Hah. It can’t be “I need to spend more time to figure out how to use these tools better.” It is always “I’m just smarter than other people and have a higher standard.”
My stack is React/Express/Drizzle/Postgres/Node/Tailwind. It's built on Hetzner/AWS, which I terraformed with AI.
It's a private repo, and I won't make it open source just to prove it was written with AI, but I'd be happy to share the prompts. You can also visit the site, if you'd like: https://chipscompo.com/
The tools produce mediocre, usually working in the most technical sense of the word, and most developers are pretty shit at writing code that doesn't suck (myself included).
I think it's safe to say that people singularly focused on the business value of software are going to produce acceptable slop with AI.
I currently use GPT‑5.1-Codex High and have a workflow that works well with the 5-hour/weekly limits, credits, et al. If I use GPT‑5.1-Codex-Max Medium or GPT‑5.1-Codex-Max High, how will that compare cost / credits / limits wise to GPT‑5.1-Codex High? I don't think that's clear. "Reduced tokens" makes me think it'll be priced similarly / lower. But, "Max" makes me think it'll be priced higher.
In my AGENTS.md (which CLAUDE.md et al soft link to), I instruct them to "On phase completion, explicitly write that you followed these guidelines." This text always shows up on Codex and very rarely on Claude Code (TBF, Claude Code is showing it more often lately).
I stopped having the same issue of 100s of tabs of "math videos that I was going to watch one day" when I started saving them in my private playlists. Now I just have 100s of videos in playlists that I just look at longingly but never watch.
What works best for me now is to do my best at putting tabs in the correct group tbh most gather while debugging and then I can just kill the group when I'm done.
Problem is the ADHD and groups get contaminated. Mostly a few casualties is actually fine but sometimes the group gets too mixed. Eventually I nuke it all
Have you documented how you built this project using Kiro? Your learnings may help us get the best out of Kiro as we experiment with it for our medium+ size projects.
But in the meantime I'm also the author of the "Learn by Playing" guide in the Kiro docs. It goes step by step through using Kiro on this codebase, in the `challenge` branch. You can see how Kiro performs on a series of tasks starting with light things like basic vibe coding to update an HTML page, then slightly deeper things like fixing some bugs that I deliberately left in the code, then even deeper to a full fledged project to add email verification and password reset across client, server, and infrastructure as code. There is also an intro to using hooks, MCP, and steering files to completely customize the behavior of Kiro.
Your comment seems unfair to me. We can say the exact same thing for the artist / IP creator:
Tough luck, then. You don’t have the right to shit on and harm everyone else just because you’re a greedy asshole who wants all the money and is unwilling to come up with solutions to problems caused by your business model.
Once the IP is on the internet, you can't complain about a human or a machine learning from it. You made your IP available on the internet. Now, you can't stop humanity benefiting from it.
Talk about victim blaming. That’s not how intellectual property or copyright work. You’re conveniently ignoring all the paywalled and pirated content OpenAI trained on.
First, “Plaintiffs ACCUSE the generative AI company.” Let’s not assume OpenAI is guilty just yet. Second, assuming OpenAI didn’t access the books illegally, my point still remains. If you write a book, can you really complain about a human (or in my humble opinion, a machine) learning from it?
Usually it’s much easier to be liberal when doing so doesn’t cost you meaningfully. I’d encourage you to evaluate for yourself if your stances are truly fair and if you’re truly liberal considering how painful it is for an H1B to lose their job vs you. It’s also easy to say “but H1Bs get exploited!” Considering how many H1Bs come here, maybe they’d rather face this exploitation vs staying in their own country?
In a free market, there's no such thing as a shortage. This isn't a 1980's soviet grocery store. The market for programmers is not centrally planned. Its one of the least-regulated markets extant today.
So anybody complaining about a "shortage of programmers" is just a cheapskate.
In a free market, what signals to us that more of something should be produced? Buehler? Buehler?
I spent much of 2020 trying to find things like bread in US supermarkets. It's funny how people harken back to Russia 40 years ago as if I was not walking through empty supermarkets four years ago.
There was only a shortage because it wasn't a free market, i.e. nobody wanted to make the dick move of raising the price of bread or toilet paper, because it would cause hardship.
If the prices had been allowed to rise, supply would have equaled demand very quickly, and the shelves would have been stocked as ever. Of course, some people wouldn't have been able to afford them, so we needed some external, non-market mechanism (rationing) to keep prices lower.
There is no such thing in the US as a truly free market.
While rising prices for the toilet paper would have quickly solved the shortage situation it would have elicited the wrath of local and national authorities. And those authorities can make life hell for anyone trying to charge whatever the market will bear.
> There is no such thing in the US as a truly free market.
Just like there are no circles in the US which are exactly 1.234 meters in diameter. Yes, the concept of a "free market" is an ideal, like the concept of a circle is. That doesn't mean that there aren't instantiations of either one which are closer to the ideal than others.
The market for programmers is one of the freest there is. We don't have guilds limiting how many people can be programmers (like, e.g. the American Medical Association does for doctors.) And we don't have unions forcing arbitrary seniority rules, or uniform pay scales.
And government regulation varies from state to state, but most states are "at will" states--you can either quit or be fired at any time for any reason. You don't have to provide any minimum amount of vacation.
The market in programmers is way more free than, say, the market in automobiles or airplanes, where there are all kinds of regulations about safety, etc. But if you can't afford a Ferrari, or a private jet, that doesn't mean there is a Ferrari shortage, or a private jet shortage.
And if you can't afford to pay market wages for programmers, that doesn't mean there is a shortage of programmers either.
Toilet paper ran out because inventories are kept to a bare minimum. Big box stores maintain a one day supply to keep inventory turnover tight. It had nothing to do with manufacturing capacity (Russian example).
Household toilet paper ran out (commercial did not, but its made for very different dispensers) because the supply chains are hyperspecialized and cannot adapt on any reasonable timetable. It absolutely did have to do with manufacturing capacity (otherwise it would have resolved much more quickly), and a rapid demand realignment of where people were using restrooms. The absence of price gouging laws would not have dealt with the fundamental problem, or even with the hoarding response once the supply problems became visible, it would just have shifted which hoarders cleaned out the stocks to the richest rather than merely the fastest, and would have put a lot more money in the hands of sellers.
I didn't claim that the cause of the problem was with manufacturing capacity.
But if the US didn't have implicit price controls ("just try raising prices 3x at this time of national need, you will regret it" from politicians), the deficits would have resolved in a week. My 2c.
Sure, if there were not price controls, the shelves would have been full of toilet paper.....but a large segment of the population wouldn't have been able to afford to buy it.
I don't know if you've ever been so poor that you couldn't buy toilet paper. But I sure have, and let me tell you, sneaking napkins from starbucks, and getting ink all over your hands from using newspapers goes from being inconvenient to being massively depressing real quick.
What kills me are these "sunshine capitalists" who just loooove the free market when they are making money, but who are the fist to cry "shortages!!!" and complain about the market value of engineering talent when it comes to spending money.
Heh, I have grown up not having the toilet paper -- workers paradise, stores carrying mostly the necessities, and luxuries like the toilet paper are only for the few big cities. Using scraps of paper does not kill you. And dental work without Novocaine does not kill you either (although I sure prefer it done with Novocaine now).
But living in this workers paradise I have seen real people suffer from the lack of medication that was available to anyone in the West. The party leadership did not find it necessary (or easy) to produce it locally, so it was only available to those with the right connections. And so on.
I am now a well-off, spoiled American (and the above reads like an O'Henry? story about two rich gentlemen arguing in a restaurant on who had it harder during their youth), but first impressions linger and I will take capitalism over socialism any day. Yes, capitalism has many failings, but replacing the guidance of money with the wise rule of the elite will always lead to a Venezuela-type mismanagement. My 2c.
The shelves wouldn't be stocked because stores and factories magically appeared; they would be stocked because the price was so high that nobody could afford to hoard bread or toilet paper.
Is this pedantic or pragmatic? A commodity, needed/wanted by all people, used to be available at a price point X, is now unaffordable for a large percentage of its erstwhile consumers is a shortage.
If that commodity satisfies a basic need, its unavilability is just even more fucked up.
Surely, there are many different senses for the word "shortage", so, even if you are pragmatic, its a good idea to be pedantic as to which one you are using.
When I claim a free market has no shortages, I'm using "shortage" in the sense that demand does not exceed supply. "Demand" and "Supply" are also very carefully defined by economists. It's a theorem that under these definitions, in the condition of a free market, there are no shortages.
The market for programmers is certainly not a completely free market, but its close enough that if somebody says they can't find any programmers, it means they are not willing or able to pay market wages for programmers.
That applies across the board, and I suspect is a personality trait independent of political alignment. I've witnessed people on the right who were against handouts or abortion until they were personally impacted.
When there is a real personal cost, a good chunk of people become surprisingly flexible about their politics, or spectacularly fail to resolve the cognitive dissonance and resort to "My circumstances are different."
I have seen people on the left preach about banning guns until they got into an argument with their neighbor and ran over to my house to borrow a shotgun. I still don't know why I let them have it. I never got it back.
Just to be fair, for 90% of the world, the kinds of compensation many hacker news readers have (a Silicon Valley engineer who gets a high base plus bonus plus equity) would also be considered “holy guacamole, whatever is the angle I look at it … does not make any f_ing sense”
I work at a company with engineers mostly in the US and in an EU country, and my understanding is that, though our salaries in that EU country are top of the range, they are still meaningfully lower than for US engineers. The international talent pool is very good, and available at considerable savings. While I am glad I have my job, and that companies still seem willing to pay Bay Area salaries, I don't fully get why.
Poor logic. Why should that matter? The initial argument was that no one should need that much money.
The sporting events can't take place soley due to the star. Do you think the star built the stadium or did all the background work for a movie? By this logic, movies with novice actors should always do bad.
> How many people bought or used a tech product solely based on the CEO of the company?
Not explicitly.
What about founder CEOs who built v1 on their own?
A CEO cannot be a CEO (unless they are a founder which is a different matter altogether) without an existing enterprise with equipment and real estate to manage, so I don’t see the point there.
Founder CEOs are founders of the company and of course they will receive large payouts. The gripe is with non-founder executive vp sliding into CEO jobs and going from making $1 million a year to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year practically guaranteed with all sorts of golden parachutes attached.
> How many people bought or used a tech product solely based on the CEO of the company? Virtually none
A lot bought it because of some decisions made by the CEO. They likely wouldn’t have bought it if he hadn’t made them (of course it varies a lot between industries).
By how much would you say a famous actor/athlete increases the revenue 10/20/50/100/1000%? A CEO can do that too.
How do you measure what affect the CEO had? CEOs (like Jack Welch for example) get great acclaim for years according to short term benchmarks only to be proven to have made disastrous decisions for the business. Appraisal of CEOs is more witchcraft than science.
That is a fair critique and overall true. But it also highlights the pay of these CEOs to be so absurd as to be barely comprehensible. It makes me wonder what types of personalities these people are. If I even had that salary for a year, max three, I'd retire and spend time learning and doing non-profit and foundation work.
That's why you'll never make CEO pay. Most people, myself included, will happily retire with a couple million.
A lot of these people have ambitions that require a lot more money than that. Maybe they want to cure aging or explore space or something.
Another way of looking at it: if someone makes 100m a year and they are thinking about retiring, how much would you need to offer for them to choose to work another year instead? That's how much you need to pay them next year.
Whatever their ambitions are, it doesn't seem to be something that's doing the world very well. Inequality is increasing, climate change is boiling us alive. Houses keep getting more and more unaffordable... These people only work for themselves and their close circles. It just doesn't seem to be a structure of governance that is doing the world very good.
And it's honestly not really anything to do with retirement. It's about doing something with my life that isn't just following someone else's ideas, who just happens to be higher in the pecking order than me.
Has there ever been a case of a CEO singularly or even collectively achieving said ambitions? No. A lot of these people are cut throat, near sociopaths in personality. I guess we should be lucky they're just CEOs. If they're not of that personality, it's often largely due to luck. James Simons, who has had a large impact via his foundation work, in which he ensures funding for people to drive their own ideas versus his, readily and humbly admits that luck is very underappreciated in success.
People for whom being an important executive is at least almost as important as having as much money as they can reasonably consume.
Certainly there’s a vast range of FIRE styles and even what constitutes retirement but at some level it’s a combination of keeping score, feeling valued relative to peers (see also sports), and the industry recognition.
Unlike all the software engineers at Google who would be happy to have their various titles replaced with some egalitarian "developer" title.
Most people have egos. Some more than others. And public recognition via titles matters a lot for future opportunities. (Though maybe you don't care much about that so long as you make enough money.)
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