I'm a programmer, not a software engineer. I like being a code monkey and just hitting the keys and troubleshooting problems. I obsess over the styling and readability of my code, and the minutia of language standards and idioms. I'm not much of a fan of software architecture and high level planning; I keep things flexible and find that the best architectures bubble up from the constraints imposed by implementation details.

I'm kind of the antithesis of most people here "just doing work", but even I've started using agents for my hobby projects.

I've used LLMs in chat and in-editor code completion since the early days of copilot and tab-nine and local llama; but I only started using them for agentic work since 3 months ago when I judged 5.6 Sol to be meaningfully capable (unlike the models available just half a year prior) so I shelled out the 20-something for a sub to evaluate the frontier for the first time rather than just running chat with simple tools locally.

(Edit: I tried many of the frontier labs now and I actually use local for agent tasks too now, but mostly just the simple stuff. I did a deep dive into customizing various harnesses and prompts and making my own memory and skill systems to replace harness-specific ones; this wasn't a surface-level expedition)

There are projects I code for the sake of coding, but it feels a bit more of an active choice now. I found that I started a ton of projects; things that I only care for the results that I wouldn't have been able to do before, and speed up things that were almost a year away on my timeline and knock them out in a single week.

However, it also changed what projects I'm working on entirely. There are things that I was doing before that only made sense to when I was writing by hand.

I actually sunk a good three weeks into building up infrastructure that I then immediately threw away because I realized writing C# in Lua was dumb when I could just write C# in C#; but I wouldn't have before, because I was writing Lua in the context of a larger third-party program that was interfacing with C#; I didn't want to rewrite everything that that program gave me just for the sake of being able to write native C# so instead I was trying to alias C# objects in Lua, which worked fine.... but why? Don't like writing C#, and I really don't even like using Lua that much; the only things I really enjoyed about it was how flexible it was and how I could kind of abuse it to accomplish whatever outcome I wanted.

I was trying to avoid reinventing the wheel, but now I have a wheel-design printing factory. It became a non-issue, which changed how I allocate my time and my effort.

I said fuck the sunk cost fallacy and I just dropped all of it and completely started from scratch, leveraging LLMs to write all the busy work. Frontier LLMs have made (much) code disposable. It always was, but now more.

I quickly prototype designs that I wouldn't have bothered before because the grunt work was just too laborious and I just didn't have the time. I had it throw together a language server for proprietary DSL with syntax highlighting and embedded language support (multiple langs in one file); something I never would have bothered to do if I had to do it by hand (could never justify the time-spend), but that made my actual writing code experience better. Now instead of burning a weekend or maybe even a week on such a QoL project, I only have to commit maybe a couple hours of hands-on time and the rest is just the LLM.