I am a student. I like my tech. I am obsessed with it.

And I've studied hard my entire life thinking it was gonna pay off one day.

2021 rolls around. AI gets wild. I'm not threatened, because I understand it's a natural part of technological progress, and hence inevitable.

I am not against it, but I've always held off on using it until I have no other options.

I've been coding ever since 9, since my dad taught me how to mess with variables in Python on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ hooked up to our TV.

I loved it. Still do.

So when AI came along and people started vibe-coding, I understood why - but I kept my distance. I knew it was a tool, but I also knew becoming over-reliant would cost me big-time in terms of my intellectual development.

I'm in college now.

I have a thing for coding manually. I love building stuff from scratch and I'm good at it. When my peers ask me why I dont use ChatGPT, or Claude, or Perplexity, etc, I tell them that it wont help me interview for a job. Because companies test your skill.

Right?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

THOUGHT WRONG DIDNCHA? GET FUCKED LOSER. MUHUHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA.

COMPANIES ARE STARTING TO ALLOW AI IN INTERVIEWS.

YES! BECAUSE WHY WOULD WE ASK EMPLOYEES TO LEARN SHIT WHEN A MACHINE ALREADY KNOWS ALL?

WHAT DOES IT MEAN IF I SPENT YEARS OF MY LIFE PAINSTAKINGLY BUILDING EACH FUNCTION AND METHOD, ONLY FOR THAT TO BE STOLEN BY AN AI WHO CHARGES YOU MONEY FOR EACH QUERY?

FOR THINGS THAT ARE AND HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ON THE WEB?

I feel lost now. I've looked forward to college all my life.

I've always been mocked for wanting a desk job because people somehow think it is limiting.

But I loved it. Every moment of it. Because it felt _right_.

This was always happiness to me.

I've always been an extroverted kid with no friends. Don't ask how. I just don't have the humor that people find attractive.

This was my life. This was something I was good at.

And now an algorithm does it all.

A business major who can't even change his screen brightness now has the audacity to mock my work because his LLM can do more than mine.

Fuck y'all. I still love this. I've been doing this all my life, and I'll keep doing it.

And if one of you uneducated, uncultured, smooth-brained fucks remind me ONE MORE TIME that you can "code" better than me just because you can type into a textbox, then BEST BELIEVE I will go Dark Souls on your ass.

This world can fuck right off.

March of 2025. I dove into a depression as a complication of my bipolar 2. Has less mania and more I want to die episodes. I noticed this as losing all interest in everything in my life. I DIDN'T HEED THE WARNING!!!

This results in me being distracted at work and struggling to learn a new platform. It also doesn't help that my supervisor keeps pulling me off the project to work on other shit. ALL OF WHICH I COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY. They even gave me a 4% raise in March. Apparently it didn't help my depression.

We get to May and my supervisor takes away the programming tool used to program the platform I am working on (embedded processor). I complain and they say I am not getting it back. In my head I should have seen this as a fucking RED FLAG and pushed back.

Then in July the CTO says I need to have my code finished for the new platform in one month. I tell my supervisor I don't think I can (should have spoke up about the programming tool because I CAN'T TEST ANY FUCKING CODE!) He says: "I think you can do it!"

So I am trying to code blindly on a platform I can't test the code. I get to August and report I am testing code on Linux because I have no way to test on the platform. Apparently the CTO doesn't like this. So he starts sending people to walk by my office to "spy" on me because he suspects a character flaw. I don't realize this is happening until after the fact. Apparently I am on my phone too much (which is not typical, but I suspect my depression fucked me here).

I get called to a meeting with HR and my supervisor. They are firing me for performance and violating policy of using my phone outside of break times. This is August 14th. I am compliant and don't make a scene (it won't help). My supervisor is crying and the CTO made him fire me and sign everything.

The CTO also made a statement about how I was never deserving of the job title because I was never creative enough or good enough or some shit. This is the same guy that praised my past solutions for creativity and unique ways of solving the problems. The dude flat out lied and rewrote history. I even found a review from 2022 saying I was good at the role. Also, the dude gave me the damn job title. Up until this point I respected the guy. Now, I have lost all respect for him. It is one thing to fire for cause. It is another to lie about it sell the point.

On the way out the door my supervisor offered to be a reference for me. Several other people I worked with offered the same and couldn't fathom why I got fired. People I worked with for 7 years.

So I get thrown into the shittiest job market in the last 20 years. I can't find anything online or local. My fucking degree is a shit tech degree. So even though I can write decent software nobody wants to consider me because there hundreds of thousands of out of work SWEs on the market. I was already trying to recover from working at a shitty startup after losing a decent job due to a layoff. This was also affected by my un-diagnosed bipolar at the time. I made poor financial decisions because of some of my rare manic phases.

Unemployment from DOL finds that I was not at fault for being fired. They determined the company applied inconsistent policy on cell phone usage. Which is true to an extent. I have seen people take a lunch for 2 hours watching movies. Saw another dude sleep for 2 hours. Snoring and everything. But unemployment has no power other than giving me unemployment. Which isn't enough.

So now I am 3 months into job search and I find out that as much as 60% of the job postings on LinkedIn are fake. So there is a good chance that all of the jobs I applied for are fake.

My wife has a business, but it won't be enough when savings run out in 6 months. Because of the shit market I can't get a fucking job doing anything it seems.

I am tired, and the bullshit keeps piling up. I realize the only way I can survive is to create some kind of business.

I know, my perception of what happened is my perception. But if I was ever a valued employee they would have asked "What is wrong, and how can we help?" Instead I find out the CTO had harbored ill will toward me and NEVER FUCKING TOLD ME! I had asked for feedback in the past about my work and was told it was good work. I asked: "Am I too slow." The CTO said: "Your a little slow, but I don't have to worry about your code." Yet when they fired me they said I was getting complaints from other departments. But guess what? They NEVER FUCKING TOLD ME. This is the most sadistic way I have ever heard of managing people. Hold them to a standard that you never tell them about. I should have been clued into this when they fired the last guy. They never told anyone he was gone. I asked the CTO why they never told anyone. He said something about that is how that works. This is some serious mind fuck shit.

I just had a recruiter reach out to me on LinkedIn for a senior front end developer job. Hybrid, 70% more than what I currently get as a Laravel developer. And I really like working with Laravel.

Fuck... I've been in this new job since September and I might just pursue this. It's SO MUCH MONEY, HOLY FUCK.

Problem is, I won't have a lot of holiday time when my lover wants to come visit me next year.

2025/6 is the year contrast dies.

Apple, obviously, with liquid glass (AKA, "I can't see what's on top or bottom!")

But now also, trying out Visual Studio 26, everything is just a slightly different shade of gray.

Won't anyone think of the clarity?! We have reached the point where we are so biased towards form over function, that our form is no longer functional! Bring back contrasting shades of colors in UI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Remember my Nigerian client rant? Now get this.

Just one day of working here, and I find out that these guys have CI/CD setup so pushes to main branch are deployed to prod automatically,

And these guys are pushing to master from their local env 10 TIMES A DAY.

There are 3 devs working here (excluding me) and all 3 are doing this.

Oh oh oh, and local env isn't really "local" because all 3 devs are pointing to prod database, FROM THEIR LOCAL SYSTEM !!!!

Things are so bad that they have to keep resetting their production db after every deployment.

FML.

We maintain an internal java framework, and one of its components requires a configuration file with a simple field: "Timestamp = 09112025000001".

Because this timestamp is persisted in a central database for state management, the developer is forced to manually increment the value after every single test run to avoid collisions. (I know... legacy systems...)

Anyway, a developer called us because they were running into a strange issue with the framework. We jumped on a debugging session, and I asked them to pull up their configuration file.

I fully expected to see a slightly incremented number, maybe 09112025000002, or at worst, a random number to ensure uniqueness. You know, anything numeric.

Instead, the timestamp they had been using was:
Timestamp = 091120250000K

A letter. A single, non-numeric character sitting right there in a field clearly named "Timestamp." I had to blink a few times. I mean, what is the thought process here? Did they hit the wrong key and just decide to commit to it?

The worst part: That wasn't even the root cause of the bug they called us about. But after seeing that config, I had to step away for a mental health break.

We desperately need better input validation, because our "robust" framework apparently accepts a letter as a valid time marker...

Shamefully, after years of c++ hobbyism, I've only now discovered the ABSOLUTE BEAUTY of constexpr

I thought it was just the "new way of defining constants", so I always skipped over it as more of a basic utility than a hugely powerful part of c++

I didn't realize it could do comptime code! I can pre-compile huge arrays into my binary just like I could with comptime in zig.

Fuck me, I feel stupid as hell. More c++ rants to come, surely.

yay, the deadline has been pushed back to an undefined time next year. Senior dev admitted that his approach is wrong and we will work on documentation & set clear expectations with the shareholders & define what endpoints the project needs... Literally those things I did warn him about and he ignored previously.

The stress is now a lot lower, sadly still a lot of stress from my private life :[

OMG, the macOS 26 version of Contacts. I swear the Xcode team wrote it. It is a completely new GUI that is a hot mess of over-colored pixels that swim around with an interface that makes you want to spank the developer's mother.

The graphical update is slower than shit between cards because OMG, it's all about looks and who cares about performance.

Clicking between contacts results in the buttons doing this shaky-shimmer thing that looks more like someone shaking their dick at the end of a good piss.

(ha, now you will think of that every time it does that stupid shimmer thing on your Mac)

I said it many times, I'll say it again: this advent of AI is the beginning of the IT seniors' golden age

HR positions are being replaced by AI [I know it for a fact]

Junior positions are getting replaced by ai in LT as well now.

I wonder.. Where will they get sr devs after 5-7 years from now, if noone new can get into the field any more 😁 ofc rehire from others.. But how will you attract them? With high salaries ofc :) I foresee a salary growth in IT in the next 5 years :)

(Double rant day)

So I had a little problem and I thought, why not test a new AI tool on it.
The problem: git-rebase, but copy tags. Example: if you apply a commit with the tag G2, create a tag called G2' in the new commit.
The tool: Perplexity. I had heard good things about it.

TL;DR: Had to do it myself.

1st it told me to do it by hand.
"What about --exec?"
Oh yeah, call a bash script to do it.
"What would the script look like...?"
Ooh, like this, look.
"Ok, I see. Can we just put it all in the command? The script can be simplified, only one tag per commit that has any, and forget the echo statements."
Yeah definitely, here you are.
"It's still complex, the script can be simplified."
Yes, I can remove some parts. Now.

Great, so now I had a single command, that would do what I wanted, right?
Nope.
- It referenced files that didn't exist.
- It had badly escaped characters in the bash string.
- And after fixing that*, for some reason Git didn't accept it, even if it was well formatted, and the AI never told me that could happen.
* Mind you, fixing that took some time of reading documentation of git commands and options I never used, snooping around what was accessible in Git's internals during a rebase, rewriting the bash lines... like, I didn't even use any part of the AI solution.

Evidently Git's very hard even for AI lol
It's neither artificial nor intelligent, it's trash. 0 stars.
(I know Perplexity is not "an AI", it was most probably using ChatGPT. Can't bother to see how to check.)
Maybe I was using it wrong??

reading a book on emotional intelligence and it's quite dystopian that it's funny. I got the name of it from a highly sensitive person book praising it (so you'd think they would be sensitive and empathetic, and be able to perspective-take and all that jazz)... he also keeps talking about how cognitive capability doesn't mean better social skills but better social skills means better cognitive ability. lol

---

> One of the more surprising job arenas where emotional intelligence makes a competitive difference is computer programming, where the rate at which the top 10 percent exceed average performers in producing effective programs is 320 percent. And those rare superstars, in the top 1 percent of programmers, produce a boggling 1,272 percent more than the average.9
“It’s not just computing skills that set apart the stars, but teamwork,” says Spencer. “The very best are willing to stay late to help their colleagues finish a project, or to share shortcuts they discover rather than keep them to themselves. They don’t compete—they collaborate.”

---

> After hearing me give a talk on emotional intelligence, the CEO of a company—one of the ten largest in its market—told me in confidence about why, instead of grooming his chief operating officer of many years to take his place as CEO, he fired him: “He was extraordinarily talented, brilliant conceptually, a very powerful mind. He was great on the computer, knew the numbers up, down, and backward. That’s how he got to be chief operating officer.“But he was not a brilliant leader, not even particularly likable. He was often brutally acerbic. In groups he was socially awkward; he had no social graces, or even a social life. At forty-five, he had nobody he was close to, no friends. He worked all the time. He was one-dimensional; that’s why I finally let him go.
“But,” the CEO added, “if he could have done just five percent of what you’re talking about, he’d still be here.”

---

so you knew he was smart because he collaborated / taught you how he thought... and this isn't the only excerpt where the author praises overtime, commitment, etc. but then the guy gets fired for having no friends. lol

Most unrealistic deadline I ever had was of my own failure to recoginze that api I would be integrating with makes me want to scream. Anyhow, that seemed like simple feature we often think of "less than a day job". I set the deadline 2 weeks ahead as I planned to be bussy. That was 9 days ago.

Got me to point where Im tired enough to see
`ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MariaDB server version for the right syntax to use near 'git pull' at line 1`

Around half a year ago I had a client... Client that told me I would be responsible for quite big system that needs to be written, that he vibecoded a lot of, and that I am supposed to use as much AI as possible and buy myself claude max plan.

Fine, at that point I needed something, anything, as I didnt had any project.

Long story short, there was 3 huge, huge repos, with tens of tousends of dead code lines. An API that half of endpoints didnt work. I started vibecoding (as requested by client, "becouse this claude AI produces shockingly good quality code" - direct client quote) and getting frustrated by what tf the AI was doing.

I was requested to take as many hours as needed to get the features delivered asap.

I managed to bend the reality to get compiling code that passes some smoke tests of some of the features. Features, that were poorly defined and I had some questions practially all the time (as the file with features was vibed also lmao), and usually anwser was something like "whatever works, mate".

It lasted 1.5 weeks. Every single day I was out of claude limit.

After 1.5 weeks client disappeared for few days, not responding, and after almost a full week I got lengthy message from him that roughly said "you are great developer, but you dont use AI enough so your velocity isnt exactly what I expected. Good luck with next projects".

Ooof. While I know it's probably worst productivity measure out there, but LoC wise, that was solid +30k in that 2 weeks, that I did indeed read through and knew it at least roughly does what it should.

Oh, and he finished the project himself with pure vibecoding, launched it, it failed immidietely as it wasnt technically sound. At least made me smile for half a second.

I will never forget trying to get Opus to follow architecture or do anything reasonably.

I rant about it for simple reason:
for some people the AI thing makes them impossibly delusional what the tool actually can do and what it is good for. Impossibly delusional. Don't be me. Don't deal with delusional clients.

JoyRant build 48 adds mentions!

@whimsical/@retoor has made a mentions crawler (I guess you can call it that?).

joydev://rant/19381730

I‘m using it as a source for mentions now (because devRant's mentions are broken, in case that you didn’t know it)

It can be disabled in the settings, if devRant's mentions will come back one day.

https://devrant.molodetz.nl/preview...

The implementation was a bit tricky but fun:

Molodetz mentions don’t have avatar info, so I‘m pulling avatars from the "encountered users" store, a feature that I implemented a while ago and it comes very handy now.

The "mark as read" is done locally now, for obvious reasons.

A funny side effect is that in theory, now it should be possible to mention users directly in rants too, not just in comments. That wasn’t possible in devRant :)

Thanks to retoor and have fun!

Client: "Can we have the info of the report as a spreadsheet?"
Sure. To minimise change, I just make it so that instead of the PDF report, the app downloads a zip file with the report, and an Excel file with the info.
A week later, the client: "when we download the list of evaluated people, it downloads a weird file there's no way of opening" (sic, except translation)

... What? Are we just stupid now? Even Windows explorer should be able to deal with that...

I HOPE I'm misunderstanding and there's a real issue, because if they really are complaining about using zip files... I don't know what I'll do.

CMake is ugly as HELL and verbose, doesnt show you where is the error (at least for the CMakeLists) and gen a lot of files.

Autotools is for ... idek but not humans, thats for sure.

SCons is slow (Python!), but can be quite OK cuz its uses a real language, not a custom DSL.

Meson, cool but --native-file ???

And Make is the holy leader, on every Unix AND mingw.

Oh and Cons by GNU is very cool too, but hey, perl

I've been working in my freetime on a hobby project that a certain established community will use (sub 10k users, unironically the project with the largest userbase I ever created so far). We had yesterday a design meeting for that project. Now I'm even more frustrated that this, unpaid, position has much more documentation and clearly set expectations than my work project. Nobody is being paid for that project compared to a project that costs nearly half a million per year to just run now (we are working on a cheaper replacement now).

But nobody is being paid in that community, everyone is volunteering. Heck, the people that are running it do not have professional experience in project management or running a company and they are doing an awesome job. I do however notice that they are inexperienced in some parts. They want to make designs for that project and just had 1 brainstorm session and just started working on it. It did look great but not really usable (UX-wise). i'm very motivated by their passion lol

We have recommended some design flows & changes in their flow and they were open in trying it.

My job is not satisfying anymore. I used to live creating beautiful pages from scratch and totally get a kick out of working for A-clients.

However i’m currently more and more turning into a software developer. Nobody cares if it’s pretty as long as it’s functional and working noone cares.

Ofcourse it give me freedom but at least half of the stuff i’m working on is not creative in the least bit and worse; is created by AI in seconds.

Are there any developers out there who made a successful career switch?

The hoops you have to go through to summarize a document even using LLMs with 100s of billions of parameters is insane. Even when you get something that "works" with RAG, all you are really getting is a summary of the distilled version of the document, not a pure summary.

I've got a script that breaks down documents into manageable chunks with an overlap so the meaning isn't lost between paragraphs, and it works decently enough, especially when you add terms and definitions to the system prompt for things it has trouble with. But the context window is still a problem so you have to discard older entries, which means you can't correct previous items based on new entries.

Using vision models to OCR the image instead of reading in a text document seems to be working a bit better, but it relies on the image being the right size and you can't load in too many at a time.