Elijah 🇲🇽🇺🇸

All software uses AI generated code now. This is industry standard. For some reason a minority in the games industry thinks AI generated code is bad and will harass you nonstop. The anti-AI mob wants the AI tag to apply to AI code so they can harass more people.

Looks like Grok Bot stopped giving everyone Opus 5.5. Since yesterday I noticed my bots were talking differently, and when I ran fingerprint tests they came back as gpt-6-astra/6.1-sol. Not too surprising with the change though. Musk already said Grok Bot was costing way too much to run, so moving people off Opus to something cheaper was probably only a matter of time. But what surprised me is that they went with OpenAI of all companies, guess they didn't have much choice

It’s a different feeling when you have options in life. When I was laid off a few years ago, it took me 9 months to get a new job. That’s when I realized… ok, I’m not as hireable as I used to be. So in December I made a change. I made it a goal to go all in on AI: vector search, knowledge graph DBs, voice AI, memory, agent infrastructure, etc. As a result… life has been great lol.

For most of the last decade, being a software engineer has been a lot of fun. Every company offered lots of perks, layoffs and firings were almost unheard of, and in general we were treated as special little geniuses who needed to be pampered so we could work our magic.

I used to refuse to do Leetcode interviews out of principle. I thought they were stupid, and I'd rather build. In hindsight I left a lot of money on the table by being so principled, but I never struggled to find work. I even took a year and a half off once to travel the world, and when I decided to get back to work it only took me 3 weeks to secure a remote job that allowed me to stay abroad in Asia (this was before COVID when remote was still uncommon) Then in '24 it was clear to me that the market was no longer what it used to be, and was only going to get worse (don't forget at the time everyone was claiming this is all temporary). I swallowed my pride, moved to SF, and grinded my Leetcode like a good little monkey. 500 questions later I secured an offer at Meta. I felt like I'd slid into the garage just before the door shut. Now in '26 coding has been automated, but most companies still do coding interviews. Never before have coding interviews been more removed from reality, and I've personally lost all motivation to prep for them. Many if not most companies will probably inevitably phase them out within the next year or two, but then the question becomes - what will they replace them with? If companies are replacing them with AI-enabled HackerRank/CodeSignal interviews, I wouldn't consider that an improvement based on those interviews I've seen. IMO all interviewing is flawed. At the end of the day, most people just want smart, hardworking people that are fun to work with and aligned with the mission. Of course there needs to be alignment in skillset, but I think AI is the great democratizer that makes that less relevant than ever. If I were running my own company, I'd just find those people and give them work trials. All this monkey hoop jumping does nobody any favors, and is frankly demeaning. It's always been that way and we've all known it, but now it's finally gotten so absurd that the tide is finally shifting.

Here's a vibe coding tip that has worked well for me: Before implementing any major feature, ask the agent to research the different approaches and best practices developers typically use to build it. More often than not, you'll get better results and the implementation tend to be more scalable too.

Behold, Japanese friends: an American gun store.