My other grandpa, controversially used a big chunk of their wedding money on a good camera. They traveled the world and lived abroad for several years right before and after my mom and aunt were born. Because of this, we are all able to see such a fascinating and meticulous glimpse into their lives. Each photo tells a story even if the story is boring, but I really appreciated the small details. Even random pictures of cars that my Grandpa thought were cool. Or the mean guard dog they had in Taiwan while it was still a puppy. Or my mom on the Trans Siberian Railroad in the middle of the Cold War.

These stories and my own appreciation of photography have made me realize how valuable every photo I have is, and I'm willing to put in effort to save them. When I'm old and dying of dementia, I'll be able to look back at my life in incredible detail one last time. Even the dumb meme's I decided to save will tell a story.

I still have a deep appreciation for living in the moment and knowing not everything should be captured, but we live in an era where I have a really good camera in my pocket at all times, and the ability to store all those photos forever cheaply.

I also have a 14TB RAID 5 NAS at home. And my Desktop PC has 6TB of RAID 5 (had that first, mostly used for video games these days).

But the closest answer I can give you (without detailed examples of work projects) is I can prototype things faster than my team of 5 devs + 1 BA + 1 Manager before AI / Covid. The speed isn't just the faster code generation, but a fundamental paradigm shift from the commonly accepted project management philosophies. Agile and scrum are (in my experience) meant to protect developers from "wasted work" or "throwaway code" and also placate this non technical stakeholder fantasy that they know the best about product and can micromanage their way into a predictable timeline.

I have effectively been working as a team of 1 and I have been able to prototype things in days or weeks that would of taken months before. 95% of the code generated by claude is throwaway but the goal is to discover the real requirements faster. In the old model every step and possible risk needs to survive 3 meetings. If the story points are arbitrarily high then we have to split the tasks into more tasks.

Ironically, the obsession of quantifying productivity is what killed the productivity. People that live through spreadsheets would rather have 10 units of measurable productivity vs 50 units of unmeasurable productivity.

Every time I've created my own backup script I realized knowing what to delete and when is not easy. IMO the practical solution to this is to just pay for more storage (within reason).

Both of these camps are the loudest voices on the internet, but there is a quiet but extremely productive camp somewhere in the middle that has enough optimism, open mindedness along with years of experience as an engineer to push Claude Code to its limit.

I read somewhere that the difference between vibe coding and "agentic engineering" is if you are able to know what the code does. Developing a complex website with claude code is not very different than managing a team of off shore developers in terms of risks.

Unless you are writing software for medical devices, banking software, fighter jets, etc... you are doing a disservice to your career by actively avoiding using LLMs as a tool in developing software.

I have used around $2500 in claude code credits (measured with `bunx ccusage` ) the last 6 months, and 95% of what was written is never going to run on someone else's computer, yet I have been able to get ridiculous value out of it.

Regardless, having free high speed internet on a flight will motivate me as a consumer every time.

We have already seen the federal government use facial recognition data to create an app that tells ICE goons who's legal. We should not tolerate the government forcing more data tracking and privacy violations just because you are not "sliding" today.

Also - the definition of Senior will change, and a lot of current Seniors will not transition, while plenty of Juniors that put in a lot of time using code agents will transition.

Whether or not these productivity gains are realized is another question, but spreadsheet based decision makers are going to try.

I've been saying for years, trucks should drive autonomously from one mega parking lot outside a city to another at nighttime, and have humans handle the last mile during the 7-3 shift.

How much would it cost to pay someone to make a C compiler in rust? A lot more than $20k

* massive meaning "total context needed" >> model context window

For personal use, those making their own software will still be a minority for a while, but at my job we are seeing potential to save $1M-$10M a year by rolling a custom tool vs paying for a commercial one. The saving here come from the tool doing a better job, not the license we pay.