JeremyNT (u/JeremyNT)

JeremyNT commented on We mourn our craft nolanlawson.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/ColinWright

The question really is what you think the long term direction of SWE as a profession is. If we need juniors later and senior's become expensive that's a nice problem to have mostly and can be fixed via training and knowledge transfer. Conversely people being hired and trained, especially when young into a sinking industry isn't doing anyone any favors.

While I think both sides have an argument on the eventual SWE career viability there is a problem. The downsides of hiring now (costs, uncertainity of work velocity, dry backlogs, etc) are certain; the risk of paying more later is not guaranteed and maybe not as big of an issue. Also training juniors doesn't always benefit the person paying.

* If you think long term that we will need seniors again (industry stays same size or starts growing again) given the usual high ROI on software most can afford to defer that decision till later. Goes back to pre-AI calculus and SWE's were expensive then and people still payed for them.

* If you think that the industry shrinks then its better to hold off so you get more out of your current staff, and you don't "hire to fire". Hopefully the industry on average shrinks in proportion to natural retirement of staff - I've seen this happen for example in local manufacturing where the plant lives but slowly winds down over time and as people retire they aren't replaced.

JeremyNT · 18 hours ago

> The question really is what you think the long term direction of SWE as a profession is. If we need juniors later and senior's become expensive that's a nice problem to have mostly and can be fixed via training and knowledge transfer. Conversely people being hired and trained, especially when young into a sinking industry isn't doing anyone any favors.

Yes exactly!

What will SWE look like in 1 year? 5 years? 10?

Hiring juniors implies you're building something that's going to last long enough that the cost of training them will pay off. And hiring now implies that there's some useful knowledge/skill you can impart upon them to prepare them.

I think two things are true: there will be way fewer developer type jobs, full stop. And I also think whatever "developers" are / do day to day will be completely alien from what we do now.

If I "zoom out" and put my capitalist had on, this is the time to stop hiring and figure out who you already have who is capable of adapting. People who don't adapt will not have a role.

> If you think that the industry shrinks then its better to hold off so you get more out of your current staff, and you don't "hire to fire". Hopefully the industry on average shrinks in proportion to natural retirement of staff - I've seen this happen for example in local manufacturing where the plant lives but slowly winds down over time and as people retire they aren't replaced.

You can look even closer than that - look at some legacy techs like mainframe / COBOL / etc. Stuff that basically wound down but lasted long enough to keep seniors gainfully employed as they turned off the lights on the way out.

JeremyNT commented on Testing Ads in ChatGPT openai.com/index/testing-... · Posted by u/davidbarker

mrweasel · 21 hours ago

How long will it take for those ads to move from the bottom of the page to the top? How long until the borders between answers and ads starts to blur?

I get that OpenAI has to do something, but really, all those promises, try to convince everyone that ChatGPT will revolutionise everything and the best monetization plan is ads.... Again?

JeremyNT · 18 hours ago

Their valuation is dumb no matter what but you've got to think it's based off of the potential for B2B / gov revenue, not monetizing the consumer facing stuff directly.

Which is to say I feel like they're going to use ads on the consumer stuff just to stop bleeding out VC money as quickly, but nobody's deluded enough to think this is going to bring them much closer to profitability overall.

JeremyNT commented on AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it siddhantkhare.com/writing... · Posted by u/sidk24

parpfish · 2 days ago

For me the fatigue is a little different— it’s the constant switching between doing a little bit of work/coding/reviewing and then stopping to wait for the llm to generate something.

The waits are unpredictable length, so you never know if you should wait or switch to a new task. So you just do something to kill a little time while the machine thinks.

You never get into a flow state and you feel worn down from this constant vigilance of waiting for background jobs to finish.

I dont feel more productive, I feel like a lazy babysitter that’s just doing enough to keep the kids from hurting themselves

JeremyNT · 2 days ago

I have this problem too.

I try to fix it by having multiple opencode instances running on multiple issues from different projects at the same time, but it feels like I'm just herding robots.

Maybe I'm ready for gastown..

JeremyNT commented on We mourn our craft nolanlawson.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/ColinWright

Nextgrid · 3 days ago

LLMs are only a threat if you see your job as a code monkey. In that case you're likely already obsoleted by outsourced staff who can do your job much cheaper.

If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not replacing you here - they can augment you in certain situations.

The perks of a senior is also knowing when not to use an LLM and how they can fail; at this point I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what is safe to outsource to an LLM and what to keep for a human. Offloading the LLM-safe stuff frees up your time to focus on the LLM-unsafe stuff (or just chill and enjoy the free time).

JeremyNT · 3 days ago

I see what these can do and I'm already thinking, why would I ever hire a junior developer? I can fire up opencode and tell it to work multiple issues at once myself.

The bottleneck becomes how fast you can write the spec or figure out what the product should actually be, not how quickly you can implement it.

So the future of our profession looks grim indeed. There will be far fewer of us employed.

I also miss writing code. It was fun. Wrangling the robots is interesting in its own way, but it's not the same. Something has been lost.

JeremyNT commented on Sandboxing AI Agents in Linux blog.senko.net/sandboxing... · Posted by u/speckx

sylvinus · 7 days ago

This is the way to go! On my side I've build a very small `claude-vm` wrapper to run each instance in a VM with Lima: https://github.com/sylvinus/agent-vm

JeremyNT · 6 days ago

I did similar with incus!

I'm convinced that VMs are the right primitive here, for now. Being able to give an agent full root and passing it in just the stuff you want it to have is super easy and it's extremely foolproof. I have my assistants free to install software, run docker, build their own nested VMs, etc. knowing that the boundary is sound and that no capabilities will ever be sacrificed.

I might switch to LXC to reduce the weight somewhat (easy with incus) but this requires providing a more limited set of tools (i.e. podman instead of docker).

bwrap is great, but you're stuck with the limitations of the environment, which depending on what you're doing may neuter the agent.

JeremyNT commented on Data centers in space makes no sense civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon

wookmaster · 6 days ago

Why does that make sense at all

JeremyNT · 6 days ago

> Why does that make sense at all

Parent said it would make more sense.

I guess in terms of the relative level of stupidity on display, it would be slightly less stupid to build huge reflectors in space than it is to try to build space datacenters, where the electricity can only power specific pieces of equipment that are virtually impossible to maintain (and are typically obsolete within a few years).

JeremyNT commented on Illinois joins WHO global outbreak network after U.S. withdraws capitolnewsillinois.com/n... · Posted by u/doener

mothballed · 7 days ago

Increasing federal power is what is going to lead to balkanization. Now that the 10th amendment is null and void the executive and federal government have nearly limitless power, particularly through expanded interpretation of the commerce clause, we find ourselves in a hell where we teeter between two extremes who badly both need to get into power to not be dominated by the other.

Allowing states to differ wildly was what let bygones be bygones, but no we can't have that anymore, everything nowadays seems to need to be imposed on everyone via 190,000 pages of federal regulations and 300,000 federal laws.

JeremyNT · 6 days ago

> Allowing states to differ wildly was what let bygones be bygones, but no we can't have that anymore, everything nowadays seems to need to be imposed on everyone via 190,000 pages of federal regulations and 300,000 federal laws.

I'm not certain this is a good historical take.

When sates actually had this kind of leeway, they used it to defend chattel slavery, and even after losing a war in support of the institution they still distorted their laws to maintain apartheid.

Were bygones really bygones back in the good 'ol days of race based oppression? Maybe for the gentry, but obviously not for those who were being oppressed.

JeremyNT commented on I miss thinking hard jernesto.com/articles/thi... · Posted by u/jernestomg

keyle · 6 days ago

I don't get it.

I think just as hard, I type less. I specify precisely and I review.

If anything, all we've changed is working at a higher level. The product is the same.

But these people just keep mixing things up like "wow I got a ferrari now, watch it fly off the road!"

Yeah so you got a tools upgrade; it's faster, it's more powerful. Keep it on the road or give up driving!

We went from auto completing keywords, to auto completing symbols, to auto completing statements, to auto completing paragraphs, to auto completing entire features.

Because it happened so fast, people feel the need to rename programming every week. We either vibe coders now, or agentic coders or ... or just programmers hey. You know why? I write in C, I get machine code, I didn't write the machine code! It was all an abstraction!

Oh but it's not the same you say, it changes every time you ask. Yes, for now, it's still wonky and janky in places. It's just a stepping stone.

Just chill, it's programming. The tools just got even better.

You can still jump on a camel and cross the desert in 3 days. Have at it, you risk dying, but enjoy. Or you can just rent a helicopter and fly over the damn thing in a few hours. Your choice. Don't let people tell you it isn't travelling.

We're all Linus Torvalds now. We review, we merge, we send back. And if you had no idea what you were doing before, you'll still have no idea what you're doing today. You just fat-finger less typos today than ever before.

JeremyNT · 6 days ago

> I think just as hard, I type less. I specify precisely and I review.

Even if you "think just as hard" the act of physically writing things down is known to improve recall, so you're skipping a crucial step in understanding.

And when I review code, it's a different process than writing code.

These tradeoffs may be worth it, because we can ask the tools to analyze things for us just as easily as we can ask them to create things for us, but your own knowledge and understanding of the system is absolutely being degraded when working this way.

JeremyNT commented on xAI joins SpaceX spacex.com/updates#xai-jo... · Posted by u/g-mork

alangibson · 8 days ago

Either this is a straight up con, or Musk found a glitch in physics. It's extremely difficult to keep things cold in space.

JeremyNT · 8 days ago

It's such bullshit that we've decided this moron and others in his cohort can unilaterally reallocate such vast portions of humanity's labor at their whims.

This is an extremely stupid idea, but because of our shared delusion of capitalism and the idea that wealth accumulation at the top should be effectively limitless, this guy gets to screw around and divert actual human labor towards insane and useless projects like this rather than solving real world problems.

JeremyNT commented on xAI joins SpaceX spacex.com/updates#xai-jo... · Posted by u/g-mork

bob1029 · 8 days ago

Right now it is.

However, the amount of available land is fixed and the demand for its use is growing. Solar isn't the only buyer in this real estate market.

JeremyNT · 8 days ago

We have so much excess land with no real use for it that our government actually pays farmers to grow corn on it to burn in cars.

Availability of land for solar production isn't remotely a real problem in the near term.