August 2024, Indeed. A large portion of my party had fallen to layoff traps. Morale was down, and going lower. Upper management seemed to be trying to drive attrition through removing perks, increasing workload, and generally making stupid decision after stupid decision.
I don't have "Fuck You" money. But with some budgeting and spending some savings (that's what it's there for!) I have "Fuck This" money. For a while, anyway.
So I quit.
I've been telling myself it's a sabbatical. The plan was to work on my game Mark My Words, get it polished, write some short stories, enjoy spending time with my family. One and a half outta three ain't bad, right? I've enjoyed my time, and I've worked on my game a little. Not as much as I should have. I'm working on that now.
Developing on my own is hard. But it's hard in different ways than I expected.
| Was Easy | Was Difficult | |
| Expected to be Easy |
|
|
| Expected to be Hard |
|
|
The Job Change Quest
In the anime Solo Leveling, the main character gets a side quest to qualify for a class change. After he completes it, he's able to recruit the shades of fallen enemies to be his shadow soldiers.
I haven't done the job change quest yet. I'll probably need to soon. My money won't last forever. I've tried recruiting shadow soldiers in the form of generative AI, but I have not enjoyed it or had meaningful success. While they can produce things "good enough" in domains I can't (like the graphic above), they also fail at incredibly simple tasks (like creating the table I manually built by hand above). Every time I try to use generative AI for coding, it falls on its face. I tried using Jules to add Widgetbook to my Flutter app. I gave it references to the readmes and howtos, and told it to follow those instructions. Instead, it proposed a change that would have completely broken my app by putting Widgetbook as a dependency in the main project instead of as a subproject, and completely wrecked the main.dart file.
I tried generating a simple vibe-coded app to generate a couple of images and write a story about them. It appeared to work, but when I went to show my kid, it failed to generate images or handle errors.
So far the LLM powered autocomplete within Android Studio is pretty great. It often does propose exactly what I want for boilerplate and copy/paste/edit, and even user-facing text.
But I absolutely do not trust it with non-trivial code of more than a few lines.
I want it to work, I really do. I have important stuff to do, and delegating to my soldiers would be a huge power-up.
