I didn't like using AI that much. Reviewing code is vastly less enjoyable process than writing it. Had my stubborn desire to enjoy coding set me up to be left behind?

When you write code, how much of your time do you truly spend pushing buttons on the keyboard? It's probably less than you think. Much of your prime coding time is actually reading and thinking, often while waiting for compiling, a page refresh, or for tests to run. LLMs do not make rustc go faster. If you're “embracing the vibes” and not even looking at the code produced, you're simply going to hit a productivity wall once the codebase gets large enough. And once you do you'll have to reckon with the complete lack of standards and proper abstractions.

It turns out that most of any activity is not spent going at top speed.

When I have had engineers who were 10x as valuable as others it was primarily due to their ability to prevent unnecessary work. Talking a PM down from a task that was never feasible. Getting another engineer to not build that unnecessary microservice. Making developer experience investments that save everyone just a bit of time on every task. Documenting your work so that every future engineer can jump in faster. These things can add up over time to one engineer saving 10x the time company wide than what they took to build it.

Notably, AI coding assistants do very little to prevent unnecessary work. On the contrary, AI often seems to encourage hastiness and over-building.

The problem is that productivity does not scale.

I think a lot of the more genuine 10x AI hype is coming from people who are simply in the honeymoon phase or haven't sat down to actually consider what 10x improvement means mathematically.

It's okay to sacrifice some productivity to make work enjoyable. More than okay, it's essential in our field. If you force yourself to work in a way you hate, you're just going to burn out. Only so much of coding is writing code, the rest is solving problems, doing system design, reasoning about abstractions, and interfacing with other humans. You are better at all those things when you feel good. It's okay to feel pride in your work and appreciate the craft. Over the long term your codebase will benefit from it.

How did you know it was base64 encoded JSON and not just a base64 string?”

Whenever you see ey, that’s {" and then if it’s followed by a letter, you’ll get J followed by a letter.

You can spot base64 json with your naked eye, and you don’t need to decode it on the fly!