Lol yep sounds a lot like my process! Took time to get it down and settle on tools (though those always changed anyway) but once you did, could make a buncha money for sure. With KVMs I could do a lotta volume on those kinda jobs and get some of my engineering homework done in between. Hardware repairs were more fun but way more time consuming and hit or miss depending on overall condition.

Not a bad gig overall but certainly did come with some downsides. Like, desktop computer filled with insect carcasses, brown everywhere with tar from cigarette smoke, stinking up the shop, customer somehow oblivious to the gnar-bomb that is their daily life intersecting with “ordinary” society.

Definitely not wrong! Especially once you’ve dialed in your routine of anti-malware utilities to run on pretty much everything. It’s like an antibiotic cocktail, lol. Or did you prefer the “back up and nuke on sight” approach?

Yep, I did similar around the time. Can’t blame people for being mad that the thing they bought is damn near unusable (and was destined to be, but they didn’t understand that part). If someone buys a new bike, even if it’s cheap, it shouldn’t roll like you’re on gravel after a couple weeks and become impossible to pedal within months. But damn, there were a lot of horrible machines sold in those days.

And then of course, the least fun part of that era, the guys who would bring their machines back weekly despite very stern warnings to stop visiting “those sites”.

Awesome, thank you! This largely matches my own experience, I’ve found it (Claude in my case) most useful in areas where I’m weakest. I haven’t tried this scaffolding-via-comments approach though, it sounds cool.

Any experience with Cursor or other IDEs or agents? Was co-pilot a choice or just kinda a natural default?

Would you mind sharing a bit more about the workflow you’re describing? I’m on a “ask people how they’re using AI to help them dev” kick.

Sounds like you’re using an agent integrated with your IDE, would you be willing to give specifics? And you’re talking about writing some comments that describe some code you haven’t yet written, letting the AI take a stab at writing the code based on your comments, and then working from there? Did I get that right?

Happy for literally any elaboration you feel like giving :)

Completely agree! It’s SO much easier to lighten the mood and keep things upbeat and productive in an actual conversation vs. just text-based feedback. For example it makes it easy to throw in self-deprecating anecdotes of your own when discussing mistakes / needed changes, which can really help put juniors at ease. It’s just worlds better in >90% of scenarios.

Completely understand the frustration here. Mistakes happen, even competent people sincerely trying to do a good job can overlook things, etc. But if it’s a pattern of just copying and pasting code without really even trying to understand what it does, that’s a big problem that needs to be addressed. And frankly they should feel embarrassed if it happens more than once or twice.

OTOH, delivering criticism in a way that winds up productive for all involved is difficult at best, and the outcome depends on the junior as much as it does the senior. What good is being right if it ultimately just alienates you from your team? Tough situation for sure, and one of the many reasons it’s so important to hire carefully (which is itself a whole huge can of worms too!).

Can you simply ask them to walk through their submission line by line with you, explaining what it’s doing? If you’ve never asked that before it might come across as a strange request, but if you phrase it well it’s possible this causes them to notice their poor understanding without you ever seeming to point it out.

Excellent work, and thank you for sharing. What a win! I’m always heartened to hear about straightforward open source wins against leeches 👍

Thanks for this, really enjoyed it :)