Giving my "otherside", because the pressure to output more at work is real, but at the same time, out side of work, I love this. I'm able to do way more projects than ever before because a barrier to entry was always the amount of research+time required to start up a pet project.

My latest is, I'm really into fizzy/soda water and wanted my own continuous carbonator. My entire build from water source to tap with an ESP32 controlled pump, pressure, water level, cooling fans.

There were so many areas I made mistakes in my shopping cart and it found it - like Home Brewer likes 8mm lines but water filter systems like 9.5mm. Really optimized the versions from a simple on/off pump w/ float switch to effectively a full on PLC system. So many iterations gained by chatting with "someone more experienced". Once I get the parts I can build and have the software side running in less than an hour.

It doesn't make money, but man I really enjoy it.

I got into programming to just build stuff, the coding is just a means to an end, try not to think too hard about the how and think more about the why and what

Part of the annoying thing is that if you're working on a product which uses LLMs, at some level you run out of levers to pull in terms of being able to fix things. At best you're stacking hacks on top of hacks to prevent unwanted output, but at the end of the day if the LLM really decides it simply doesn't want to follow your instructions, you can't do much other than resign to adding *IMPORTANT* and hoping the next model fixes it.

The experience is much closer to working with an external API that you don't have control over and which simply doesn't do what the documentation says. Those have always been the most frustrating parts of programming, but at least previously you could reverse engineer the actual implementation to work around bugs. You can't even do that now because the "boundary" randomly change every day.

(And I admit I'm salty that the "I don't give a shit about why the calculator doesn't work in France, I'm just here because they pay me to fix it" people were the ones vindicated by technological progress)

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I'm no longer in corporate America, so maybe I'm out of touch a bit, but could you just...not...use an LLM? You can still solve interesting problems on your own if you choose to do so?

Leave programing for what though?

iwould advise that if you love it, stay and coast.

this AI bubble will pop. when it does you'll be hot stuff all over again.