Archive: February, 2026

I spent some time making AI write code for me today. I ran out of usage credits at one point, but they reset at 6 p.m. Where I find it works really well is when you build a few features in layers, showing what your conventions are in terms of structure. Once you have that, you can refer to those conventions, or codify them in your CLAUDE file, and then ask it to take bigger swings. On those big swings that take a few minutes, I lose though, because my ADHD can't take those sorts of breaks. I'll figure that out, hopefully.

All of this productivity happens because it's greenfield work. If I had to throw it at some of the monolithic nonsense I've encountered at various jobs, it would be less useful. Or at least, you would spend more time verifying things and writing tests (if that's even possible) instead of typing, which honestly is also good if you're trying to understand what it's doing. But everyone on LinkedIn is selling some reason that AI makes people "10x" or whatever, though they have only anecdotes to "prove" it. There hasn't been a lot of significant academic study about it, but what there has been tracks no to negative movement in productivity. Of course the folks selling something (or themselves) will tell you that you're doing it wrong. And hey, I've got another popular post about it. Tech bros don't like to be challenged.

Every time that I sit down and work with the robot, I'm still amazed, because it's like magic. Since I don't code for work, and it's more in streaks with my own projects, I tend to forget a lot about how a library or framework works. The machine is great at reminding me, explaining stuff and especially getting into things way outside of my knowledge.

AI will help people write better code, for sure, and somewhat faster, as folks understand how to direct it. In that latest LinkedIn post though, I point out that the coding part is relatively small in terms of what a developer does all day. It's not the force multiplier that people make it out to be. Or at least, there isn't data to support that claim.

There's a company out there, that I'm not even going to name, that scans the Internet looking for images that their clients claim a copyright on. When they find them, they send messages to the site owner and demand money from them. This is technically legal, even though it borders on extortion and harassment. A lot of people pay the money.

I'm not one of those people though. I got two such messages today, regarding forum posts. As any idiot with a web site knows, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, for all of its flaws, has a safe harbor provision for site operators that host user-generated content. So I essentially told them to go fuck themselves and read the law, in which case they indicated that the messages were automated, sorry, our bad.

They're a known copyright troll, and they do sometimes bend legal ethics and send lawyers after people. That would be a real waste of time for my LLC, because it doesn't have any money, even if the law was on their side.

Ugh, I'm generally pretty down on social media, and don't worry, it looks like spammers and algorithms are going to ruin the professional network in the long run too. But somehow, in the last month, I'm getting what the Internets consider "viral" attention, which is a pretty low bar for LinkedIn. I suspect my usage of it will practically stop if I can land a job, but for now, I don't mind the attention... if it helps.

At the four-week mark of non-employment, I've had a total of four leads, and various levels of discussion and interviews. One was a series of red flags that I politely declined further involvement, one was a good second interview that I was pretty excited about, but didn't get it, and two are still up in the air. What I have not done is blindly submit to jobs without knowing someone on the inside. I did this early last year, when I went through a brief period of wanting to do something else, and after 200-ish applications, it didn't go anywhere. So I'm sticking to what I can control. All of the above were initiated through my network. Two came to me, instead of me to them, through a contact.

A Google search says that "good" action on your posts starts around 1,000 views, or maybe 3,000, in some cases. Well, a post that I made late last year about QA is at 100,000 views, and counting. The follow-up is around 30,000. My post about getting booted from Facebook is over 35,000 so far. Just this month, my posts about getting RIF'd, what to do after getting RIF'd, and what to put on your resume, are all tracking for 20,000 so far. The rest made this month have been around 3,000 each, including one from yesterday that still has some momentum.

Apparently this isn't typical. Cool, but what do I win? I've had hundreds of profile views, some categorized as blurry-icon recruiters that I can learn the identities of if I pay for premium. It's hard to measure what the value of this is. I don't have a new job yet, so I'm not sure that it's particularly useful. But again, when I compare to my effort last year, I've had 100% more interview action than before, which was none.

What's already exhausting is that everyone has a hot take about AI that isn't rooted in any data or study. And yes, coding with AI agents is way more fun and takes a lot of the tediousness out of it, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't still require your expertise. I have more opinions on that, but I guess that'll be a future post. Maybe it'll get 100k views, too.

I imagine that one of the most jarring things about getting laid-off is that you no longer get up in the morning for the same reasons. Your "job" becomes looking for a job, with all of the rejection and judgment that seems to come with it. I'm sure that none of that is particularly good for your mental health.

Still, it's not unreasonable that we derive some amount of our identity from what we do. That makes sense, since we spend 40 of our waking hours doing the thing. There are at least two variables that I can think of that influence the level to which we identify with our work. The first is tenure, or how long we've worked at a particular place. That's certainly what I struggle with right now, because four years is a long time to spend with folks (why four years is "long" in tech deserves its own discussion). The other thing is the outcomes that we associate with the work. For makers, especially artists, this can totally throw the identity balance out of whack. If you're an actor, stage manager, musician, you're involved in things that deeply affect others.

Take all of that away, and suddenly you may find yourself lost during the day. That's OK. The outcomes may be thrilling, depending on what your line of work is, but really it's the people that make it special. As they say, when you're on deathbed, it won't be the work or the money that you remember, it'll be the people. To that end, especially if you're part of a large RIF, you have instant community. That's a good place to spend your time.

Something my therapists asks is, "If you could be doing anything right now, what would it be?" The truth is I don't know, and that's scary. My best shot is to continue doing the kind of work I did, as an engineering leader, but could I (or should I) be doing something else? Don't afraid to be bored, because it might lead you to new places.

I can confirm that with the temperature getting down into the 20's here in the greater Orange County area, that I am incompatible with cold. I do not care for it.

I woke up to a nasty surprise, because it was down to 65 indoors, which might as well be freezing for me. It turns out that these newer Nest thermostats have a setting in which it uses "alternate heat" below a certain threshold outside, which defaulted to 35. I don't know what that's supposed to do, but it meant that the heat pumps were not engaged, and the two units together were pulling like 10 kW doing nothing. When I got up at 8, we had already used 80 kWh of electricity, when a typical day is at worst 60 kWh all day, charging both cars. I changed the setting and it went back to heating properly. In fact, the heat pumps are actually pretty efficient, more so heating than cooling. The upstairs unit, which we replaced about a year ago, is two-stage and runs pretty low for heating and cooling.

HVAC aside, I find my body reverting to my Ohio ways in the cold. I want to hibernate, even when the sun is out. I just want to lay around.

On the plus side, it'll be 50 degrees warmer on Wednesday.