For fuck's sake, management is now asking us to provide data converted in % as to how genAI is actually making us more efficient as developers. How the fuck do you even measure that empirically?

It is already BS enough that they track how much we query these AI tools everyday in our development environments, but now they want genAI to produce most of the code templates in our SDK. It can barely produce a working regex or a working python script, let alone a small piece of code that won't stack overflow itself into oblivion. It sometimes takes more time to debug and refactor than to do it myself from scratch.

They ask for our professional opinion, we tell them, they don't give a fuck about it, proceed to think all is rainbows and unicorns, and still ask us the same moronic things as if they were the new messiah's on earth.

Don't get me wrong, genAI can be useful, but why the fuck does management think it will magically solve all our problems when they don't even understand how it works even on the surface.

The only thing that would make sense is a lot of them got money at stake in some AI investment sales pitch bullshit and they try to jam it up our collective throats because otherwise they will loose their investments like there is no tomorrow.

Fuck all of this, I just want to do engineering and build something useful to society. Is it too much to ask?

Apparently I'm now a suspect in a criminal case. I would have commited identity theft between 2007 and 2025.

Except no, I didn't lmao I'd be richer.

I regret talking shit about my coworker because despite being not a great programmer, he is a nice human being, and at the end of the day, this is what matters.

Running is good for sleep. I wish my lungs weren't fucked, but I ran anyway.

So we are looking for a ML summer intern.
The amount of fake ML genius is astonishing.

These kids would put projects like "increased state of the art vision transformer model for automated guided missiles technology by 500%, leading to the destruction of ISIS in Irak and Syria", and then proceed to be unable to give you the derivative of Relu(x)=Max{x, 0} which is 1 or 0, or explain what batch normalization is ?

I'm getting gooder in music than i ever expected.

I feel like I spent years studying part of music in isolation (the basic first, guitar and a bit of piano, singing, then reading / writing score, then engineering for techno, the junglist way of playing with the drum break, the rythmic and theory behind it all, not to mention advanced guitar techniques).

And now it's all coming together and I feel fluent. It's a great feeling. Not to brag coz there are some absolute gods out there who would school me, but I feel at that point of video game when it's getting harder to get XP but real shit are ON.

"Collect Call" by Metric is my favorite song. It takes me back to Android Ice Cream Sandwich times and invokes strong Mandela effect episode that makes me "remember" how I called someone using that fancy aluminum brutalist Chromebook and a native Hangouts app built with Material design v1, while being in a cafe in the evening.

Hangouts app never looked like I remember it looking. I've never seen that Chromebook. Yet, I remember it clear as day.

debugging async io code this morning instead of being on a date with my beautiful girlfriend.

Job search isn't easy.

Not because there aren't any jobs, but because I am afraid of anything that seems remotely like my current toxic workplace.

Fack.

My twelve years old daughter saw me using an eletric mixer to puree potatoes, instead of the potato smasher.
She screamed: "You're using AI! That's cheating!"

When did "AI" replaced "Automation"?!?!
It's just like "woke", the word is meaningless now.

My daughter: "why don't you want to do a pinkie promise?"

Me: "because promises have been supported natively for like ten years now."

My colleague thought process became the average of all possible existing LLMs. He has perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude and Cursor open on different tabs every time I go check on him. He is literally performing majority vote on all possible LLMs -> he basically stopped thinking.

In french the world fish means "poisson". Not to be confused with a "boisson" (beverage), nor with the "poison" (poison).

But you could have fish beverage, which would be a "boisson de poisson". And some fish are poisonous, which would make it "poisson poison". Now let's take some poisonous fish, like some fugu, and turn it into a soup. You get a poisonous fish beverage, so "une boisson de poisson poison".

It also follows the poisson distribution

UX didn't design with localized strings in other locales being up to ~40% longer in their mock ups

Our ex-employee wrote an amazing SQL SELECT-query consisting of 6449 characters. It has 11 JOINS and takes a solid minute to execute.

The table it fetches from has 16 records and the SQL query returns 46857 records and it was production code lmao

Ya know when you're working on a personal project, and you add a feature thinking it's a really good idea, then you don't touch the code for 6 months and it's still a good idea but you've got no idea what's broken and no idea what you need to do next?

Keeping up the tradition!
https://devrant.com/rants/15030806/...

Now powered by the awesome Claude 4!!!! The latest bleeding edge gem in the LLM trend that by the bold claims of big tech and various youtubers is stunning and will replace programmers/insane/godsmacking

This time, I decided to post because I was on the verge of a mental breakdown and I had a firsthand experience and a bit of free time, so instead of waiting that the rage boils down, I just took the chance and so we have a fresh AI experience to proof my previous rants.

Problem:
I have an application that manages interactions between a Mediator pattern between Kafka, some http listeners and other stuff (Rabbitmq, Redis (redis= another shit) etc etc)

Kafka handling was already done, i needed to exacly replicate what was being done with kafka for http. I said, heck, we have AI, it's good to do bovine stupid work, why not let him copy the whole structure, they have also agents on copilot on vs code, and they pulled out Claude 4, let's give it faith again.

Big error.
Beside the havoc the fucking agentic AI not being able to fully copy an already existing pattern and scaffolding, it did half shit wrong.

One of the most frustrating parts, since today I have an example, was this (summarized version of the prompt because I was very much more specific also giving the AI files and pointers to the code and explaining it):

PROMPT:"I have to return fake http transports, just copy what exists for kafka and adapt it to a new transport type called "Http", this is the structure {json with the class}

AI: "I need to see the current ITransportsItemResponse interface first to understand the structure, then I'll modify ...... BLAH BLAH"

Of course I had to review the whole code.

PROMPT:"any valid reason why you dumb shithead didn't respect the IGetKafkaConnectionsItemResponse and generic IGetTransportsItemResponse format and you pulled out of your ass a full blown IGetHttpConnectionsItemResponse with extra properties when compared to IGetKafkaConnectionsItemResponse"

AI: "You're absolutely right, I fucked up. Looking at the IGetHttpConnectionsItemResponse interface, it has way more properties than the basic IGetTransportsItemResponse and IGetKafkaConnectionsItemResponse interfaces. BLAH BLAH wall of text reasoning"

Then it modified the api calls to suit the kafka objects and didn't update any class of the Http transports

PROMPT:"So you tought it was a good idea to leave the #sym:IGetHttpConnectionsItemResponse like it is respect to #sym:IGetKafkaConnectionsItemResponse ? Why? And answer the why don't apologize like a little wuss"

AI: "I left them different because they represent different domain concepts... BLAH BLAH EXPLANATIONS WALL OF TEXT"

Now ai tought it was good to do this and that but....

PROMPT: "In your fucking careful analysis didn't you reallize the "items" object are a basic representation and in the fuckin same folder there is also the object with the full set of properties?"

Literally it missed objects used in the same folder for different scopes and modified stuff without caring.

AI: "You're absolutely right. I missed that there are TWO different response types BLA BLAH"

I won't continue to not get too lenghty than it already is but the point is:

AI IS RETARDED.
People say it will replace programmers.
People says agents are the future.

Sad reality it's an overglorified broken ball of if/else that can't do shit well beside bovine work.

No amount of tutoring it with careful prompts, explainig the code and whatever else is going to fix it.
I've used gpt since gpt 3 and no model has been up to anything good, not even NLP. They suck also at the sole scope they were invented for.

I tried to ask GPT to make a curriculum based on another, I gave it the example curriculum and another one with the informations.

I carefully explained that it must not be a copy of the other, they are 2 different roles and to play by fantasy to make it look it was written by 2 different persons and to not copy stuff from the other.

Hope lost. It looked like the other curriculum was copied over and some words swapped, lol.

What a fucking joke, lmao, I am studying deep learning and machine learning to get on the bandwagon to make my professional figure more appealing, but I can already feel this is a waste of time.

ditch it before you fix it

Daily driving alpine linux on my laptop. Excellent distro:
- Probably the most secure linux in the world, with very low attack surface and a lot of money being spent to keep it secure — alpine is the most popular linux for docker containers, and everyone uses docker nowadays
- no systemd (but openrc, way lighter)
- no apt (but apk, the fastest deps manager for linux bar none)
- no glibc (but musl, way lighter)
- no sudo (but doas, lighter)
- wayland and gnome work out of the box
- flatpak for heavy ubuntu-centric apps like some browsers. Librewolf, Firefox and Chromium don't require flatpak, they're in the main index
- I couldn't figure out secure boot in ubuntu. I read all the manuals, to no avail. GPT-4.5 couldn't figure it out either. It was a deal-breaker for me — I need secure boot. In alpine, I spent one morning (today) and got up and running relatively easily. It just works
- everything is stupid fast
- usually, in minimal distros, you expect the desktop part to work, but dev & serious parts to be a PITA. In alpine, both work flawlessly bc it's a server-oriented distro

Alpine ftw!

TIL json can't encode NaN or +/-inf. wtf!?...

Once upon a time, there was a young, clean-shaven dev.
Soon in his career the smooth faced dev realized he had a knack for cloud setup. He understood permissions and network configurations, he could tell apart security groups from access groups, he could get all the information needed for an IPSec VPN in a single breath.
But if things got really tough, if the network layout was really messy, if the security settings too arcane, some older, bearded senior dev would come to solve everything.
Time passed, the junior dev got better at stuff, switched companies many times, solved a million problems, delivered countless projects, attended infinite meetings - twice - and, as often is the case, the senior devs, one by one, left the companies and run ever more scarce each day.

One day, a long, loooong time after his first meeting, the once young dev was solving network problems. Weird ones. Tough security requirements. Poorly documented cloud services. For hours, the dev and his colleagues toiled away, chipping at the problem without getting at its core.
The silence fell in the meeting. Everybody looking at each other, waiting for someone to say something.
Then they all looked at the dev, their eyes crying for help.
And the dev realized that he hadn't shaved in weeks.

-------‐‐-------------------------------
I've shaved since then.
And I did solve the problem. Took many more hours, though.

Installing Alpine Linux with GNOME (yes, I want to move from ubuntu to alpine as my daily driver)
Expectations: several days of debugging by entering contradictory commands and workarounds that make little sense
Reality:
type “setup-desktop”
type “gnome”
wait
type “reboot”

Alpine, what the heck? You’re a server-oriented distro with openrc instead of systemd, your own package manager and musl instead of glibc. Making you a desktop should be a challenge! It’s very unlinuxy of you.

My project mananger let it slip during the sprint review that the upper managers are making plans to do lay offs / cut the fat.

What an ideal moment to hand in my resignation.

I type fast-ish. And a ot. My previous work laptop was replaced ~ a month ago with a brand new beast.

The previous laptop was somehow skipping letters, sometimes mixing them up. It surely was time to repalace it. I must've "consumed" the keyboard over the 3 years of its service.

However, I'm noitcing that my new work laptop does the same thing. I guess it's Lenovo's issue then..

Quitting dev job after 3 months (8 YOE) – thinking of switching to BA/PO. Anyone else been there?

Just passed the 3-month probation at a mobile dev job in a bank—and I’m already planning to quit either tomorrow or Monday.

It took me 5 months to land this job, I’ve spent 3 months working here, and I only need 3 more to qualify for a mortgage (which was the original plan). But I just can’t do this anymore. I’m drowning in endless technical churn every day.

Last week broke me: I was moved without notice to a completely different team and domain, with a massive proprietary codebase, zero onboarding, and totally unreasonable deadlines—in other words, unpaid overtime is just expected. I was hired at mid-level pay but expected to produce senior-level results like someone who’s been here for years. I honestly don’t know how even neurotypicals would cope with this chaos.

I have a bachelor’s degree, 8 years of experience, and usually stick it out at least a year—even in shitty jobs. But this? Either I’m too old for this shit, or taking this role was just a mistake. My ADHD brain is fried. I’ve never felt this anxious, foggy, and burnt out—and it happened fast.

The guilt of quitting this quickly and going back to the grind of interviews and memorizing trivia is eating me alive. But I’m falling apart, and at this point, I feel like I have no other choice.

I’m also thinking of switching to a BA/PO role. I’m actually good at organizing chaos, writing documentation, and talking to people—without wanting to hide under a rock.

Has anyone else with made the jump from dev to BA/PO? Did it help? Would love to hear your experience.

If you ever wondered how a lab-rat inside a labirinth might feel like, go and try delete that facebook profile you setup ages ago but still get spam mails from. The whole account deletion process has been engineered to maximize the likelihood of not deleting your data it's actually pretty amazing.

"All due regards".

None. No regards are due. If you didn't work out I thought you lot were assholes from the body of the email, you're not going to work it out from the sign off, but still. You've got the social skills of a toothbrush.

I'd love to play poker with these people though. Can't bluff for shit.

Company wants to change to a different cloud provider because of credits :/
Thus rebuilding the infrastructure from ground up.

Worst part is Azure sucks.

Every year my work sends out a "mental health awareness week" email including some "useful resources" and the biggest problem for my mental health is those assholes.

I give up.

I have to make a bunch of disparate things work together, in an otherwise easy-sounding ask, and they’re all broken. Every one of them is broken. Even links between them are broken. Devs hardcoding incorrect values; devs pushing broken code, broken dependencies, broken configs. The orchestration is broken. The containers are broken. The NATS/gRPC flow is broken. Nothing works out of the box; many of the pieces require config and env hacking to run, and when they do run, the data formats don’t match between services (nor do e.g. account IDs). I can’t do it anymore. I was so burned out before this ticket that I couldn’t look at anything work related without feeling physical pain. And now this.

I’ve spent weeks just getting things to run and talk, and being ignored when I ask for help. There have been walls every step of the way, and I’m still not done. I can’t do this anymore.