The best time to solve personal problems with those techniques, perhaps. That is not the same as (and might be opposed to) the best time to seek employment or go into business using those techniques; there isn't going to be much of a market for things that your (employer's) potential customers could trivially do themselves.
I tend to call this sort of "I glued a bunch of external services together to make a useful tool" Software Plumbing, not Engineering.
Anyways I think what you've demonstrated that it's actually a really bad time to be a "Duct Tape Engineer" because anyone with a bit of knowhow can coax the AI to build them some pile of loose data pipes and leaky abstractions that appears useful. The market for this sort of software builder is about to get very crowded
I see this sentiment constantly. AI tooling is better than ever and its making building things easier than ever. I have respected coworkers who say that are maxing out multiple $200/month subscriptions.
But I have yet to see any results? Where is the useful stuff?
I don't know what those people are doing, but I built a personal day-to-day notes manager at work, for work, for under $20 in credits. Yes, I could have just used text files but this is less friction which means I'll actually stick to it. Nothing exactly like this already existed. It was built in under a week in small portions of spare time, and it probably would have been more like a month if I had to choose all the libraries and write the whole thing myself.
> I didn’t build Twilio. I didn’t build the Realtime API. I didn’t build Claude Code or MCP.
I didn't write a blog post.
Thank you, this quip really cracked me up. :))
That time in the car could have been spent thinking of something worthwhile enough to write about.
This is just an advertisement, it's not about being a "duct tape engineer", and the various coding agents are already great duct tape engineers, so I can't imagine someone writing a compelling blog post about it anyway.
Agreed. I was expecting something more along the lines of "now is the best time to be somebody capable of glueing together and fixing all the messes that AI agents have created, on top of being aware enough of security issues.
This was the exact opposite.
And when you get home to check out the results, you won't understand any of the code :)
I feel as if a lot of this what Google home (or other "home like" products) could have been and they have failed miserably. As a Google home user I find it can't answer the simplest questions that would require even the hint of an integration within Google's own ecosystem.
All modern SaaS is just other SaaS glued together
This is a completely insane way to check how many emails I have in my inbox I love it.
I hope he does not use it and just wanted to advertise his project to get some Github stars...
> What I wanted was to say “hey Siri, call Claw Phone” and have the audio system in my Toyota become an IDE. So I build it.
Or just focus on driving? Why we are doing it to ourselves? It seems so toxic to fill every possible little moment with… productivity? Is it even productive?
This comment is too emotional but i just felt so sad while reading this
I think you should just focus on the road because most of us are just trying to get home safely to our families. Some of us are even biking beside the road on a lightly-protected bike lane.
I find driving to be one of the most useless ways of spending my time, and if it's for more than half an hour, I do try to figure out some way to increase the value of that time.
I have a weekly commitment that leaves me driving home (~40min) at 9pm, and I usually eat dinner (just a sandwich) while I drive. That also has the advantage of making it so that I'm not eating an hour before bed.
If I know that I need to call someone, I'll usually try to schedule that call while I'm driving. I used to take meetings while driving as well, though I stopped because it was perceived poorly by others.
What's sort of sad is that I can take public transit to all of my regular commitments, and that lets me keep doing something (reading, working, whatever). The schedules are poor, though, and they blow my commute times completely out of the water. For example, I've got a 5-7pm commitment that is a 15-minute drive one way, but if I wanted to go by bus, I'd have to leave at 3:30pm (latest it comes before I need to be there), and get back on it at 8pm (the earliest it comes after I'm done).
In my experience the driving-behavior part of my brain can run virtually autonomously, like how you don't really have to spend 100% of your brain to walk down the street. This means that the words-thinking part of my brain is almost completely free, with the exception of short high-attention spikes for risky maneuvers like onramp merging. This is why listening to music or podcasts is a very popular driving activity. In many places even handsfree phone calls are allowed as long as both hands are available and your vision isn't obstructed.
I would contend that listening to a podcast or being on a handsfree phone call would be on par with the Claw Phone.
I was a workaholic from 18-26. 12+ hour days for months/years on end. It absolutely was not healthy. Toxic is not an inaccurate label.
But I don't regret it. Those years are the foundation of the career I have in my 30's.
Back in those days, when I wasn't at a computer, I was listening to non-fiction audiobooks on business and software. I don't know how I had such motivation bvack then, but I'm glad I capitalized on it while I had it.
In other words, to people reading questioning if they're working too much: it's okay to work hard as long as you're doing it for the right reasons. (I'll purposely leave "right reasons" undefined, that's on you to evaluate)
I'm just generally not a fan of people putting other people down for wanting to be productive. It's okay to work hard, and it's okay if your identity is your work at least for a short time in your life.
> I was a workaholic from 18-26. 12+ hour days for months/years on end. It absolutely was not healthy. Toxic is not an inaccurate label. But I don't regret it. Those years are the foundation of the career I have in my 30's.
I'm glad this worked out for you
As a small counter anecdote I guess, I was this person in my 20s too. I arranged my whole life around work, constantly trying to get that next rung. Then I burned out, quit my job, moved to a new city and was unemployed for a year. My career has been pretty decent since then, but it almost had nothing to do with the hard work in my 20s. It's just that where I was working before didn't reward the hard work and where I am now rewards the work I do even though I don't work nearly as hard as I used to
Anyways. All I'm really saying is if you're going to work yourself to the bone trying to get ahead, make sure to take a breath once in a while and look around. Check in with yourself to ensure that the hard work is actually paying off, building the life you want. Otherwise it's just trading your youth and getting nothing in return
I wonder if these people just need to talk.
I wonder if these people are just avoiding thinking about the tough things in their lives.
I wonder if these people are just scared of being human, so reaching for any distraction they can get.
I've tried to stop taking my phone with me when I go to the bathroom. When I shower. When I go to bed. Because I think we all have these same addictions. There's things that suck in life. But maybe if we put our phones down we can work together to solve these things.
- Written on godelski's iPhone while pooping
I do know a lot of people who love to talk. I don't think it's a character flaw. It's certainly not what I want, and I would die if I had to talk all day, but it's just the way they prefer to communicate. Same way that some people are introverts and some are extroverts, some people like reading paper books and some people like audiobooks.
Yeah but what if I do this so I have the time in my workday to drive to the beach.
I started reading the first part of your comment before the article and thought you were mocking AI bros. I then read the rest of your comment and was sure you're misrepresenting TFA. I clicked on the article and started at it in disbelief.
Driving is a good time to decompress or hammock based engineer imo
Being a hammock-deployed engineer is really the career goal.
I assumed they meant the 15 minutes waiting in between kind of slots. Not... Actually while driving I hope