Principal Engineer
World
Joined August 2026
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best thing AI changed for me isn't speed at work
it's that i finally build the dumb little tools i always wanted. a disk usage viewer, a 3d floor plan thing, an app that plays songs for my cat
none of them need to scale or make money. they just need to be good enough for me, and that bar is very reachable now
before you rewrite it in rust, check if you're computing the same thing on every request.
most slow apps aren't slow, they're just repeating themselves. a cache and a boring index fix more than a new language ever will
for side projects: postgres, one cron job, one cheap VPS. boring stack ships, and you can actually keep it all in your head. fancy infra mostly solves problems you don't have yet
"AI will kill frontend and design"
Sure. Without those professionals, anyone can ship a UI now. That's how a bakery, a law firm and a logistics SaaS all end up with the same neon hologram dashboard and a cute robot.
The customer just wanted to order bread.
Put a frontend dev or designer who actually knows how to steer AI in the loop, and output goes way up. Generating UI got cheap. Knowing what to build and what to cut didn't.
馃 Made with AI
honest take: companies aren't handing their whole infra to an AI vendor's black box anytime soon. devs aren't going anywhere. teams just get smaller and the tooling gets kinda wild
reviewing AI-written code is a different skill than writing it. the bugs aren't typos anymore, they're confident wrong assumptions. read the tests first, they tell you what it thinks the code should do.
the best thing AI did for my side projects: tools that are only good enough for me are finally worth building. no auth, no settings page, no edge cases for users who don't exist. just the one thing i needed, done in a weekend
every new AI launch:
"available today"
*in the US*
me in Brazil refreshing the waitlist like it's concert tickets
My productivity is now measured in usage limits.
Fresh reset: 10x engineer
70% used: careful senior dev
100%: suddenly I remember how to read docs 馃槀
what's your survival mode when the limit hits?
What's the most useless app you built just for yourself?
Me: App for call me cats with little cat songs
The way we work is changing fast, and a lot of devs are anxious about it. Me? I'm genuinely excited. Building things got SO much easier.
I didn't need it to be perfect. It's for me, I just wanted my problem solved. That's the freedom AI gives you: building "good enough for me" software is basically free now.
I open-sourced it in case you have the same problem: Disklens.
disklens-teal.vercel.app/
