| Yep. I have the luxury of having my mortgage paid off and being able to be a bit picky about my work for a little bit. So I am spending my days gardening and obsessively working on personal coding projects with these agentic tools. Y'know, building a high performance OLTP database from scratch, and a whole new logic relational persistent programming environment, a synthesizer based on some funky math, an FPGA soft processor. Y'know, normal things normal people do. So I know what these tools are capable of in a single person's hands. They're amazing. But I hear the stories from my friends employed at companies setting minimum token quotas or having leaderboards of people who are "star AI coders" telling people "not to do code reviews" and "stop doing any coding by hand" and I shake my head. I dipped my toes into some contract work in the winter and it was fine but it mostly degraded into dueling LLMs on code reviews while the founder vibe coded an entire new project every weekend. These tools suck for team work or any real team software engineering work. I'll just let this shake out and sit out until the industry figures it out. The only places that are going to be sane to work at are places with older wiser people on staff who know how to say "slow down!" and get away with it. In the meantime, quantities of cut rhubarb $5 a bunch in Hamilton, Ontario area for sale. Also asparagus. Lots and lots of asparagus. |
In a corporate setting this isn't the case, and realistically writing code is not the bottleneck there.