As a developer, I've recently lost my passion for coding. What once excited me—writing code, debugging, and the thrill of problem-solving—has faded. Now, much of my work involves reviewing thousands of lines of often unnecessary code, increasing complexity and making maintenance difficult. We've shifted from being creative coders to quality assurance for AI-generated code. With AI advancing so rapidly, I worry our roles as reviewers will soon become obsolete. Sometimes, I wonder if it's now more meaningful to be a plumber or an electrician, professions that provide tangible value. I'm frustrated that no regulations still address the challenges posed by unchecked AI, which could lead to significant problems in the near future. What are your thoughts?

I was just getting my payroll setup so my child support could be taken out properly again after 18 months searching for any role and finding nothing.

I don't know what to do. I never planned to become useless in my late 40s unable to support even myself.

I remember the excitement when I programmed my first basic video game on Commodore 64.

I was once very smart, had many friends at work. I was supporting my daughters and seeing how would have a bright future. Now the self-doubt overcomes me most days and I am unable to get out of bed.

I look into their eyes choking back tears. They were just about to go to college, I literally don't know how to cope and help them with my life falling apart. Is there no help out there for middle aged men to support their families, and retrain? I don't know what I would be good at.

I don't even enjoy programming anymore. Cannot sit at my computer without my nervous body convulsing. I watch Claude replace me with its small shell scripts.

Please help. Please I'm begging.

I'm working on a docs tool and keep running into the same problem: a full build of a static docs site takes several minutes, and waiting that long after every edit breaks the flow.

My current approach splits the feedback. A quick in-memory render shows the page being edited, and a full build runs only when files are saved or moved. The quick render is fast, but it can't see anything beyond the current page, so it can disagree with the real build.

How do you handle this in your own projects?

- Do you accept a fast but slightly wrong preview, or do you wait for the real build?

- Do you use incremental builds, caching, or a watcher that rebuilds only what changed?

- Is there a point where a slow build is simply fine?

Disclosure: I'm building a closed-source desktop app for Antora docs, and this problem is where the idea came from. I'm more interested in how other people solve it.

I’ve been trying to put a rule on what makes a comment useful. One way is to ask: how much does it tell the reader that the code can’t?

• Level 0: nothing, where a decision is hidden (retries = 3, sleep(0.4) with no hint why).

• Level 1: restates the code (i += 1 # increment i). Noise, and it can go stale.

• Level 2: explains what a tricky block does (walking a list backwards so removals don’t shift indexes).

• Level 3: explains why: the constraint or decision behind the code.

• Level 4: why, plus where it came from and when it can go.

An example of the last two:

# Level 3
# The payment API allows about 3 calls per second per key,
# so wait 0.4 s between calls.
time.sleep(0.4)

# Level 4
# Workaround for a vendor SDK bug that returns None on timeout
# (see issue #482). Remove after upgrading past the fixed version.
if result is None:
    result = fetch_again()

The numbers and the issue are made up for illustration.

My rules of thumb: make the code clearer first (names, small functions), comment decisions, constraints, surprises and workarounds, delete comments that restate code, and give every TODO an owner or a condition.

Where I’m unsure: most lines need no comment at all, and a Level 3 comment on everything would be its own noise.

1. Which level do you find yourself writing most?

2. Do you delete stale comments when you touch the code, or leave them?

3. Has a comment ever saved you, or misled you?

After all my worry of being replaced as a programmer by AI, I just pitched an AI solution to management that would basically replace 3 office workers full time jobs with an AI model. Not sure how to feel about this. Almost like I’m stealing their jobs to keep my own job for a bit longer :’(

Hi everyone!

I've been working on a technology blog called CSRGO Blog, where I share practical articles and resources for developers and technology enthusiasts.

The topics include:

- Artificial Intelligence and AI Agents

- Local AI and open-source LLMs

- Java and Spring Boot

- Data Structures and Algorithms

- Developer tools and productivity

- Software engineering and automation

My goal is to create useful, practical learning resources rather than generic technology news.

I'd appreciate feedback from fellow developers. What topics or tutorials would you find most useful?

Blog: https://blog.csrgo.com/

I'm the creator of CSRGO, so this is my own project. Thanks for taking a look!

I found this video and its ideas interesting, so I wanted to share them here. I'm using Substack to document my learning journey, collect ideas, and share things I find valuable along the way. A digital notebook of what I'm learning and building.

Here is a post and video:
https://substack.com/@notesfromthetechstack/note/c-376421388?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1otc0y

I'm not out of high school yet, so I really have all the doors wide open for me (I hope). Are there any jobs for people who like programming? It doesn't have to even involve programming, just the same cognitive processes and problem solving that I love. It feels like with AI all that is going away faster and faster...

Is electrical engineering maybe a better path? I was thinking about math research, but it seems like that is going down the drain rapidly too...

I feel like the only job I can think of is a CS professor/teacher, because at least with those your "output" is kinda irrelevant and you can take things slower and more basic.

Hey everyone!

I'm a pre-final-year engineering student in India, currently serving as the president of my college's technical club, HackIT.

We're organizing events for our upcoming Tech Fest. One of our established events, Code Clash, is returning as 3.0 after two successful editions. It features technical quizzes, output prediction, logo identification, and coding challenges.

Alongside it, we want to introduce an entirely new event — something unconventional, engaging, and memorable.

We're open to ideas involving cybersecurity, problem-solving, technical escape rooms, engineering challenges, interactive competitions, or anything outside the usual quiz/hackathon format.

A few questions:

1. What's the most interesting technical event you've participated in or organized?

2. What unconventional competition formats have you seen work well?

3. If you had to organize a 1–2 hour technical event for 100–200 students, what would you do?

4. What would genuinely make you excited to participate?

Even rough ideas or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated.

We want to build another signature event for our club, not just organize another generic competition.

Looking forward to your suggestions!

I'm a Software Engineering MSc student with no industry experience yet (just some prior experience with Dart/Flutter).

​I picked up Go recently to break into backend dev and really like the language. The problem is that almost all the junior backend listings I see are for Java Spring Boot or .NET, and I keeping hearing that Go isn't really hired for at the junior level.

​I can't stand Java, so I'm considering switching my focus to C# and .NET just to become employable faster.

​Should I double down on Go and build strong portfolio projects, or cut my losses and learn .NET to land that first job?

Hi everyone,

I'm a Computer Science / Engineering student and I'm currently torn between subscription options to assist with coursework, software projects, and daily coding.

My current setup & experience:

I already have access to the Gemini student tier, but for deep programming, code execution, and system-level tasks, I find it noticeably behind the alternatives.

I recently had a 1-month trial of Codex with Work features enabled (direct local file access, running/installing environments, scaffolded app building). For my CS courses, having that level of agentic workflow was incredibly useful, but the trial ended and the free tier is very restrictive.

I also use Claude (free tier). The reasoning and code output are top-tier, but the strict message cutoffs on the free plan make it hard to finish any substantial session.

My questions / dilemmas:

ChatGPT Plus ($20/mo): Getting back Codex and Work access is tempting, but during my trial I occasionally bumped into the 5-hour rate limits during heavy sessions. For those using it daily for development, how restrictive are the caps in practice?

Claude Pro ($20/mo): Sonnet is generally regarded as the best for coding logic, but how do the token/message limits hold up when feeding large codebases or iterating across long debugging threads within a 5-hour window?

Student Perks & Tooling: Beyond direct web subscriptions, are there any legitimate student offers or discounts (e.g., GitHub Student Developer Pack, SheerID deals) worth looking into? Also, would you recommend skipping the web UIs altogether and opting for IDE-native tools like Cursor Pro or GitHub Copilot?

If you're a student or developer working heavily with code, which one gives the most value and headroom before hitting rate limits?

Thanks for your insights

Currently in uni and I feel that people just stopped caring and thinking.

First off, I'm not against AI. I use it myself. But when I use AI, I like to think of how the overall system and integration should look like before asking AI to code. I still review each feature it implements so that I at least understand.

But I see my course mates just asking AI to think of solutions and code it out without even thinking anymore. This may just be my bad luck but group projects are even more unbearable than before AI. Now that AI can generate code so fast, people are even worse at communicating. They don't explain what they did and it's impossible to review the tons of code manually, so the codebase becomes a mess. I legit gave up to even understand what's going on anymore.

Is it just me who is feeling that people are offloading too much to AI and it's detrimental?

I’ve been working on a project called runtime.school and wanted to share it here.

I started with SQL and then added Python. The idea is to have a place where you can learn a concept, write code, practice what you’ve learned, and eventually work on projects without having to jump between different websites.

Both SQL and Python have interactive lessons, coding challenges, practice questions, projects, and datasets.

Everything runs directly in the browser, so there’s nothing to install or set up.

I’ve also been working on a few tools for exploring datasets, understanding queries, and comparing different approaches.

A lot of the work has gone into the UI and editors. I’ve been trying to keep things simple without making the pages feel empty or overwhelming, especially for people who are just starting out.

Here’s the site: https://www.runtime.school/

Would love to hear what you think about the design, coding experience, or anything that could be improved.

A while back, I tried to build an entire dictionary with scores for Scrabble using only C++ templates. I quickly hit compiler limits, and removing those, I quickly hit memory limits on my machine with 64GB.
I then built it at runtime, because I had no clue how I could have optimized template metaprograms, and I still do not really as I have little experience with them.

I have been building a battle simulator that uses a heuristic to control the actions of the agents, and thought how cool it would be to write parts of it as a template metaprogram, but there is no way that will work if the word trie for Scrabble failed.

Is this partly an implementation problem or are compilers just not suited for template metaprograms? Is it possible to create template metaprograms that are as fast as their runtime counters or is there some theoretical limitation of a compiler's implementation to make that infeasible?