IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Deathwing said:

Generally, I agree. I honestly don't know how to square those two longterm as this is now my 4th attempt trying to type up this reply. I feel like we're living through the runup to 2008 again and not enough people give a shit about what storage prices are doing as a barometer.

And you're not being rude, not at all. Recently, I feel like I'm the black sheep in some these tech threads. I was expecting a far more bombastic response.

FWIW, I've started dabbling in Claude Code on work's dime. It wrote a script for transition bugs out of an outdated system and into gitlab. Not really had that eureka moment. Yet? Idk, maybe I'm too stupid to figure out how to integrate it better into my workflow. I just spent a whole day pouring through logs to try to figure out why clang++ couldn't find basic headers like <any>. Turns out, emacs had installed libgcc-14-dev but not gcc-14, so the headers were incomplete. When clang++ ran, it picked gcc-14 over gcc-13 for system headers and barfed because of course it would.

How do I integrate AI into that kind of workflow? That's like 50% of what I do.

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"I'm getting this error, how do I fix it" is what I ask Claude a lot.

Well Gemini is not using anthropic models, so yes it's AI but it's not great.

By the way today we finally ran my code and it worked the first time on a live server. Just bonkers.

It sounds a bit like you're not even attempting to use AI at all because of preconceived notions Deathwing

Deathwing said:

I was posting serious sized chunks into google, does that count as using Gemini? I usually scroll right past the AI response but I was getting desperate. I don't recall them being very helpful.

The tricky part of this is that I was trying to match a production environment, so the common solutions were all useless because they suggested system modification that wasn't going to happen.

In the end, it was my distaste of emacs that I uninstalled it on a whim and noticed apt saying some dev package could now be autoremoved that finally clued me in. Afterwards it was just 10m of figuring out what -I flags to supply to the commandline.

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Yea this isnt remotely the same thing. Those ai summaries in Google usually are true generic slop.

I started using Copilot in VS Code with model switching. At the time, the models were somewhat throttled, but after trying multiple options it became clear Claude was generally stronger, with GPT/Codex trailing in some cases. Around Nov or December 2025, these tools crossed a thresholdfrom browser chatbots to genuinely useful integrated development assistants

In order to get better efficiency and the most out of it, you'll need to to put work in at the beginning by either creating a specialized skill for what you are doing or even just a .MD file for it to reference before each session. You can do it without, but it will usually make the same mistakes and require you to feed it the necessary info every time you start a new session. I try my best to remember to tell it to add critical lessons learned when Im done with whatever I was doing.

As of now, I cannot really say which is better between claude and gpt as its basically an arms race between the two. Sometimes gpt will solve an issue for me pretty quickly that claude will get stuck on and vice versa. The good part about that is you can usually have the other review a plan or code as a 3rd pair of eyes and it will call out gaps or problems you or the other agent missed.

Its also really not difficult to utilize or use.

Khane said:

Its also really not difficult to utilize or use.

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That's the thing I don't understand. People talk like AI is hard to use skill or is this huge barrier. It's pretty damn simple to use when you break it down.