request like “how would you write this block of code” “how does this API work?”, and then just take what it says under advisement.
I find as soon as I start accepting what the AI says without critical thinking or just hitting the “apply block” button, it’s time to take a break. I use CoPilot and I barely touch 40% token spend per month and to me it’s the best way to work, I am always engaged, have a full mental model of what I’m working on, and have someone pushing back and criticizing what I’m writing. This gets you out of tutorial hell, but keeps you motivated because you’re not always staring at a blank code window wondering where to start.
I pay for a lot of things that are free from google/big tech, I’m happy to watch the advertisement driven web implode on itself so we can go back to the idea of a consumer paying a company for a quality product, monetizing peoples attention has been a huge detriment to society.
I think the bigger picture is there won’t be one catch-all solution and we’ll need to embrace the Swiss cheese model from the world of aviation safety, this is just a suggestion for one layer.
It raises the stakes though. Getting challenged for an AI slop PR isn’t great, but ok, try and redeem yourself. Getting caught trying to cheat that challenge, you might as well just close down your account, like what is the point of even spending tokens to do this? These slop PRs are just people trying to pad their GitHub profiles.
(It’s famously not well capable of sounding human)
This is the core of the issue, not that someone uses AI, but that it’s just one of many smells a patch can have that indicates someone doesn’t understand what they’re submitting. You could be breaking variable naming conventions, changing APIs you shouldn’t, making amateur language mistakes, all indicate that yes, maybe the patch does work, but that there are other good reasons to reject it.
A way around this might be to mark a PR as rejected because of AI and then ask the author to point out some part of it they’re particularly proud of and explain in their own words, not a wall of AI text, what this does and why they like it. Just something where the author has to show that they have something an AI can’t, namely taste and an opinion.
Off by 6 on my iPad by mis-clicking. Very satisfying!
My work env was just VS Code + WSL and I realized the most pain points came from using Explorer and trying to admin the machine with the fractured landscape of sys admin tools. For me it became very obvious that windows is only going to get more bloated and less “my” machine going forward, why stay on this platform if I’m already spending most of my day in a Linux environment (that I’m already familiar with).
Last "job" was a startup with two other people and it was so great having others to bounce ideas off of and share the ups and downs. Building something together is a fundamental human joy IMO. We sold that and I've been working solo for the last 4 years.
It's lonely, and these have helped me.
- Making a point to physically get out of the house and ideally meet up with someone for a coffee or lunch or something.
- Being part of an active group chat.
- Podcasts
- Working out of a library or bustling cafe, just physically being around other people.
- Working out and maintaining a good wake/sleep cycle.
I also have some great hobbies (flying, scuba, rock climbing) with great communities that keep me socialized.
For anyone about to quit their job and try the solo dev thing, I always say mental well being has to be a "remembered priority". You're never going to have work/life balance like you did at an office job and the first few years are incredibly tough, so you need to plan for that. Marathon, not a race etc etc.
Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your brain in the driver's seat or the chat bot.
I also keep my laptop by my couch so I reach for it vs my phone. I hate typing on my phone so I end up just clicking on a dopamine drip app rather than actual reading / work which I tend to do more readily on a laptop or desktop.
It is a behavioural problem at the end of the day. Which means it will take discipline and accepting some feelings of discomfort up front to change for the long term.
This is the same brand of person that was excited to get rich off NFTs and has now just moved on to slapps (AI slop apps).
Vibe coding is fun and great for personal projects or bootstrapping, but the specificity of the prompts needed to effect the change you want grows exponentially with the code base size to the point where you do just need to code it yourself and use the AI as a helper.
Just like you said, they all claim to make $xk per month and have a course to sign up for. I really hate this as places like product hunt are just gummed up now with Slapps (AI slop apps). The courses they sell seem to be how to quickly make Slapps, get people's email addresses and then use the authors email list management software (for a monthly fee) to endlessly send spam.
It's been really wonderful, everyone knows everyone by one degree of separation (me) and are adding to the library like a sort of group project. You can just hop on and see a somewhat currated library in the sense that someone you'll probably run into IRL thought this was worth watching.
So just to add to your point, you can't get this with a streaming service.
Hello HN!I have a group of friends who are professional artists and they are not big fans of generative AI. I've tried my best to explain what it is and isn't and a few of them are interested in taking a more serious course on the subject.Most of the learning material is either very technical and geared towards programmers or too vague and hand wavy to be practical to someone who wants to...