I've seen a lot of posts like this one, but this is the first to encapsulate how I feel so well.

Honestly, I don't really know what to do. I spent my whole life (so far; I'm still very young) falling in love with programming, and now I just don't find this agent thing fun at all. But I just don't know how to find my niche if using LLMs truly does end up being the only way for me to build valuable things with my only skills.

It's pretty depressing and very scary. But I appreciate this article for at least conveying that so effectively...

Could I ask, what did you love about programming that you now don't find this agent thing fun at all.

I'm genuinely curious, I feel very differently and excited about this agent thing.

Asking because unlike a lot of other commentary, this struck me as being more about the act itself than being depressed/anxious for financial reasons, etc

I love the act of writing code, it clicks well with me. I love the feeling of my brain solving problems, figuring out how something works, and then finally understanding it. I love debugging. I love having built something that people love, solely wrought by my own fingers.

I got into programming because the act of spinning a web of code just feels like what I'm designed to do.

Vibe coding definitely has some of that, but it feels so detached from any understanding of the computer itself. I feel like I'm bossing someone around — and I would never want to be a non-coding manager. I'm curious, how/why do you feel so different?

(Obviously the financial side is stressful too, but I feel like I'm in a good spot to figure that out either way.)

I guess I gotta write one about CPUs now ;)

No problem really, I think most people want to bootstrap quickly from the low level into the higher abstractions that they care about, few people want to stay down in the cpu itself.

check again!

somewhat better now! added a bit more concurrency. lesson learned: use tokio next time

It's like when your uncle squeezes you at Christmas. You're glad to see him again, but it's just a liiiitttleee... too... much... for... your... lungssss,.,.,.,

Anecdotally, I've run a bunch of traceroutes and reverse traceroutes to different locations and they tend to follow the same AS paths — although sometimes the traceroute will surface more routing through your ISP (especially from college networks). In general you are correct, though, and I would love to explain more about hot-potato vs. cold-potato (and other interesting routing decisions) in the future. Either way, the results the reverse traceroute provides are good enough for the purposes of explaining the internet, IMO!

I did a traceroute to how-did-i-get-here.net, and it went through a completely different network to the one they reported for the reverse.

Yup. Those paths are cached bidirectional.

check the html :)

Nice!

oh yeah i saw this! newer than the website though :)

This is awesome! To anyone interested in learning more about this, I wrote https://cpu.land/ a couple years ago. It doesn't go as in-depth into e.g. memory layout as OP does but does cover multitasking and how the code is loaded in the first place.

I love cpu.land! Thanks for creating such a fun resource.

Had the pleasure of helping rack drives! Nothing more fun than an insane amount of data :P

Thanks for helping!!!