Just a heads up you forgot a word between “you” and “me” I think

I’ve been wondering the same, so hard. I feel like at this point I’d like to see a comparative study of the job of people that see it VS the job of people that don’t.

I remember some twenty years ago when I finished college I had this internship that turned into a summer job afterwards. Prestigious organization in fancy skyscraper. Our teachers were a bit nervous about it since it was the first time the got the org to accept interns and made it clear we should be extremely grateful and well behaved, or else.

Godfuck the job was boring. This massive tentacular place had a million subdivisions doing roughly the same thing in a different region but somehow each had enough torque to get to have their own little website with a different interface design and a handful of different fields. Our job was to rewrite backends from [boring old basic MS tech] to [shiny new overengineered MS tech]. Dozens and dozens of roughly alike but not entirely identical backends. After months of work there was still at least as much to do as had been done. The architects in place had no desire for harmonization or reuse. They knew be heart the features the seemed to rewrite periodically in a fancier ways.

Sometimes I wonder how many places feel like that, how many programmers embrace the repetitive churn, oblivious to the affront against the very core of software this represents. If these are the ones that see it.

Devaluing the human experience until the tech looks good

I’m far from having the final say on anything at my org. They’ve just decided not to embrace the slop. Sorry you’re in that kind of your company. Just be careful with skill atrophy.

I suggest you design the core bits of your project, actually fucking program it yourself, see what works and what doesn’t, review design, and repeat. (This is a programming community.)

It puts the beauty in the ugly

they say “thoughts & prayers” but it’s just prayers

The US is fucking me over and I’m not even American.

A pet project with a sufficient incentive (here, friends) is a perfect opportunity to pick up a new language too!

I would argue it’s better to have a good grasp on Javascript before tackling Typescript. The Typescript type system (the only reason to bother really) leaks Javascript quirks in different ways which aren’t going to make much sense without the underlying knowledge.

Fortunately software is much more than App ideas fishing for VC investments. A lot of us are building actual tools for nurses, teachers, technicians, artists, students, etc. We have to analyze these human beings’ role in society, their needs, their situation, which is different from merely preying on their attention span. Programming languages are still the most reliable way to specify how the software must behave. And once the software is done, it is merely born. It then lives through a steady flow of continuous adaptation until one day it dies as all things do. Downplaying the human condition is a mistake.

AI tools can generate functional, adequate, perfectly average code at a speed and cost that would have been unimaginable even five years ago. And like the outsourcing wave of the early 2000s, the economics are real and rational. Nobody is wrong for using these tools. The code they produce is often fine. It works. It passes tests. It might ship as-is.

Not the first time I’ve read this kind of statement and I always struggle to reconcile this with my personal experience. I’m seriously doubting that I’m just not a “good enough prompter”. I know how to explain context from domain to tech and vice versa, that’s like, a good 20% of my job. I’d say that AI tools are good at producing code that already exists.

The LLMs are an interface to a corpus of written material. They’ve never had a thought, a chat around the coffee machine, or any experience in the largest sense of the world. This is a hard barrier on any induction they may emulate.

100 kb from multiple mb is fucking huge and it absolutely makes a tangible difference to anyone firing up the website from mobile data. Do not underestimate the power of snappiness, and keep up the good work.

B-but I don’t have to?

holy fuck

No matter how hard you pet your LLM, this project is not your work. LLM output attribution is a gray zone by design. Your assumption that vibe coding has overtaken software development is a big red flag imho. I wonder where you’ve acquired this belief. If you’ve been banned from multiple communities already I recommend you reflect upon this.

exactly

TLDR:

You should probably use a proper parser rather than hoping your .env looks enough like an .ini to pass muster.

You can probably use a butter knife instead of a flat screwdriver but just do your job properly.

(I hope I’m not bugging you! Disregard if your’re done with this thread.)

About the category column, your approach does violates database normalization in particular that all columns must be atomic. It’s not a sexy topic but it’s how you make the most of a relational database. None of this stuff really matters at small scale but if your site lasts through the years and you end up with numerous posts and categories, getting all posts of a category will perform terribly because the database will be unable to index properly.

Congrats on your progress! You’re learning 100x more then if you adopted a framework right away imo.

Database creation is something you usually only do once.

In an ideal world. In this world you absolutely have to plan how you’ll make your site (and its database schema) evolve while preserving your precious production data. Check out migrations.

Here’s an example of my trick

Be careful with tricks. Your future self prefers boring code to clever code 100% of the time. Way back when, I had made up a whole system for doing aspect oriented programming in JavaScript after reading some book. I was so proud, then after a while I hated myself so much for it. Finally I was so relieved when that monstrosity went offline.

instead of having newpost.php and validate_and_insert_post.php files doing separate jobs, my newpost.php is the page has the form and also receives the form in order to validate and insert into the database

This is a fine pattern don’t worry about it.

single column where categories are manually written in, separated by commas

If I’m understanding well and you have a database field containing a list of comma separated IDs, this is a code smell. Your site won’t catch fire if you don’t fix it, but you’ll limit yourself with the kinds of queries you can make against your relational database. You have a lot to gain by representing many-to-many relationships with a junction table.

Sorry for the lengthy comment, I enjoy talking about “the craft”. Wishing you lots of fun with your project!