What Actually Makes You Senior  ## Metadata - Author: [[Changelog Master Feed]] - Full Title: What Actually Makes You Senior - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/1fec7dba-03b2-4736-98dd-3a7ef772afc9 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Ambiguity Reduction Defines Seniority** - Senior engineers stand out by reducing ambiguity rather than by ticking off checklist items. - Asking clarifying questions drives clarity, ownership, and better solutions. Transcript: Jerod Santo What actually makes you senior? Here's Matias Lima. Quote, people love to describe senior engineers with a big checklist. Architecture, communication, ownership, leadership, etc. But if you strip away the title, the salary, and the years of experience, there's one core skill that separates senior plus engineers from everyone else, reducing ambiguity. Everything else flows from that. End quote. One of the reasons that senior engineers are worth their salaries is that they ask great questions. Questions like, what problem are we actually trying to solve? Who's the user here and what's painful for them? What are we assuming that might be wrong? And what happens if we're wrong and ship this anyway? Boil these kinds of questions down and they're all about reducing ambiguity, creating clarity, and then, and only then, solving the problem. So, are you a senior engineer? Mateus provided this litmus test. Quote, what happens when someone hands you something abstract fuzzy slash complex? Do you wait for someone else to clarify it for you? Do you start coding immediately and hope for the best? Or do you spend some time upfront making it concrete enough that you and your team can actually execute with confidence? ([Time 0:00:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0cb19ed4-9789-4301-a033-2728adb59812)) - **Filter Search Results To Pre-AI Content** - Use Tega Brain's browser extension to filter search results to before Nov 30, 2022 to avoid AI-generated content. - This ensures returned content was produced before ChatGPT's public release and likely human-authored. Transcript: Jerod Santo Tega Brain created a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome for avoiding AI slop. It's a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT's first public release in November of 2022. Tega says, since the public release of ChatGPT and other large language models, the internet is being increasingly polluted by AI-generated text, images, and video. This browser extension uses the Google Search API to only return content published before November 30, 2022, so you can be sure that it was written or produced by the human hand, end Quote. Is this a long-term, sustainable approach to avoiding AI slop? ([Time 0:02:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5069eba8-c99e-468e-af4f-c448ce7cfd9a)) - **Platform Priorities Can Drive Projects Away** - Andrew Kelley moved Zig off GitHub due to perceived engineering decline and neglected features like Actions and Sponsors. - The move reflects concerns about platform priorities affecting open-source community sustainability. Transcript: Jerod Santo Maybe. Zig moves off GitHub. Zig creator Andrew Kelly explains why he's taking his programming language and going home, I mean, going to Codeberg. Quote, it's abundantly clear that the engineering excellence that created GitHub's success is no longer driving it. Priorities and the engineering culture have rotted, leaving users inflicted with some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework in the name of progress. Stuff that used to be snappy is now sluggish and often entirely broken. Most importantly, actions has inexcusable bugs while being completely neglected. End quote. Andrew says he looks forward to fewer violations of Zig's strict no-LLM slash AI policy, which he believes is at least partially due to GitHub's aggressive pushing of Copilot to help You file issues. GitHub sponsors, on the other hand, might be a big loss for Zig's sustainability efforts. Quote, this product was key to Zig's early fundraising success, and it remains a large portion of our revenue today. I can't thank Devin Zugal enough. She appeared like an angel from heaven and single-handedly made GitHub into a viable source of income for thousands of developers. Under her leadership, the future of GitHub sponsors looked bright, but sadly for us, she too moved on to bigger and better things. Since she left, that product as well has been neglected and is already starting to decline, end quote. Andrew asks that all current GitHub sponsors supporters consider moving their donations to every.org. ([Time 0:02:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5a555a71-0f49-4296-8939-728c20f9d965)) - **LLMs Shift, Not Remove, Complexity** - 'Vibe coding' via LLMs shifts complexity rather than eliminating it; prompt complexity can rival project complexity. - Serious programming languages exist to manage inherent system complexity, not to complicate things needlessly. Transcript: Jerod Santo No free lunch in Vibe Coding. Matias, Akila, share some deep thoughts on the question that we're all trying to answer these days. Can Vibe Coding get us there? Quote, in theory, you can produce software with a single prompt, yes. But at what point does a prompt become complex enough to qualify as a project on its own right? Does the whole scheme merely transform programming complexity into prompt engineering complexity? The way I see it is that LLMs are another step in the saga of machine-human interaction. It may even be a revolutionary step, something akin to the introduction of the graphical user interface. This development, however, is orthogonal to complexity. Complexity is not a matter of implementation, but an inherent mathematical property of the whole engagement. End quote. Complexity, it turns out, is where the rubber meets the proverbial road. It can be managed, but not altogether removed. And you know what's good for managing complex systems? Humans wielding programming languages. Quote, serious programming languages are not obfuscations. They are not intimidating or difficult on purpose. It's quite the opposite. These are best efforts at making an extremely complex thing as simple as possible. And however you tackle this, the same complexity will be present in one form or another and has to be managed in one way or another. ([Time 0:05:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/500e60a2-48d6-4b93-be7f-e59f23bcaf67)) - **SSD Data Retention Is Time-Limited** - Consumer SSDs (TLC/QLC) can lose data if left unpowered over long periods; 'data at rest' can still be at risk. - Regular bootups and tested backups mitigate retention risks for most users. Transcript: Jerod Santo Your SSD data isn't as permanent as you think. Today I learned our SSD data at rest is data at risk. Quote, unlike hard drives that magnetize spinning disks to store data, SSDs modify the electrical charge in NAND flash cells to represent 0 and 1. NAND flash retains data in underlying transistors even when the power is removed, similar to other forms of non-volatile memory. However, the duration for which your SSD can retain data without power is the key here. Most consumer SSDs use only TLC or QLC NAND, so users who leave their SSDs unpowered for over a year are risking the integrity of their data. End quote. In practice, this is a non-issue as long as you boot up your machine every once in a while. Also, it's not a big deal because you have a robust and recently tested backup system, right? ([Time 0:06:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5c2a1fd3-a99b-4fc3-a880-6f7541292483)) - **Paid Praise In The Classifieds** - Jim Nielsen paid to share praise in the Changelog classifieds as a personal endorsement. - The classifieds section highlights community announcements and paid messages alongside projects. Transcript: Jerod Santo Changelog News Classifieds. Our new classified section is a great opportunity to share your startup, passion project, opinion, big idea, upcoming event, or whatever with your fellow 25,000 readers and 30,000 Listeners. Feedback welcome. Here's this week's classifieds. Augment Codes Augie now works in Zed, NeoVim, and Emacs thanks to Agent Client Protocol. Learn more at AugmentCode.com. WarpStream, diskless Kafka with zero inter-AZ costs at warpstream.com. Private Captcha, a privacy first, self-hostable, proof of work Captcha solution at privatecaptcha.com. Noster, really decentralized social network protocol with a chance of working at Noster.com. That's N-O And Jim Nielsen. Hi, I'm Jim Nielsen. I love the changelog. So much, in fact, I'll pay to say it in the classifieds. ([Time 0:07:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c87421dd-c980-496c-8111-2992c0ea659d))