Well that was fun, not.
You probably do not know me. You will probably think this is the usual junk clickbait. I don't publish much it makes me uncomfortable. The LLMs help with that. Yet in this one just to make a point it is handwritten.
I learned to love programming in the early '90s. I used Mosaic in a university computer lab. I was feeling behind the curve when a friend showed my Google which had come out of stealth. How am I gonna keep up too much new tech?! I had figured out C and bits of C++ by reading the textbook and using an orange Vax terminal. I am pretty sure this is what I was meant to do as it felt so good but srsly slow down. Some day when I grow up I am going to be a software engineer.
It is 30 years later:
I've known adventures, seen places you people will never see, I've been Offworld and back... frontiers! (Blade Runner)
Never consumer. Always money with big number. Never in the public domain. Never on anything that was not big-budget or big reputational risk. Sometime 30 devs pushing code each month. So that is a lot of code.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. (Blade Runner)
Was any of it any good? Well, depends. When you have that much stuff doing out the door, with a team of people across two or three timezones. Coding buddies you only every message to in a chat window who overlap by only a few hours. Well, you learn what is important and what is not. My niche was to get in there and get stuff working. Laser beam. Cut, cut!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. (Blade Runner)
Now the gaffer tape. This concept right here is the thing that will make it all work and the rest is weight. Follow the invariants. I can walk around the system in my mind. That is not metaphorical. I walk around the code in my mind to fall to sleep. That can mean not getting much sleep.
You don't know me. Take it that I know DM-ing to human-level intelligence to get code written on deadlines. Decade after decade. System after system. I have an encyclopedic memory of code and the ability to explain it in detail. You might say I have been in training for working with LLMs, and AI, on enterprise software for many years. So you don't know me. Yet you may be interested in my story.
So, the LLMs are as at early 2026, still not working well in big enterprises. It was mid-2025 that I went all in on learning to code with them. My self-educational goal was "until I know it all or I stop having fun!". And boy, it is fun! As long as you don't have to maintain it shipped to users when it's too big; and boy is it always going to get too big. Just one more prompt. Just one more feature. Just one more 5h limit. I have this under control. I can quit anytime. Darn, I burnt my codex weekly limit in two days again. Try the next sub.
When I talk to the lead devs about real code, they are usually in their 30s with a decade of senior experience, so just getting into the big picture stuff, I say:
It's always like this, every team on every project go as fast as we can. We push and the wind resistance is the bugs and inefficiencies. We get to max velocity. You cannot get there faster by pushing harder. We can only reduce drag to get velocity. Don't burn out, we need you! (simbo1905)
When the LLMs suddenly got better, boy, did I go wild. That is the experience that is in the press. The principle engineers, the old hands, they find joy. They go crazy. Suddenly all those fun ideas become hobby projects with prototypes. I can now take a prototype like lunet and make a project out of it lua-lunet. Crazy!
Can the LLMs do higher-order programming with AST compile crazy stuff which is pure art with Java? Yes they can https://github.com/simbo1905/no-framework-pickler/blob/main/ARCHITECTURE.md. Mike drop.
So this seemed like a training problem to me. If you learn how to prompt them; then you can do what I did above, right? Somewhere in them those LLMs can do world-class meta-programming. You just need to tickle them right, and they just giggle it out! Maybe.
Well, I thought, I gotta give it a proper go. And boy, did I stub my toe. I got to go wild, and I smashed through six max subs on six services repeatedly to build something big. Then I still shelled out API tokens on a pay-as-you-go basis. I went for it. I mainlined it. I went large. Epic.
Okay, that is it for now. I need to get back to work. If you liked this, give it heart. Then I might be encouraged to tell the full story. The story of raging at the ghosts in the machine. The LLM, who is the devil to me. The LLM, who is the angel. Well, a black cat. Fatigue while burning out max subs can do strange things to the mind.
TBC...
So this seemed like a training problem to me. If you learn how to prompt them; then you can do what I did above, right? Somewhere in them those LLMs can do world-class meta-programming. You just need to tickle them right and they just giggle it out! Maybe.
Well I thought, I gotta to give it a go. And boy, did I stub my toe. I got to go wild and I smashed through six max subs on six services repeatedly to build something big. Then I still shelled out API tokens on pay-as-you-go. I went for it. I mainlined it. I went large. Epic. This series of posts are my recovery cycle.
Okay, that is it for now. I need to get back to work. If you liked this, give it heart. Then I might be encouraged to tell the full story. The story of raging at the ghosts in the machine. The LLM who is the devil to me. The LLM who is the angel. Well, a black cat. Fatigue while in the flow during all-night coding benders can burn out max subs and do strange things to the mind.
TBC...
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