There's a lot of AI training jobs that fit this perfectly now. Right up to the dissatisfaction - you really do feel like a cog in the system. It pays well, but it reminds me of those stories about Amazon workers who are afraid of taking pee breaks.

They'll promise that the love you and you'll do well, and suddenly you're flagged for low performance because someone used AI to check your work and nobody checked whether the work-checking AI is valid.

Let's say your skills are not up to par. It might be the truth. What next?

There's cognitive dissonance going on here - you are not worthy but you need the money so there's no choice but to be worthy. Your brain has both of these and it's freezing up. That's the part you need to fix.

I might not be worthy either. And possibly not even due to any kind of rot, but because all these brilliant people are competing for the same jobs and willing to do it for cheap.

Personally, I took up entrepreneurship because it's a lot easier to get funds these days and it's safer than all these layoff cycles. What's the point of a full time job if job security is a thing of the past?

I haven't seen it happen. They're the bottleneck now, and for some people, removing the bottleneck may mean removing the process. But there's probably a good reason why it's the bottleneck.

Some people think that as long as it passes all tests, that's all jolly - but it still needs a code review to check whether all the tests are still relevant and whether everything that needs to be tested is tested.

Even if AI gets the PRD 100% right, the PRD may be wrong. Getting the communications right is the essence of software engineering in the end.

GPT and Claude were able to do different takes in the past, but lately they've been horribly mediocre.

There's something called the oatmeal problem in the game industry: If you created enough procedurally generated content, it would become "oatmeal". Incredible variety individually, but bland when mixed together.

I'd say as data increases, it will default to being really bland.

Grok was never the edgy one. It has no competitive advantage so Musk tried to market it that way.

Both Claude and ChatGPT were able to go far more edgy. Claude was a popular smut generator until that time when the US gov locked down Fable, and subsequently it was lobotomized, and ChatGPT was edgy until someone committed suicide on its advice.

They're valued at a trillion dollars faster than any other company in history. I think selling tokens as a strategy works.

They do have plenty of AI products too - RAG, embeddings, voice, companionship, image generation, video. They're not the best in most of these fields but it works well enough.

ChatGPT is also a very powerful platform that they haven't been able to fully leverage.

I love the curiosity despite the possible legal consequences. It's in the spirit of Hacker News.

The flappy bird of our generation.

If it feels vibe coded, chances are that they haven't run it through sufficient QA or a mindful design approach yet.

Or they simply haven't developed the taste to understand why it feels off, and likely aren't domain experts either.

The cynicism here surprises me. Many managers are open to feedback.

But if they're not new to management, chances are that someone has given them the feedback.

And if they're still doing it after a while, that's a sign that they aren't open to it.