From a lot of posts here I get that working as a dev in the US is now a total shitshow. But to give you my European perspective (I work in Germany): AI adoption hasn’t been as rapid here. People and companies are more skeptical about it, compared to the US.

I work as a web developer for an employer that is cautious about AI. I can use it, but I am not forced to. Tried it excessively for a few months (agents writing my code, playing a glorified manager and all of that jazz), but I noticed my own skills atrophying and me losing the general grasp of what my code actually does. And even though everyone and their dog claim that the models get better with each new release, I still run into hallucinations way too often. If you are very experienced in a field and you’ve been doing it for over a decade, you notice all of the small inconsistencies and bullshit answers - much quicker than a junior dev who didn’t have that experience yet.

So nowadays I only use Gemini for tool and library research or really simple boilerplate code. For everything else my own brain is the better solution. I am not actively against AI as a technology, but extremely opposed to paying a subscription to some techbro billionaire’s company to keep doing my job. Fuck Altman, Elon, Jensen and the Zuck.

If Ed Zitron is correct in all of his calculations, the frontier models will get so expensive they’ll become unprofitable for a lot of companies, so it would be a stupid decision to rely on them. I am looking forward to one day host good models on my own machine - though that day is not today, when capable GPU’s still cost thousands of dollars.

Thinkpad L390 Yoga. They crammed a 4.6 GHz CPU into a cooling system that was not designed for it, so the machine ran hot and throttled all of the time. The keyboard keys rubbed off after a few months of use. The Thinkpad logo was just a sticker that one day decided to stick to my hand because Lenovo used really cheap glue. It had a MicroEthernet port with a passive adapter that did nothing but break it out to a regular ethernet jack. The adapter cost 30€ and its cable turned into oil after a year.

I was able to undervolt the CPU and make it barely passable, then Microsoft released a Windows update that prevented undervolting. Gave it to a friend afterwards and got myself a GPD Win Max 2.

Maybe he bought that RAM before the crisis. I got a 64GB netbook last year, shortly before it became unobtainium.

my project is not inherently dangerous.

It is not “your” project - it was generated by a glorified chatbot. Since you lack the experience to judge its output, I cannot trust you to verify the security of the project.

Ghost Rider. First one was goofy action, but still kinda cool. Second one was boring, confusing and lame. But at least it had an exploding bucket-wheel excavator in it, which was the only good scene.

Yep, it feels really fishy. He dropped a whole album and all of these songs sound the same.

Can’t say I didn’t enjoy this one in the moment, but knowing it was probably generated in minutes sucks the joy out of it longterm.

It’s amazing to see how far they’ve come. Rewriting the graphics engine three times is insane. And awesome.

Updated to the beta today, everything went fine and just works. I love this distro.

Were you homeschooled? That’s the only way I can imagine a kid could escape homework

Disclaimer: I’m from the EU, I don’t know if it’s more difficult in the US. But I escaped homework by simply not doing it. I got yelled at, there were a lot of talks between my parents and the school, teachers made fun of me in front of the whole class…but that just made me more angry and more unwilling to do them. :)

Ultimately, there was nothing they could do, except giving me bad grades, but I didn’t much care about those. I’ve been a little shithead.

What also helped was my parents not giving much of a fuck either, they trusted me to do what’s best for me.

I’ve been running some Linux servers for fun, at my last job we also had quite a few. The only admin quit, no documentation. Guess who got a big salary increase because he was the only one with the knowledge required to keep this shitshow running? Yep, that’s me.

Thanks to past me for installing every distro under the sun and sinking years into the commandline, shell scripting, web and mail servers just for the thrill. Linux is awesome.

Hell yeah, brother. I’m in the same boat. Sunk myself into my computer instead of doing boring tasks after school and now it’s my job.

Yes, it’s an older model that still uses those old lamps. I will probably switch over to a laser projector when it gives up the ghost, but so far, it works well.

Thankfully, I never had a lamp explode on me. That sounds absolutely terrifying.

Same here, but I run a projector and watch movies and play games on one wall of my room. The bulb sucks 330 watts to project that large of an image.

I love being an irresponsible adult so much sometimes. :D

Thanks for confirming! That’s the box I saw as well, after clicking on it it said I will get an email in five business days - and it really took the whole five days.

I don’t see it anymore either. Might be they’re testing out this feature and not all users get to see it.

I also think they’re more cautious about the EU. There are less consumer protection laws in the US, so they get fucked first.

If you want to try it out yourself: This is the book where it happened. Despite that email I can see all of the reviews again, so maybe it’s a feature they’re testing out.

It’s really shady to have a rating system and hide ratings within that system. Why have it at all then?

Did you just pull a random infographic out of your ass without even mentioning the source? I reverse-searched it and it comes from Anthropic, of all places - the guys that run Claude Code.

Forbes took a look at that study, I love this money quote from it:

These flaws turn Anthropic’s dataset into an overstated labor-market conclusion. The study’s findings do not have the level of reliability required to sustain the breadth of the headline framing, because each conclusion rests on an exposure measure whose scope (1), construction (2, 3, 4, 5, 7), and interpretation (6, 8, 9, 10) remain contested.

So yeah, an AI company telling us that AI will theoretically replace our jobs, based on their own study with flawed data - damn, that’s trustworthy! /s

I’m not going to argue anymore. It’s pointless.

At least on this point we agree.

I’ve built things that used to take 20 weeks in 1 week with Claude.

That’s ridiculous. You’ve either been a bad coder even before the AI hype or you’re simply lying. I have used these tools and they’re not that good or make you that fast - except when you’re just merging all of the proposed code blind and hope for the best. I fear for the future colleagues who will have to work with the raging dumpster fire you have created for them.

The company with the strongest coding LLM is Anthropic and it doesn’t sound like they’re having financial difficulty

Oh yes, they have the same problems OpenAI has. Just look into the vibecoding subreddits, you can see many people complaining about excessive rate limits and their models getting dumber. A healthy company wouldn’t try to put a cap on the token useage and introduce peak-hour throttling, that’s a big warning sign that they’re overspending as well.

its hard to deny the reality at this point

I only see one person here denying reality. You will be effed in a major way when your employer one day decides that the subscriptions are too expensive or tell you to limit your token useage.

It sucks, but this is the new reality.

Sorry mate, but you drank the AI koolaid from Sam Altman and the other tech oligarchs. The reality is that all of the major AI companies are deep in the red, OpenAI isn’t even making a profit with the 200$ subscription.

The only reason people are able to burn thousands of tokens to vibecode their apps is that they don’t have to pay the price for that, the companies are. This money will run out soon and then we will see the real cost for the bigger models.

If a subscription for Claude Code costs 500$ or even 1000$, will companies still pay for it or let actual humans do the work? We will see. I seriously doubt it, and I don’t want to depend on a subscription-based service to do my work while my skills are atrophying. Thank god my employer doesn’t force me to use AI.

Engineers are definitely going to lose their jobs

This kind of fear-mongering is what I despise most about the whole bubble.