Veteran engineer on what the AI-coding generation will never feel: 36-hour sprints and elusive bugs
bendee983 · x · 2026-10-27
As the author embraces a world where AI writes most of the code, he looks back at his hardest-earned engineering lessons:
- Working 36 straight hours on a quadtree algorithm that boosted his 3D rendering engine's framerate 4x
- Debugging a nasty concurrency bug that desynced audio and video in a multithreaded streaming app
- Spending days on a slow ERP only to find a misconfigured SQL Server index that degraded past a record-count threshold
He still remembers the dopamine rush of features working on the first try — something the new generation of engineers likely won't experience. Still, he's optimistic there will be new exciting experiences to explore.
More from AGI Musings
- Eric Topol challenges frontier-model study: where's proof of sustained upskilling? — EricTopol · 2026-10-27
- Deep dive: where do p(doom) estimates of AI apocalypse actually come from? — anderssandberg · 2026-10-27
- Pedro Domingos: as intelligence gets cheap, demand will skyrocket — pmddomingos · 2026-10-27
- Apollo chief economist: AI has delivered zero financial payoff outside Big Tech — rseroter · 2026-10-27
- OpenAI acquires Orchestra Bio to bring clinical-trial monitoring agents into drug development — dl_weekly · 2026-10-27
- Do AI agents work better when they pace themselves and take breaks? — EpistemicHope · 2026-10-27