alt Hacker NewsIt's weird times.
I feel incredibly productive. I'm building in an afternoon what would've taken weeks. I spend all my time in either MR's reviewing code, or a terminal prompting.
I've moved from being a coder, to being a product-engineer-architect. I love coding -- LOVE it. But the role has morphed. And, I actually really like the new role. I love being product centric, and caring about architecture -- it suits me wel..
The code Claude produces is often clean, but terribly archictected. So I'm spending a lot of time reviewing in detail.
But the anxienty - OMG the anxiety.
I work on multple features (generally 4-5 work streams) concurrently, so am constantly context switching. I worry about how much time I'm spending on each task. Am I doing enough code review? Too much? Too little?
What about click-through testing? Our test coverage has never been higher - should I be able to just merge these features? Wasn't that always the promise of TDD - merging with confidence? But, it feels like a risk.
And, I'm moving really really fast - but I assume my competitors are too. So that drives me to move faster. Automate more. Use claude in more places. Which brings more anxiety - am I cutting too many corners? Is this all gonna crumble on me?
Also, is everything I'm working on going to become irrelevant? Will customers buy this product, or vibe code it? Do we even have a moat? Anxiety. More anxiety.
My investors are reading stuff constantly too. They're pinging me with market updates, emerging players, shifting landscapes. More anxiety. Also - productivity tools - look - internet influencer X is now producing a gajillion lines of code a second -- are we doing that? Are we token maxing? Are we feature maxing?
Are we building the right number of internal tools? Are we automating enough? Should I evaluate the market for this new tool, or just smash something out with claude? More features. Burn more tokens. Ship ship ship.
Having to explain to investors why we're not going as fast as those guys, and building enterprise products requires care and dedication -- that takes time. Time I should be shipping, coding, featuring, tokenizing. More anxiety.
I'm exhausted.
Anyway, gotta go - herdr has pinged me four times during writing this reply. Gotta ship.
Replies
Some questions that bother me:
Are people reviewing all the tests that have been created automatically?
What about existing tests? How do we make sure that AI does not fake them (by silent changes or by faking the test output)?
edit: corrected typo
I'm actually unsure whether this is satire or not, which says volumes about the current moment
I feel so sorry for you and the kind of life you're building for yourself... I really hope this is a joke
I am fighting context switching by
- spending more time upfront working with agent on intent of the change, then design, so agent does not try to work around issues in a way that I don't intend to
- investing in ways in which agent can verify it's own change
- giving access to as much prod telemetry, etc so it can also verify the change post-merge
- obvious stuff, like automated review loops etc
But in the end I still read the "load bearing" parts of the code. Less closely, and I've long ago stopped looking at the tests. It's better for me than couple of months ago.
I just had an interview and they asked me prepare for coding live. I had to manually code bubble sort before the interview. It felt really nice, but it ended up them showing me some code and review it instead :facepalm:
>so am constantly context switching
a recipe for omni-disaster
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U