Stone Pokes

writing on | fullstack engineer | open to work

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

enjoy the journey, not only the outcome.

we rob ourselves of any joy until we hit our outcome. and when we do achieve it, the joy only lasts for a moment.

i finally graduated! i finished x task! i completed a marathon!
and what?

feels soul crushing

⬇️

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

@FiachraRM oh dear wtf, thats so much 🤣

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

@thorstenball people just want to deny the llms so hard they fail to see the advantages of using it

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

dude, i just realised. i don't hear about "technical debt" anymore.

am i just being selective 😂

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

@TimsonWryts @0xHvdes this fella did this: https://t.co/WIETAtaAZO

and i can say it works 😂

now i just need to not avoid it

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

@jeremyparkphd @vlmrun how long did it take for you to build this? and did it cost a lot?

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

@thorstenball or i think people are just lazy and they want outcomes without the work 😂

or maybe, if their ai account blows up, they can sell their methodology to others

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

@zachlloydtweets i wonder, how much engineering goes into this kind of stuff?

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

@_mnpw love the graphics on the front page!

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

@housecor i hope it doesn't cost a lot to use one, because most will probably only have a 20 dollar sub to play with this kind of stuff

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

@FiachraRM i never thought i'd see the day of my chinese calendar vibe teaching me four letters word 😂

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

@thorstenball at this point, how do we even define slop? and wouldn't there be code review tools to catch it?

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

@ML_Philosophy what a beautiful, yet haunting image

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

@traqscales ah shit, that'd be useful for a personal trainer who has domain knowledge but don't want to show their face!

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

@nic_munoz great recommondation! but how should we engage in this kind of materials? like highlight passages or act that stands out to us or we just soak in the actions they took as examples for ourselves?

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

moving forward, we've to be more intentional about "learning to build" or "building to learn".

because the former ("learning to build") is what is valued at work, where we only learn what's required for the incoming feature / task / project and then we stop, we don't rabbit hole. heck in the case of agents, we probably don't even need to do this much because "we no longer need to understand to build"

whereas the latter ("building to learn") is what we value personally as software engineers, we like to take the time to rabbit hole and figure things out deeply and be certain about what we're going to do next, and handle incoming questions if needed

and for a long time (pre-llms), the lines between these two modes is a blur because to ship something it required us to understand deeply, and more importantly we're getting paid to learn how wonderful!

but now that llms are here, this is no longer the case. we have the ability to ship things we don't understand fully. and if we make the case of "i want to understand before i ship" people will just frown at you :(

so my takeaways is finding balance, maybe during work, fine ship stuff you don't understand (FAFO), just because it pays the bill and the environment dictates it. and here, you might have some takeaways on what you can achieve by letting go and having hollistic (big picture) over deep understanding

but also don't underestimate the ability of llms to help you learn! off work or in your free time, still "build to learn", either write from scratch or use llms to augment your learning capabilities. have your own personal tutor.

but above all, i think as engineers we need to take time to properly process the loss of what we hold near and dear to our hearts because it seem so sudden (overnight) that what we used to cherish is gone like it never existed.

we can mop, be sad, take some time off, but i think don't be resentful or develop any resentment to any of these because it's not worth your energy. go touch some grass, and keep in touch with your hobbies!

the world is changing at a rapid pace, if we keep chasing the tail of it, we'll be constantly sprinting of course you'll be tired. life is a marathon, go to the aid station, take a break, have some bananas, go walk and when you feel good again. start running, but slowly.

[HackMIT @HackMIT]

Grant Sanderson's keynote speech at HackMIT 2026.

"We no longer need to understand to build."

"Are you learning in order to build?"

"Or are you building in order to learn."

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

@QuotesforGoal is this why i love to stay at home 🤣

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

ive not touched code for the three months. part of it was burn out but a bigger part is griefing

somehow i was grieving the loss of hand rolled code / the craft we spent years learning in this era of llms.

long gone the time where we spend hours debugging manually or writing uo a feature. all these, with the right amount if context, the agents can do it for you.

now with acceptance, what's the road ahead? im not sure, maybe fine tuning slms or use llms to help me make the bestest ddd codebase with robust error logging and clean domain, stuff that would have been tedious are now essier to do

i think the takeaway here is that the sooner we come to terms with reality, the sooner we can figure out what to do next, rather than deny or avoid it or keep say "the llm is shit"

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

yep, the swe role as we know has sailed. and the part on "if coding was the easy part, why when the llms does it, you feel hurt?" that hits a spot.

long gone the time spent on majority of time writing code, now its just having a more holistic overview of your system and point the agent to the right direction and read more books about engineering principles like ddia, domain driven design or stuff matt pocok recommends

oh but on a side note i still think hand writing code has its use. but on a personal level and not on a work level.

hand rolled code will be useful for one to understand and learn stuff off work but if you do that at work you'll probably be scrutinised for it sadly

[Dave Kiss @davekiss]

https://t.co/E74YRkf8rR

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

@mitsuhiko the point of local models for me is "just enough intelligence". i dont need it to compete with frontier intelligence but it jist needs to be usable on a day to day basis for basic to simple tasks

[Stone Pokes @astonepokes]

love this article! its one of those succinct ones and it hits the spots. though i didn't really understand the "building a stairs" analogy but i the takeaway i got was "even though things look simple on the outside, remember its only when you dive into it, nuances start to appear and thats when you start to tussle with it and learn"