A REST/Rustaurant that serves CRUD!

It’s interesting because my dad followed a similar path and I wish I had the smarts he did. He worked as an electrical engineer and was with a company contracted by NASA. He told me how he got to work on some of the stuff in the space capsules back in the 70s/80s. Then at some point he became a full-time kitchen designer and was a carpenter. I asked him once why he left such a high-paying and interesting field. He said it was because all of the people he worked with were uptight squares and he just didn’t like it.

He passed away about 17 years ago. I wish he was still around. I could use his advice as a web dev that feels collectively burnt out and in a rut.

I get the thousand yard stare more often as I get older. I learned that it’s my brain forcing itself to take breaks.

I’ve been in tech since 2005 and I wish I had the means to bail like that. I’ve honestly considered taking a fat pay cut and going back to driving a forklift.

Yep. Tell it to lie and it will.

It’s honestly a gamble based on my experience. Instructions that I’ve given ChatGPT have worked for a while, only to be mysteriously abandoned for no valid reason. Telling AI not to hallucinate is apparently common practice from the research I’ve done.

I do feel bad when I have to tell it not to. Hallucinating is fun!

Make sure you ask the AI not to hallucinate because it will sometimes straight up lie. It’s also incapable of counting.

Oh I use Copilot daily. It fills the gaps for the repetitive stuff like you said. I was writing Stories in a Storybook.js project once and was able to make it auto-suggest the remainder of my entire component states after writing 2-3. They worked out of the gate too with maybe a single variable change. Initially, I wasn’t even going to do all of them in that coding session just to save time and get it handed off, but it was giving me such complete suggestions that I was able to build every single one out with interaction tests and everything.

Outside of use cases like that and getting very general content, I think AI is a mess. I’ve worked with ChatGPT’s v3.5-4 API a ton and it’s unpredictable and hard to instruct sometimes. Prompts and approaches that worked 2 weeks ago, will now suddenly give you some weird edge case that you just can’t get it to stop repeating—even when using approaches that worked flawlessly for others. It’s like trying to patch a boat while you’re in it.

The C suite people and suits jumped on AI way too early and have haphazardly forced it into every corner. It’s become a solution searching for a problem. The other day, a friend of mine said he had a client that casually asked how they were going to use AI on the website they were building for them, like it was just a commonplace thing. The buzzword has gotten ahead of itself and now we’re trying to reel it back down to earth.

Ahh the future of dev. Having to compete with AI and LLMs, while also being forced to hastily build apps that use those things, until those things can build the app themselves.

I’ve given up at this point because in the tech industry, there are zero wins. Even if you knock something out in 2 weeks, you’re “too slow” and need to “iterate faster”.

Okay fine.

iterates faster

“Why is this missing X, Y, and Z? Why is this button blue?”

Did you want good or fast? You get one.

You just described my life. JS is hell.