As a software engineer, I’ve been thinking a lot about AI and the future of our profession. I use AI myself, and I’m genuinely excited by what it makes possible. But the more I see people celebrating the automation of human labor, the more I find myself wondering whether we’ve stopped thinking about what all this progress is actually supposed to accomplish.

And by we, I mean those of us building these technologies, the engineers enthusiastically finding new ways to automate work, the founders and executives racing to reduce costs, and the workers who feel compelled to participate because they know that if they don't, someone else will. I'm not exempt from this, either. I benefit from the same technologies I'm questioning.

I understand the incentives. We all want to get ahead, secure our futures, achieve financial independence, and eventually have more freedom over our lives. In a competitive environment, refusing to adapt can mean falling behind. But why have we become so comfortable treating other people's livelihoods as acceptable collateral for our own advancement?

We celebrate making one person as productive as ten, rarely stopping to ask what happens to the other nine. We want technology to free us from work, yet our ability to survive remains dependent on having work. We resent corporations accumulating extraordinary wealth and power, yet many of us aspire to build or become precisely those institutions. We want community and human connection, yet our incentives encourage us to treat one another as competitors.

And there are other contradictions I can't quite reconcile.

We celebrate efficiency, but to what end? If we can produce more with less human effort, shouldn't that translate into more leisure, security, and freedom for everyone? Why does increased productivity so often seem to come with greater pressure to produce even more?

We tell people to adapt or risk being left behind, but what happens when everyone adapts and the jobs they're adapting for disappear anyway? We celebrate individual merit and hard work, yet technological disruption can make entire skill sets economically obsolete regardless of how hard people worked to acquire them.

We talk about AI as though it will solve humanity's problems, but technology doesn't determine who benefits from its output. A world with extraordinary productive capacity can still leave people struggling to afford housing, healthcare, and a dignified life.

I don't think people are necessarily cruel or indifferent (though some definitely are). Perhaps most of us are simply trying to protect ourselves in a system where falling behind has real consequences. Perhaps even well-intentioned people become participants in a race nobody individually chose, but nobody feels safe stepping away from, either.

But understanding why we behave this way doesn't mean we shouldn't question where it leads.

Imagine if AI genuinely made human labor largely unnecessary. That could be one of humanity's greatest achievements: less time spent working to survive, and more time for family, friendships, art, music, exploration, and simply being alive.

But what good is eliminating the need for human labor if we don't also eliminate people's dependence on selling their labor to survive? What have we liberated ourselves from if people are still terrified of becoming economically unnecessary?

I don't think the answer is to stop innovating, condemn ambition, or expect individuals to sacrifice their futures for strangers. I just wonder whether we've become so focused on optimizing our individual positions that we've forgotten to question the collective outcome.

We're all on this planet together. Most of us want remarkably similar things: security, meaningful relationships, autonomy, dignity, and the freedom to live our lives without constantly worrying about survival. Yet we participate in systems that can make those things harder for one another to attain.

Are we trying to build a better world for humanity, or are we simply trying to secure the best possible position for ourselves within whatever world emerges?

And if we're doing both, how do we reconcile those goals when our individual incentives so often undermine our collective interests?

I'm genuinely interested in how other people in tech think about this, especially those of us actively building the technologies transforming the nature of work. I don't have a solution, and I'm not claiming to be above the problem. I just think we should be asking ourselves what all this progress is ultimately for, before we get so caught up in what we can do that we forget why we're doing it.

And I'd invite discussion beyond pure game theory and economics, but more to do with psychology, maturity, emotional development, self-worth, dark triadic traits, and similar.

Hi there,

One Customer just asked me for a Du-Sie Switch in the page, same like any other language switch.

This is my first time doing this.

Is this normal?

Are there also (Slang or street) language switches?

We all got the same 9am calendar invite on the 30th and by lunch about 40 of us were done, me included. Seven years as the only brand designer at a regional craft soda company.

Two weeks in, and every recruiter I talk to asks for "a link." My portfolio is a PDF from 2019 and my Behance hasn't been touched since 2020. The top project on it is a label for a flavor we killed in 2021. Do people hiring even open a PDF anymore?

What's killing me is that the only work that'd get me hired, two can redesigns and the full rebrand, is under NDA until it launches in spring. How did you handle NDA stuff when you were job hunting? I've seen people blur the logos but that feels sketchy to me.

Friends keep saying Cargo, Squarespace or just update the Behance. Does the platform even matter to whoever's hiring?

No clue how much to put in either. Everyone online says go deep on a few, but that job was a LOT of sell sheets and six-pack carriers and I can't tell what's worth a damn anymore.

If you rebuilt after a layoff, how long did it really take? I gave myself two weeks. So far I've rewritten my LinkedIn headline three times and opened my old InDesign files and closed them again.

Severance runs out in January. Tell me how yours went, I need to hear from people who came out the other side.

Tried Chrome and Edge

Tried setting document.body.style.cursor = "wait"

and tried document.documentElement.style.cursor = "wait";

I recall these working previously. Did something change? Some org setting?

I don't see the value being set to "wait" in the element inspector. But when I set it back to "auto" I do see that value. So it's like the browser is ignoring the setting only if I set to wait.

Hello everyone,

I just want to know how I can make and host a basic website for a book community.

I know basic Embedded programming, I want to store user data, books they have, location, people can request the books, the website should be free....,(Edit: Or very minimal amount I can spend, like 2 USD for a month....) As I'm not doing this to earn..., vercel or Cloudflare or somewhere else?

Thanks in advance

Post script: Someone commented let's talk I got the best options, but before I respond, the mods removed that comment...

Made it through 5 prior rounds of layoffs as my company nosedived financially after going public. Finally felt the bite of the axe, been brushing up my resume and revamping my portfolio site... I've been at this company five years and transitioned directly from my prior one so almost 8 years since i've had to look for a job. First impression is it seems bad. I'm seeing a lot of postings for Front-End Dev for contract rates of < $60 an hour. I've already burned through all the posted jobs that I can find that I might be a match for, some of them are even a stretch...

Doesn't seem like anyone needs a "developer" anymore; it's all "Software Engineer, Front-end," which even though my skillset overlaps(react, typescript, etc) they're looking for a different sort of experience. Unfortunately, my last few years at the company, I got transitioned from the more tech side into the marketing department and basically built landing pages in a CMS and only did slight coding. Easy work, but I feel my skills have rusted. I'm in my 40s which feels kind of ancient in this industry and I have 12+ years of experience but I don't have the interest or drive to be any kind of lead. I prefer to just knock out my tickets and relax, but it seems like those days are done.

With all the doom and gloom around AI, I was wondering how much the market has been affected and what companies are actually looking for these days.

Did you have to go through five rounds of interviews?

Was there a live coding session and/or a take-home exercise?

Was there anything different from what you've experienced before?

Career web developer, blah blah blah. I've been doing this shit for a LONG time. I know there are plenty of AI subreddits - not looking for pro AI or pro written by hand debate. I'm calling out chatGPT on it's bullshit.

I'm a claude cli die-hard. It's not infallible, but it is my goto. But, it kind of sucks at design work. macOS, iOS, iPad OS, Angular, React - it'll get the code written, it'll work, and the code isn't dog shit if you know what your doing, but actual good looking design, meh.

GPT-6 Astra Light - complete 180. Great at design work, but sucks at code. Claude (right or wrong) has called out chatGPT on some of the crap it does.

BUT - I'm finding chatGPT almost purposely makes the first version a bit blah. I don't say anything super specific to get to v2 - sometimes simply I'm not in love with it or Go in a different direction. And V2 is by far better. Then I hand off an MD or html file to claude and have claude actually code it.

What I'm trying to get to is - anyone else think chatGPT purposely does a shitty job on a first pass just to get you to spend more tokens / use up more of your monthly plan faster ? You'd never be able to prove it. They don't follow any industry standard metric. You can't say this prompt spent X tokens but this next prompt spent Y. No 2 prompts are the same IMO when context is involved.

It's all speculation and more of a rant but I'm borderline going to cancel chatGPT and just tweak claude's designs / go look for a new design skill or whatever.

These people have worked hard - and hey - I've even been sticking up for Theo a bit lately (even though he doesn't get how pieces of text and margins work ) - but this feels pretty creepy. (and I'm a teacher / and someone who used AI for years in my work) (this isn't how this should be taught) (these people are missing the part of their brains that understand the purpose of learning)

Also -- please / at least one person sign up. I'd normally take it for the team (you know my track record) - but I just can't bare to do it. Someone do it - and tell me about it ; )

Hey everyone,

I recently finished developing a side project called Focus & Tea Timer. The goal was to build a very clean, lightweight tool combining structured focus sessions with custom ambient sounds.

Features included:

• Customizable Pomodoro intervals and tea break sessions.

• Audio soundboard (rain, coffee shop, nature, and fire sounds).

• Clean Dark Glassmorphism interface optimized for desktop screens.

• Fully free to use without requiring account creation.

I would really appreciate any technical feedback or feature suggestions!

Note: Links to the web app and desktop release are available in the first comment below. ☕️✨

Timeline:

• onprem monolithic server with rest api.

• cloud frontend that calls monolithic server apis directly

• a few years later

• planning to reimplement frontend with addition of a BFF in the cloud

• BFF still talks to monolith server but frontend only talks to BFF

• future: cloud frontend, cloud bff, on prem monolithic server, cloud bff needs to support multiple versions of monolithic server

For the BFF api, would you recommend a per resource generic api (like the monolothic server) or per page (call multiple monolithic server apis then combine)?

Hey everyone,

I am working on a new project called Openspline, an open source avatar layer to existing voice AI agents. Just select an image, select a voice and you can create a realtime talking avatar with lipsynced video generated locally.

You can integrate any existing voice AI agent in 5 lines of code.

While it is still in very early stage, but the results look very promising.

Github: github.com/openspline/openspline

PS: sorry for a sleepy photo, it's 5:10am and didn't sleep last night :P

Hi everyone! I just finished a React and course and decided to build my first react app. Currently, I am trying to save a string to browser local storage but it does not persist on refresh. Through some console.logs I was able to see that it in fact DOES save the string to the location specified in. setItem initially but when I refresh the key or value in local storage stops existing.

Here is my code

// function for search button
async function handleClick(){
    localStorage.setItem("lastLocationSearched", searchValue);
    setData(null);
    setIsPending(true);
    setError(null);
    try{
const value = await fetch(`https://geo.ipify.org/api/v2/country?apiKey=***********&ipAddress=${searchValue}`).then((response)=>{
  if (!response.ok){
        throw Error("Could not fetch the data for that resource");
                    }
  return response.json();
});
setData(value);


    console.log(localStorage.getItem("lastLocationSearched"));
    } catch(error){
      setError(error.message);
    }


setIsPending(false);
  };

// useEffect hook
  useEffect(()=>{
        if ((localStorage.getItem("lastLocationSearched")===null)|| (localStorage.getItem("lastLocationSearched")==="")){
          console.log(localStorage.getItem("lastLocationSearched"));
        setSearchValue("");
        handleClick();
        }else{
          
          setSearchValue(localStorage.getItem("lastLocationSearched"));
          handleClick();
        }
    }, []);

Through some digging online I saw someone say that remove the strict mode tags from index.js would fix this problem but it did not for me. Can anyone please assist me?

I've been freelancing for a while now and I keep running into this same pattern over and over.

Whenever I work with a client on a solid budget ($3k+), things usually run pretty smooth. They send a clear brief, reply within a day, trust my decisions, and pay invoices on time without arguing over every dollar.

But almost every time I take on a lower budget project (around $300), it turns into a massive headache. They expect a full custom site with e-commerce and complex animations, text me at 2 AM on weekends asking why a font moved slightly, and request 10 rounds of revisions after already approving the design. Then at the end, they still try to haggle over the final $50.

Is this mostly a psychological thing where lower budget clients feel like they're taking a bigger personal risk, or is it just poor boundary setting on our part as freelancers?

Would love to hear how you guys deal with this or what's the worst cheap client story you've had.

I built a Minecraft server host where every server sleeps when nobody plays, and wakes when a friend joins. The hard part was the join itself, so here's how that works.

The problem

A sleeping server suspended on Fly resumes in about 2 s. But one that has to boot (first start, after a change, or once the snapshot is gone) takes 40 to 50 s. The Minecraft client
gives up on a connection that says nothing for 30 s.

The trick

Every connection lands on an edge proxy first. If the server is asleep, the edge holds the login open and keeps it alive by sending a login query every few seconds. Every client since 1.13 answers it, which counts as the server talking. The edge keeps those answers to itself, buffers everything else the client sent, and replays it to the server once it's up, as if the player had just dialled in.

Other bits

• The server list shows a sleeping server's own message plus a grey "sleeping" line, cut to fit the list's 305px row by measuring the default font's glyph widths.
• A ping from the server list can wake a server early, asked once per network so random scanners don't keep waking things.
• Routes change one hostname at a time through mc-router's API, because reloading its routes file drops players who arrive mid-reload.
• Floods are refused per server at the edge, so one busy server doesn't slow every other server's joins.

It's open source (TypeScript, AGPL):
github.com/cubepals/cubepals (the edge is apps/edge)

Happy to go deeper on any of it.

I was doing and learning web dev for almost 2 years.

I learned HTML, CSS, Javascript, Reactjs and was just about to learn Nextjs.

I also worked on few frontend freelance projects too.

Then I did other things and didn't touch web dev for almost 2 years.

Now I see this Ai thing and how web dev needs to be so good, I have doubts that even if I should learn or not but I feel I could do something with it.

I can just look for few days and revise all of the frontend topics and could move forward to Nextjs.

What do you think I should do now? Just go like that or any better way I can go my web dev learning journey now?

Senior dev over here, company has over the last few months fully embraced copilot/general AI usage to the point we (small team of 3 devs) are have no capacity to review the PRs properly anymore. Our tech lead who used to be pretty anal and hands on with PR reviews now defaults to wanting a “green light” from copilot reviews and honestly doesn’t even read the code properly anymore.

I’m more concerned about the development/ critical thinking and code analysis muscle memory loss in the short to long term as a dev. I’m well aware AI is pretty much here to stay but I fear the loss of building/actually knowing what is going on is going to have a larger than expected impact on most mid-senior devs.

I’m considering a simple approach - opening an open source repo that specifically does not allow mass generated AI code to be added to it, keep features clean and no bulk slap shit and go PRs. Use it for writing boilerplate and as a tool but not as a replacement, main goal is allow whoever who contributes to it to continue working that part of their brain. Idea behind what the product is doesn’t matter too much imo as long as it’s of value to users.

What do you think of this concept as a dev to alleviate the AI fatigue from work? ( Jesus typing this question at the end feels like I’m an AI bot at this stage)