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by ChrisMarshallNY 201 days ago
> Sweet semi-retirement, how I love thee.

I feel the same. Not having people crapping all over my work, is bliss.

I would have loved another decade of salary, but my savings were perfectly adequate for a reasonable retirement.
1 comments
wahnfrieden 200 days ago
That's nice for you that you made enough money from your careers to not optimize your productivity, and to enjoy spending your time with code as leisure.

You two are retired or semi-retired and interested in the pleasure of coding apparently as an unpaid hobby. But I am speaking only to the utility of LLMs for business needs as an indie - the blog post is also about making a living as an indie and speaks to LLM use in terms of what they found productive. Indie in this case means independent business, not independently retired from business...

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kranner 200 days ago
I should have put "productivity" in double-quotes. What I meant is I don't have to worry about justifying why I'm not using AI to "optimize" my "productivity" to a pointy-haired boss as my FAANG friends seem to be having to do.

As I said I'm only semi-retired. There's a very expensive fortnightly life-saving medicine I depend on which I'm currently getting for free on a government programme. But it's tied to my current place of residence and other places in my country either don't offer it at all, or not to people who haven't been living there for decades. I would like to afford ending my dependence on the government programme because it might end someday anyway, and also so that I can travel a little.

All this is to say, if the newest AI tools actually increased my productivity, I would be stupid not to use them. But I haven't found that to be the case. It's fine to use for autocomplete and to look things up now and then, but every time I've had it generate a substantial amount of code it has messed things up and in the long run cost me the same amount of time I could have done the job in myself. And doing it myself has always been more engaging, fun and satisfying, and has left me with a much better understanding of a complex system that I'm going to have to maintain and extend for years.

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ChrisMarshallNY 200 days ago
Yes. Note that I mentioned that, in my comment.

BTW: I didn't actually make that much money. Kids coming out of college, make more than I ever did, at my peak. I just lived very frugally, avoided personal debt, and saved and invested as best as I could.

I guarantee that a lot of folks here, would sneer at the way that I lived, and live now.

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