Everyone I talk to about Deepseek has a bad taste it feels like for CHinese models? I have a Kimi sub and use deepseek a lot at home. I've hit my limit on K3 many a time for Deepseek to come in and finish a job. So far no complaints. I feel it makes a lot of round trips by design but over all a good option. It's hard to compete though with an open sub out on codex/claude and just do everything in that subscription. Deepseek for me is when I run out of my subs. It's usually always coming behind a great session and fixing things so I don't give it a chance to try something novel on it's own.
As an engineer I'm afraid in the age of AI all the easy ideas have been found / lots of companies are working on. It's the hard ones we all know that seem to be intangible. I am still struggling to make things on the side and not feel the weight of my inner thoughts self doubting essentially on "is this juice worth the squeeze if anyone can do it?" but I keep doing it out of the supposed fun I get out of making something. Novel ideas do seem hard to come by though.
There's more than one guy selling hot dogs on the beach. Not joking. This is the most important realization I ever had.
Anyway, on AI, lots of people just don't want to do all the QA and interaction to build the software. And those people are willing to pay to not have to.
Design custom hot dogs (software). That's my advice. It's working very well for me. People hire me for my in depth experience in certain fields (logistics, manufacturing, database stuff generally, chemistry). That they can spend time to learn and discuss it with an LLM doesn't change that one bit. I'm earning more than ever.
People use my software because it's a little cheaper or a little better than some other similar software.
There's room for everyone. You don't need to be the only one in your industry.
Expand the breadth of expertise you can offer. Just as has always been the case, people will rather pay you for it than learn it themselves.
I've freelanced before and always ended going back to a "real job" because I either couldn't find clients, or when I did, they didn't know what they wanted and weren't prepared to pay what it would actually cost.
If you can stomach it, nothing brings new customers like personally knocking doors. Business parks, law firms, local events. A hand shake and a smile are the hardest thing to motivate yourself to do but I think it's the best way to get that initial batch of customers to kick off word of mouth and other marketing channels.
On the contrary, AI has sucked all the air out of the room. There are still a hundred thousand normal consumer apps waiting to be built, but nobody's building (or funding) them anymore, they're all off chasing this new thing.
This reminds me of the early 1980s when synthesizer music became popular. People back then were saying things along the lines of "anyone can make music now, you just press a button and you have a no. 1 hit". But the reality is that, just having a synthesizer doesn't make you musician but a synthesizer in the hands of a musician can make a big difference.
Yeah I tried Khanmigo with my daughters and it just didn't stick. Tried making my own that just would piece meal out the answer and strive to gamify it with kudos.
I feel weird now to think it but some problems are people just trying to shoe horn AI into something and hope it works out. My kids just didn't want to use their brain once something just spat out the answers. Even if it output all the work they'd just keep pressing for the answer and go next. It really showed up in test scores where it wasn't working when their homework was usually A- in algebra. What has helped me when using AI is it gives me a place much faster to be able to start. I can easily take a pic or draw on a tablet and get it classified in a way so I can start helping her. Now the issue is meeting her in the middle she prefers apps and tech not face to face help.
So I made our own thing where it only doles out clues and I get a report back that summarizes the session and how the AI thinks it went. I then take it and give her a reward if she does it week to week. Still though this is a perplexing problem. Feel free to check out what I made (trying to monetize something anything nowadays seems shilling) Cluestep.com
My wife thinks it could make money but there's a ton of competition out there. Would love your input.
These poor people marginalized by politics trying to find a better life. I just don't understand how people can be so far removed from this problem and not feel a profound sense discontent with the world that we enabled this to happen. What's worse is the children affected by this too. It's hard to believe the world can have billionaires and yet also people dying from lack of food, medicine and shelter. There is enough to go around we simply don't want to change. Worser still those that work for these systems are often protected, heralded and celebrated even.
For me it's just making stuff for my family and kids and seeing if it sticks. LLM's have given me a way to easily get something off the ground whereas it used to be a few months now is a few evenings.
I've made a wealth of cute things for me and my kids to do (shameless self promotion)
https://drawesome.art - multiple people drawing/painting/coloring on the same canvas my kids love this. The architecture took forever for me to get write. Basically server side authoritative state of pixels and blending between two points. How to realistically manage and store it.
https://www.catchmemeow.com - random where's waldo-esque game where you find a cat or dog wearing a silly hat I made this for my daughter and me to help the shelter she wants to volunteer at.
https://www.cluestep.com - this one is weird I've actually tried to productize it but i made this because I had the HARDEST time helping my oldest with her calculus/algebra II homework. Basically I constantly made her cry. I just wish I could make it not look so "Made with AI"
I think LLM's analogy are prefab with nailguns did for carpentry. It's very complicated to prompt it (at least for me) to try and make it do something novel and net new. It always falls back on node/typescript/fastAPI/python. It's not terrible at using more obscure languages but I have the hardest time describing what I want or thinking without starting something more by hand and then letting it take the wheel and seeing where it drives me.
I should mention too at work I'm practically forced, measured even on the amount of AI I use. The expectation feels like use AI for any and everything. So i'm more worried one day I'll be laid off once I'm found to hit the 'enter' key much anymore. Anyways for me I'd say embrace it, use it and you'll find your output is much higher with the caveat that when a bug occurs it's incredibly hard sometimes to fix if it's with LLM generated code.
> this one is weird I've actually tried to productize it but i made this because I had the HARDEST time helping my oldest with her calculus/algebra II homework.
I feel somewhat qualified to opine on how humans learn because I've successfully taught my 2x boys[1].
Teaching is difficult. It requires a lot of patience and understanding, and a working mental model of the human brain.
If you have tried, and failed, teaching calculus to your kid, then maybe you don't have a good model of how human brains work.
TBH, it doesn't even have to be correct, it just needs to work; celestial navigation had the wrong model for centuries, but ships still got to where they were going (mostly).
I'm finding that developers claiming to have learned something have often very superficially learned it. If they were tested on what they learned, they'd fail, just like the HS trig students who read the textbook and did no problems fail when they hit the exam.
--------------------------
[1] My youngest, at grade-1, reads at a grade 3 level and can do things like multiple 27 by 4 in his head. That is a result of a structured and scheduled 10m lesson per day since he was 3.5 My oldest was getting 5% in trig/geometry in grade 11 (long story behind that one), and became solidly mid-70% after my tuition.
Yeah I have 4 kids. I'm come to the realization all brains are different. My daughter struggles with anxiety and feeling terrible if she doesn't immediately 'get it' especially in a social setting. She does great with online tools where she can feel like no one is judging her.
My son doesn't get upset at all with me he'd just play his mom to get the help to the right answer and didn't have the 'want' to understand a problem he just wanted to move along.
I have another daughter who is autistic. I'm still trying everything I can possibly do to get her past reading at a 2nd grade level. That's another problem I'm trying/struggling to solve.
It just dawned on me that LLM use is a lot more measurable then "the rockstar engineer spent a week bouncing their favorite nerf ball off the wall all week and then the solution came to them" and the business side always loves to measure productivity metrics etc. As someone who's worked for mom and pop and big corporate the stats spook me, or if they're available to the worker I find them more distracting and encourage gaming the stats then being productive or humane to your co-workers.
> "the rockstar engineer spent a week bouncing their favorite nerf ball off the wall all week and then the solution came to them"
I wouldn’t call myself a rockstar but I did get a job after a summer internship which I mostly spent touring with the Grateful Dead. At the end of the summer I was in the office and the head of the research division said he hadn’t seen me much(!). I said I’d been thinking and had some ideas on how the group’s research plan was flawed and how to do it better. I then filled his whiteboard with off the cuff ideas.
I spent the next several years with a team implementing the whiteboard.
I like to think things work better these days, AI or no AI
I've written about this at length on my blog[1], but it's sorta impossible to measure the work that goes on in ourbrains. So we just say "anything we can't measure doesn't matter".
There are times when I wonder if a model is just spinning its wheels to burn tokens, and how hard would it be to write that loop from the API provider side... Lex Luther shower thoughts!
I feel the same way. Mostly with tools for people though. How do you bring people closer in the age of social media and ai. I keep seeing things like https://www.wishlst.com and https://journalee.com and trying to brainstorm things that would be helpful to humans regardless of tech.
This. I also think there'll be more local AI models to fill gaps and people see how we've become needlessly dependent and we start using AI responsibly.
reply