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Comment by JesseTG

8 hours ago

Is writing it by hand the old-fashioned way not on the table?

It's really not. As a one-person IT department I'm now able to build things in hours or days that it previously would have taken my weeks or even months to build (and thus they didn't get done). Things people have wanted for years that I didn't ever have the time for, I can now say "yes" to.

  • Then I would say they judged the situation correctly when they decided to raise prices.

    That said: competition will soon kick in.

    • Yeah totally. I’m just surprised they did this AND ended the 2x promo simultaneously.

      I had my hopes up to switch to local but my first few passes didn’t pan out with that so far. But I’m optimistic it’ll land soon.

      I think I need to lower my ambitions too. I got my hopes up since AI can do everything but how long it takes to do it right can really drag on

  • Sounds like, in the words of Douglas Adams, a SEP.

    This isn't your problem; this is management's problem for cutting headcount, or not caring about the things that people wanted.

    As it isn't your problem, paint it bright pink and move on.

  • Yeah the ops alone is a huge win. It’s such a win I didn’t even think to mention it ha.

    Dangerous too of course. So many times I’ve had subtle unexpected side effects. But it’s all about pinning thins down well and that’s what we’re all still figuring out well

> Is writing it by hand the old-fashioned way not on the table?

Of course it is. I started a (commercial) product in Jan, on track for in-field testing at the end of April.

Of course, it's not my f/time job, so I've only been working on it a/hours, but, with the exception of two functions, everything else is hand-coded.

I rubber-ducked with AI, but they never wrote the product for me (other than those two functions which I felt too lazy to copy from an existing project and fixup to work in the new project).

Absolutely not. I took on some thins that would normally take 5-10 people and many months.

Some people are turn out slop. I was really excited to try and make some impressive shit. My whole life has been dedicated to trying to embody what Apple preached in the early days.

I knew this was coming, but I thought I had a little more time to try and get them over the finish line, ya know?

Maintenance by hand might be achievable, but it’s extremely hard when you’ve built something really big.

I’ve only got so much savings left to live on.

I’m not saying anyone owes me anything, but we all need to pivot and in a lot less sure my pivot is going to work out now

  • > I took on some thins that would normally take 5-10 people and many months.

    Based on what, exactly?

    It's very easy to claim some software would've taken you months to make, but this is ridiculous. Estimating project duration is well known to be impossible in this field. A few years ago you'd get laughed out the room for making such predictions.

    > I’ve only got so much savings left to live on.

    Respectfully, what are you doing here?

    Yeah sure, the Apple dream. But supposing AI did in fact make you this legendary 100x developer, so it would to everyone else including those with significantly more resources. You'd still be run out of the market by those with bigger budgets or more marketing, and end up penniless all the same.

    I would strongly recommend you not put all your proverbial eggs in this basket.

    • I’ve pivoted to writing native iOS, macOS, windows, Linux apps. Most of my career has been front end web. It would take me awhile just to learn and practice, vs having my visions working in hours or days

      I’m not ready to unveil the thing I alluded to, it’s important to me that it’s good and polished. But I’ve done quite well so far developing in Swift, Rust, Go, and coming up with marketing and design — things I definitely couldn’t do by hand without a lot more time and effort.

      https://poolometer.com/ Is one of the things I’m almost ready to call ready. So much domain expertise or tedious math involved — I simply wouldn’t have bothered on my own, pre-AI

      I agree it’s a huge existential risk that everyone is also amazing. So far that’s not true. I get hung up on a lot of little quirks, like getting Dolby Vision to play properly on Apple Silicon without Vulcan. Something I accomplished after about 2 weeks of relentless determination.

      To be clear I’m just trying to answer your questions honestly. I understand the situation. It’s almost to my benefit the harder it is for non Software Engineers. But in our current reality, when I’m not launched yet, it’s more stress

      2 replies →

  • > I’ve only got so much savings left to live on.

    This confuses me - did you leave your job to cosplay as an EM, using LLMs to build your products? If not, then your savings don't matter.

What am I an assembler programmer now?!? Am I to plug wires and flip switches!?!

/s