I remember a tennis survey where something like 70% of respondents believed they could win a game against a Tennis pro player (I can't find the source anymore, but it was discussed on Andy Roddick's podcast). If you watch Roger Federer effortlessly and elegantly make beautiful shots, it's very easy to fall into this trap and think -- it must be so easy, right?? Are people falling into the same trap watching Claude Code regurgitate CRUD apps for them?

For me currently this sweet spot is TINY. It's so small that my usage of Claude Code has dropped to almost none. It's simply more practical to let myself have the agency and drive the development, while letting AI jump in and assist when needed.

Needless to say you get none of that with algorithms. Spotify does recommend some good songs for me regularly and I often add them to “liked” but it’s much lonelier now. Music used to connect me with other people and now it’s just me and my Spotify.

If we don’t hijack privacy in messaging, how do we fight crime happening on a message platform? If government doesn’t have access to message contents, what’s stopping criminals from using the platform and never get tracked down? Or proven guilty, since all the proof is safely encrypted? Aren’t we hurting ourselves by being so obsessed with privacy? Again, I apologize for ignorance and am curious

All we had to do is do some repetitive work for values of a dictionary (stringify and lowercase). We ended up having an abstraction of a dictionary with smart value conversion behaviours, which brought pain every time the business wanted some added custom behaviour (e.g. don't lowercase this property, make human-readable that property, etc). Younger me would keep piling up complexity onto this abstraction. Modern me just duplicated some `str(..).lower()` calls, removed the whole thing and went home happy.

However I'm still a bit unsure how this affects my career. I feel like conventional corporate success depends more on your relationships and politics than the quality of your code and writing. It's really hard to build quality relationships and see the politics and status games people are playing in my company by being a remote worker. I met most of my current network by sitting in the same office with them.

I wonder if this is everyone else's experience too, or maybe I'm just missing something obvious, like scheduling more face-to-face meetings with people.

it's often a matter of experience to get this nuance of programming. you just learn with time that it's very inconvenient to test for emptiness multiple levels deep in the callstack again and again and you go "why can't i just assume good data here?". and then you figure out a way to write the code so you can.

Well said

I hate it. But I also don't know if we can do anything about it. Like, for example the company I work at heavily uses AWS Lambda to build mobile app backends and, as a backend developer there, I feel very uneasy about how little I understand and control the system running our critical business logic. But it works well enough and the money savings are amazing when compared to using dedicated hardware, so I can't really make a good point why we shouldn't be doing it.

Sometimes I wonder if other professions get to have fun. Maybe I should explore design to scratch that artistic itch somehow.