It's nutty to me that anyone would go to such great lengths to use LLMs -- especially chasing the bleeding edge like this. If Claude and co. disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn't flinch.
I don't understand why people are exchanging their brain wrinkles for access to a slop machine. I wonder if a good analogue would be a skilled carpenter being offered access to a machine which excretes furniture (one or two levels of quality beneath Ikea). Does it do the job? Most of the time. Does the carpenter enjoy the process? No.
> I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race.
Same. I'm currently trying to find _my next thing_ and all anyone wants to talk about is how I'm using AI and it's absolutely maddening. It's become a lazy, lossy proxy for productivity. I've had a few intros for the types of orchestration engineering roles which are described in this post and they're just completely unappealing -- especially the prescriptive aspects. Like, the sort of JDs I'm seeing are variants of, "we want a back-end developer who has experience with XYZ but they must use agentic harnesses to do their work." Why does any serious person give a flying fuck how the end result is reached? The flip side of all this is that rates are also being driven through the floor by loop cowboys who are generating steaming piles of shit which are _good enough_ ... until they aren't. I'm being completely serious when I say that stocking shelves at Tractor Supply is becoming more appealing by the day and I also just thought to myself, "Maybe I should just join the Army while they'll still take me?"
The salary gap in Europe is *huge*, at Meta and other big tech you can easily make 3x (after taxes) of what you'd earn in a European company for the very same position, same amount of actually worked hours. It might not be fair or might not be ethical, but in particular if you have dependants, such a gap *does* make a difference.
I don't understand why people are exchanging their brain wrinkles for access to a slop machine. I wonder if a good analogue would be a skilled carpenter being offered access to a machine which excretes furniture (one or two levels of quality beneath Ikea). Does it do the job? Most of the time. Does the carpenter enjoy the process? No.