I've been doing development, in one way or another, since the 90s. I've worked with dozens of teams from enterprises to startups. Hundreds of developers. The quality of work has been all over the place, but the majority was not great.
I'm arguing that what people today call "AI slop" is already higher quality than what most developers created historically, and the fact that tests and documentation pretty much come for free now means that the floor has been raised.
The quality of AI generated code is not great. Yes, it will get better. It's already better than 65%+ of what regular devs can do AND it is faster to produce, iterate, and release.
This is off-topic, but I strongly dislike AI written documentation.
When I see AI house style my eyes glaze over. Just this morning I reviewed an RFC from a colleague that he said was a spec for a web service. The document had no introduction, no context, it described endpoints for 2 distinctly different services instead of 1, and made no effort to reconcile why there are 2. It was scattershot with details, some of them important, some completely irrelevant. It was replete with typical LLM-ism.
Basically, it was a dump of a conversation he had with an LLM. As a document to build shared knowledge, it was nearly useless. The only feedback I could provide was a polite "I do not understand what you are trying to build".
But, supposedly, another engineer is already working on implementing this spec. I assume the other engineer just cycled this "spec" into his LLM, and off the two of them went. \o/
They are trying to pull me into their project right now, I stood up some containerization infra for them. But, oh boy, do I not want to join. I looked over their codebase, by LOC the codebase is 35% comments, and a lot of the comments are contradictory, there are dependencies that are not used, there is no tooling of any kind (no type checking, no linting, no PR process), there is no auth (this code is already running in production lol -- they have public endpoints exposed that can be used to scrape/mutate internal company data). Another 30-40% of the codebase is unit tests that test trivial stuff like whether their framework's serializers and ORM work, ex: x=DB.create_x(arg=1), assert(x.arg == 1).
At the intuitive level, I do not understand people who say coding is solved... To me it seems like LLMs are a multiplier (LLMs are amazing, sci-fi level shit), but if you multiply a negative number or 0, you get something that is <=0. Making agentic coding work requires a lot of discipline & expertise.
Oh man, the "unit tests" that test whether the framework/browser/language is doing what it's supposed to drive me insane. Those have their own tests already! Test the unit under test, that's why it's called that!
AI documentation is practically worthless ime. I forbid it in my projects. It's almost always more useful to not have any documentation and read the code than to rely on AI docs.
I have a weird background (product, development, writing + devrel). I write a lot of code and a lot of articles.
I think there is a lot of overlap in how people who write code or articles (documentation, books, etc.) use AI. On one side of the spectrum, you have people who just blindly input some prompt, accept the output and move on with their lives. You can likely predict how that is going for them (not great). On the other side of the spectrum, you have people who outright reject all AI and are continuing to plod on with how they have always done things.
In the center is a more reasonable approach that leverages AI to create without blindly accepting the output. This applies very much to writing.
The workflow that I've adopted over the past two years or so has been to leverage AI to help with the research and outline process. Once I'm happy with the structure I go and I write what I need to write.
This maps pretty closely to the code that I write. It's fine.
Yup! Our biggest vote in life is where we put our feet and where we spend our money. It has always been this way but it is more important than ever that people learn to think this way.
I remember being 15, that August. We were excited for this release. My dorky friends and I went to a local computer store and tried to get the clerk to show us what Windows 95 was like. He had a pre-release version installed on one of their computers. I don't even remember how we knew.
The clerk refused to show us. I'm still irritated about it.
Funny to think of W95 like some kind of luxury that a shopkeeper has to keep teenagers out, as if you were trying to test drive a Mercedes, or trying out guitars like that scene from Wayne's World (1992)
Or maybe the PC was in the back of the shop, in some non-public area that a bunch of random, inquisitive people (regardless of age) weren't welcome to visit.
Maybe the area was just trashed or otherwise unseemly, and would leave a bad impression. Maybe the shopkeeper smoked weed back there and didn't want to expose kids to Bertha, his prized six-foot bong. Who knows.
When I've worked in shops that sold electronics with a retail storefront, we tried to keep the showroom looking very nice and uncluttered. The back rooms where we repaired stuff and tinkered around with gear were very different: These were utilitarian spaces that regular customers weren't often invited to see.
Nothing particularly untoward ever went on back there, but still: There's reasons why shops (of all sizes) have interior walls. :)
I tried a beta and was unimpressed. I tried to talk my dad out of buying it because it sucked... He went to the store and bought it with 4x4M EDO RAM DIMMs.
The clerk might've been afraid showing it would put people off.
We couldn't afford to upgrade our 4MB 486 either (well, more like I wasn't allowed to) so I was stuck with Win 3.11 all the way till 1999, skipping 95 completely, skipping color (monochrome monitor).
But by '99 I was old enough to build my own PC, so I built a fancy PIII-450 box, with one of the first nVidia GPUs (RIVA TNT) with 16MB RAM (later upgraded to 32) and finally stepped into the world of fancy color graphics (new color monitor, yay), Win 98, and the world of multi-booting with Linux, QNX, BeOS and of course DOS. I had this fancy GUI boot manager (with mouse support too!), can't recall what it was called but it was so much more advanced than anything else at the time, it had a built-in partition manager and could also get past the 4-partition limit. Man, those were the days, so much cool shit to play around with.
Yeah, Windows 95 was an incredible step up. We had a Mac at home at the time, and 95 was when Windows went from an absolute joke to pretty fricken comparable to what the Mac could do.
One of my earlier memories of it back then was that _every single time I recompiled my kernel_ (which was frequent), my LILO bootloader ended up corrupted. There was just a totally broken default in whatever version that was.
SO MANY rescue boots.
Related, it took 8h to compile a kernel with 4MB of RAM. I didn't realize that was slow, honestly. I just thought that's how long it took. When I finally did get more RAM, and the system stopped swapping, and it took 12 minutes to recompile, it blew me away.
Anyway, it was fine. Well more than fine, great. Running a dozen virtual consoles (alt-f1 thru alt-f12) gave me everything i needed; interactive sessions, sessions I left logged into IRC clients, PINE for email, etc.
I didn't have enough RAM to run X Windows until later but once I did, that was a revelation as well. Remote X servers was so much more advanced than stuff we got in Windows/Mac until much much later.
What was the fix? You did rerun lilo for every new kernel, right? Make install on the Linux source tree used to copy the built kernel image and run lilo.
In some part it was more advanced, I think windos 95 lacked TCP/IP in its first version, as microsoft tried to do a "Novell" on the LAN. To connect to the Internet there were 3rd party applications like trumpetsomething.
At that time there was the Xfree X11 implementation, before the Xorg coming, and you had to create your configuration for your GPU and monitor combination, using scripts or from scratch, the famous Xconfig. I recall the scary warning in the documentation to not mess with your monitor modelines as you could literally burn your CRTs; monitors at that time were already equipped with builtin protections, so wrong config would only result in a black screen, but every time it happened I held my breath.
There were already at that time a lot of different window managers, like FVWM, TWM and at least one or two desktop environments. I think CDE was already available for Linux in 95...
I think the first release of Windows 95 did include TCP/IP networking support. I remember using it. But I think it wasn't installed by default, so you had to go and install it separately via the control panel.
I used Trumpet WinSock with Win 3.1, but with most ISPs you had to use an emulated SLIP/PPP connection anyway. Otherwise you'd be dialing in to a shell so the advantage of the GUI was mostly lost (from the perspective of being able to use Mosaic or whatever, that is).
I adopted Linux in 1998 (Slackware). It was super rough around the edges as a desktop, but absolutely an upgrade for a server. Especially since the alternative was Windows NT, which for an 18 year old, using shitty hardware, was out of my price range.
It was full of bugs, slower, took more screen real estate, had a very long boot time, took an insane amount of disk space, even had to wait for effin shutdown.
I could not see the improvement in that. The frequent BSODs proved it was horribly unstable.
Ya, could be. We didn't get a copy at home for a while. Mostly, I remember when we got a new 486, which did have Windows 95. It was a multimedia machine with a CD-ROM and a fancy new copy of Myst. I remember being totally blown away.
In the US you have several legal safeguards that are not provided by debit cards. Fraud liability limitations, chargebacks, and so on.
You can still implement “if I can’t afford something, I don’t buy it” with a cc. I pay mine off every month so it’s financially the same s a debit card but use a premium card for its purchase benefits.
I used to have this same mentality (no credit cards) when I was younger, until my debit card was stolen and someone took $1000. The bank basically shrugged their shoulders and said there was nothing they could do.
I always get my money back when this happens with a credit card purchase. I've also had to dispute things occasionally, and I almost always get refunded.
In an alternative universe, the government could require banks to refund victims of theft and fraud. It's entirely possible for banks to do this without requiring you use a credit card, they just don't want to.
> Industry body, UK Finance, estimates that criminals successfully stole £1.28 billion through banking fraud and scams in 2025. Of this, £703 million was unauthorised and £576 million was authorised.
> Unauthorised fraud is where the fraudulent transaction is carried out by a third party, not the victim. Authorised fraud involves the victim being tricked into paying money into another account that is controlled by a criminal. This is also known as Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud.
> Frontier found that APP fraud losses have fallen by an estimated £73 million per year and the number of APP scams have fallen by nearly 35,000 due to the policy. Reimbursement rates for all claims have risen from 54% to 65%, and for claims in-scope of the policy, firms are now reimbursing 97%.
The origin of these protections in the US date back to the early decade of the general purpose credit cards. They started out for business expenses (the first one was branded “Diner’s Club”), but they were so profitable that the issuers wanted to branch out to consumers, but those were wary: many already had credit with their local merchants and didn’t see the point. (The local merchants offered credit bc women couldn’t have bank accounts).
Anyway, the credit card companies (Diner’s Club and Bank Americard, now Visa but still retaining the original color scheme and logo) lobbied Congress in the late 60s to get these protections enshrined in law so that consumers would get a benefit over using cash as a positive incentive to switch.
Yea, we never, ever use debit cards. Credit cards only, for the heightened consumer protections. It sucks that most banks and credit unions give you one by default that doubles as an ATM card. I always push back and ask if they offer an ATM card that does NOT have debit capability.
>pay mine off every month so financially the same as a debit card
actually it's better than a debit card, your purchases "float" for half a month on average you get to pay later. if you, as you should, maintain a regimen of always adding to your investment portfolio, this is a non negligible amount.
If you shop at places where many customers user credit cards, and those places don't change an extra credit card processing fee to customers, then you are effectively paying for those credit card fees whether or not you use one.
This is arguably partly because the EU caps card interchange (at 0.3%, generally). So these reward schemes don’t exist, because there’s no money for them, so why would anyone use a credit card over a debit card or bank transfer unless they need the credit? Most people in the US presumably don’t start using credit cards thinking “I’ll get in debt, that’ll be great”; it’s the reward schemes.
Ex-European here. It is very common to overdraft your bank account in Europe. The overdraft interest fees are very similar to the credit cards here in the US. It is basically the same service but with a different execution.
On a macro level, that's true. On an individual level, your avacados cost 3% more whether you use credit or debit, it's just your choice to recover 2.5% from that back in rewards or not.
>On an individual level, your avacados cost 3% more whether you use credit or debit, it's just your choice to recover 2.5% from that back in rewards or not.
I instead chose to live somewhere it's capped at 0.3% and then I don't have to fuck around to get my money back after the fact. As an added bonus, I don't even know what a medical bill looks like.
Yet many European countries have high household debt. Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, some of the highest in the world. I guess it has to be mortgages, since it's true they are not that "big" on credit cards. Although Klarna is a Swedish company.
Speaking for NL, yes it's mortgages. And those come with monthly payments towards the principal in pretty much all cases. Also, those being mortgages the rates are like 5% or so, not over 20%. Soll
After 30 years, people generally speaking own their home and that's their biggest chunk of wealth. So basically, yes a high debt to income ratio, but it's building towards wealth and its not high interest debt either.
I'm American, and I don't use the extra cash flow (in fact, I make sure to keep more money in my checking account than I spend on the credit card, so I can always auto-pay my bill and therefore never pay any interest).
If I could get a debit card that gave me 2% cash back on all transactions, I'd use that instead!
Pay your credit card balance off every week, and it's an overly complicated debit card but you technically build up a score for future loans. Also maybe you get cash back on that?
Rational if you want a mortgage in the US at least.
I'm in <other US city>. It's possible to earn enough to buy property here. I already have a mortgage (as an immigrant, building a credit score from credit cards which in turn qualifies you easily for a mortgage is pretty nice).
While I hate that it's like this, you're leaving money on the table.
Currently you're keeping money in the bank accruing the bank interest to occasionally pay for stuff.
With a credit card you would get various bonuses/cashback/gameified returns by owing them money, and it costs you nothing as long as you pay them back once a month interest free.
If you however slip up/miss a payment it will cost you a lot.
Both cases suck, but the latter saves you money if you play that game.
That's from a EU perspective. From a US perspective you also require it from a credit score perspective, which EU thankfully hasn't adopted... yet.
Cashback is definitely capped, I'm less sure on other forms of rewards, but by my napkin comparisons, I do get out more "value" from my credit cards than the fees and cashback caps. YMMV of course.
Sorry, but I don't care what other people think. It's my money and I'm careful with it.
The entire credit card industry is set up to squeeze out as much profit from people as possible. They offer discounts as an incentive, but it is a huge trap that many, many people fall into. I'm not interested in risk. I'm interested in simplicity.
It's participating in the credit card industry that is foolish.
For people who only spend what they have, what is the risk? I don't accrue credit card debt, never have, so I've enjoyed a 2-3% discount on my entire spending history. Over lifetime that will probably amount to a couple of vacations.
I completely get where you're coming from, but credit cards are a tool, and you can came out way ahead using them properly. For starters, they are key to having a good credit rating, which opens a lot of doors - maintain 3 open cards, pay off the full balance every month, and keep those accounts open for 10+ years. Big lift.
Second, never use a card with an annual fee.
Third, which I already said, but bears repeating: pay off the full balance every month.
Fourth, look out for one good rewards card and funnel expenses through it, so you can get the rewards.
My parents taught me all of this 40 years ago, and it was exceptional advice, and has served me (and my family) very well.
Credit cards are not about carrying debt. They are the worst tool for that.
This is overselling it. You can come out 2% ahead or so. 4-5% if you are an extremely high spender who enjoys mentally managing 5 or 6 credit cards to max out category bonuses and other benefits and all that.
You come out marginally ahead at the expense of mental overhead. Good tradeoff for some, not for others.
I use a credit card, I dropped from 3-4 different cards trying to max out those 4-5% spending categories and just have a straight 2% cashback on everything card now. Plus one backup on a different payment network in case one goes down. It got to be exhausting trying to remember to manage so many cards plus remember to use the points, make sure to use the right card for the right thing, and all the other BS.
For some of my friends it's a hobby which is great for you if you enjoy such things! For me, it's just adding another chore to my life. Not worth the 1-2% or so marginal gain against my spending.
The super easy stuff is long gone these days too. You get far larger discounts paying via ACH for utility bills/cell phone bills/etc. vs. what credit card rewards give you so all the "autopilot" stuff is largely gone.
I do remember the days where we paid our Equinix bill via the company Amex. That was pretty fun while the party lasted!
I don't play the credit card points game. I have an Amazon Visa, and I get 5% back, which has been thousands of dollars over the life of the card. When I say that you're coming out way ahead, I'm referring to two things. One is the value you get from the points, but the other is the way credit agencies view credit accounts that are open for a decade or more and are consistently paid off. This is a strong signal to the industry that you are a person that can be relied upon to pay your debts, and this is reflected accordingly in your credit score.
Try to pay for SaaS online. Tons of them accept nothing but credit cards; and then some of them accept direct withdrawals from bank account but it takes days to verify. Services using Stripe seems to be the worst at this. (I’ve never carried a credit card balance my whole life.)
Debit cards charge as credit cards no problem. That said not having a credit card is tough on your credit history. You could just have one and pay the balance but then they still have all your data, it sucks
I’ve specifically had debit card with Visa mark declined online where credit card was expected. Don’t know how common that is because one stops doing that once it happens a couple times.
I assume you've somehow gotten access to stable housing though via that bank account (possibly a home loan, or something else), or accessed a large line of credit before 'modern' credit scoring came into play (FICO scores and the Big Three).
I see many commercials for local banking up here that pulls out 30-40+ year members of the banks boasting about the prosperity the bank provided them, but at the same time, when they'd walked into the bank back in the day A Guy just said "yeah he's good for it" and wrote out the loans they needed.
You can't opt out of the modern credit scoring system and if you fuck it up even once with a bad line item you're out of the running for quite a few things and become virtually poor.
If you are traveling and need to rent a car in the airport - sometimes it is not possible to do without credit card. Otherwise you don't need a credit card.
Using a credit card makes it way, way easier to rent a car or book a hotel room, or do other transactions that require a significant preauth.
If you present a debit card to one of those desks, they may encourage you to swap for a credit card. Because a debit preauth ties up actual funds in your account. A credit preauth costs nothing but part of your credit limit. It really is a difference if you expect to spend money on vacation.
I’ll never understand this credit card debt thing... and why should businesses eat the credit card commission cost? Is it 5%? You pay for it, why should I?
I’ve literally never bought anything with a debit card. I’ve definitely spent over a million dollars on credit cards in the last 3 decades and maybe over 2 million if you include personal and business card transactions.
Businesses accept less money when someone pays with BNPL. They also accept less money when someone pays with a credit card.
The reason is rather obvious, people spend more money with credit than they would’ve with cash. Accepting 95 cents on the dollar to get a sale with credit that you wouldn’t have got with cash still earns the seller money, money they wouldn’t have earned without accepting credit.
Vampire Squid. But this is only in one country. Go other places (e.g. New Zealand) and reality is different. There every single transaction has the credit card fee added explicitly.
The reason for a business to want to accept cards is that some fraction of your customers would choose not to buy whatever it is you sell if not for the convenience. Whether that's a guy who decides not to buy donuts because then he won't have even to buy more scratch-offs or the woman who doesn't get those bald tires replaced because if she did the family will be leaving on cheese sandwiches until payday.
For the consumer the reason is that this is revolving credit. If you pay next month you can have stuff today. That's a small relief, unless it turns into a carried balance and then it's an ongoing burden, but you don't think about that burden at first because you're naturally optimistic.
There is value in this even if you always pay your full statement balance every month.
If you have a stable source of income knowing your credit card payment is due on the 7th of every month means you don't have to monitor your checking account's balance for every purchase. You only have to think "make sure you can cover $X by the 7th".
I usually compare the US to Switzerland. I live in Boston, but was born in Lugano (southern tip of Switzerland).
Switzerland has an excellent quality of life, far better education system, remarkable stability, and amazingly good healthcare. The companies pay people well, give them adequate time off, and has 16+ weeks of maternity leave.
There are some pretty significant downsides in Switzerland, too. It's highly conservative, hard to make friends with the Swiss, and fairly expensive, depending on where you live.
We live in Boston because of family. It's a decent enough place to live, and from my perspective, just about the closest that the US gets to Europe.
I run a mid-sized job board (https://miserablyunemployed.com/) and I deal with a substantial amount of reports from users about jobs that aren't accurate or don't exist. They get taken down immediately.
The worse offenders are the companies that are using fake jobs to drive traffic to their sites. There is a special place in hell for those people.
I wish that legal systems were better equipped to deal with bad actors that obey the letter of the law, but skirt ethical and moral boundaries. I think a lot of the worst things in the world would get fixed if we had some better way of dealing with them.
I am not sure that makes any sense in the context of what I asked, and it also seems to imply that your business is based on scraping others' sites, which is a bad look.
Also you chose a horrendous name for it. Holy crap, I would never sign up to a site with that name, not to look for actual work! Much less a bottom-feeding scraper bot! Most job boards try to keep sort of an upbeat or optimistic mood, at least!
You're right, my answer wasn't clear. I'm saying that I've identified a few places that actively produce job listings with the sole intent of getting you to sign up for their service. It's a dark pattern and I've banned them for it.
As for the name: It was an intentional brand choice. I'm not trying to build "most job boards" and I'm sick of toxic positivity. Don't like the name? Use Indeed or LinkedIn instead. It's your choice.
Lastly, your characterization of the site as a "bottom-feeding scraper bot" says more about how you view technology than it does about the site. By that measure, Google is the same thing as it goes out on a schedule, scrapes site for content, creates an index, and serves that to users who query. It's a one-to-one mapping.
Ya, I spent a month building a pretty complex scraper system that targets ~75-100K companies around the world and manually scrapes their career pages. It was just a fun thing for me to do and it morphed into something useful for others. I had never built a scraping system from the ground up and I really enjoyed it.
Would you mind sharing some monetisation stats? :-)
I have been on jobsearch lately and it was a very bad experience - it was so frustrating that I thought about building a modern/fresh jobsearch site for my region (EU), somehow crawler-powered but in the end I gave up because of all the scraping problems :-/
I've actually been thinking that I should be putting out a monthly report that shows costs, revenue, and profit margin. It's negative right now, but I'm hoping to turn it around within the next six months.
The scraping problems were medium hard and at least I learned some cool stuff along the way. All in all, it's been a pretty fun experience building the whole thing.
Have you thought of using the technology to make a spin off for branche-specific job boards and then looking to direct contact to some crops?
(ie.g. "www.agriculture.jobs" as example)
From my experience, lot of companies are willing to pay small amount of subscription if they have a "corp/niche specific" usergroup. (and this was actualy what my idea was about)
And if you are branch specific, it worth to curate the site, have some customer calls etc. - this would give you two winners: Companies looking clearly only for one set of applicants, and applicants who can be sure that the site content is valid.
Though, IIRC expeteer.com tried to deploy this "dating approach" onto job boards, but I do not know how they are doing these days
I haven't considered this. I'm just one guy and juggling a bunch of different brands would be a lot of technical and marketing overhead I'm just not set up for right now. Probably worth thinking about though. Thanks for the idea.
that is a good looking job board. except i am missing a filter for the type of work, like IT, software, marketing, design, etc. also filtering by industry would be nice. and part-time/contract options. there seems to be a remote filter, but it's a bit confusing how to activate that.
I appreciate that, and the feedback. Will find some time over the weekend to add it. We already have these facets, I just don't expose them in the filters. Good call.
I've been doing development, in one way or another, since the 90s. I've worked with dozens of teams from enterprises to startups. Hundreds of developers. The quality of work has been all over the place, but the majority was not great.
I'm arguing that what people today call "AI slop" is already higher quality than what most developers created historically, and the fact that tests and documentation pretty much come for free now means that the floor has been raised.
The quality of AI generated code is not great. Yes, it will get better. It's already better than 65%+ of what regular devs can do AND it is faster to produce, iterate, and release.
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