"I suck" -ThePrimeagen

Before I show you my talk on what is my value that I gave at Omicron, I wanted to give like a little bit of a precursor, a little bit of kind of setting up here so you understand what's happening. So, Omicron just got done taking place in New York. The conference was awesome. The talks were awesome. They're all going to be on YouTube. I highly recommend you checking them all out. It's about kind of the celebration of computers, about our interest in it, and how they're actually really fun and like our current future is actually a pretty cool future where you can build anything and things are more accessible than they've ever been. I'd really like to thank Dell for sponsoring Omicron and making it possible for me and the team to come out there and really make this event awesome. This computer is absolutely fantastic. This is the best laptop I've ever used a Linux on ever. The battery life is incredible. It's been on all morning and I'm still at 90%. And holy cow, look at this OLED screen. It is so good looking. You see Chrome running and I'm not out of battery? The magical world we live in. Thanks, Dell. There were a couple few audio problems, so if the audio does go in and out, don't worry, it gets fixed or some of it might be a little bit missing. So, it's really just like a peek behind the curtains into what I am thinking. So, love to hear your thoughts, your comments, if you're feeling the same way. Am I just full of crap? Let me know in the comments. Hope you enjoy it. I get a lot of messages and the messages go something along the lines of, "Hey, you know, I've been working for 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years. Hey, I'm in college right now. What do I do? Like, what's the changing environment, how things are moving? Like, I am genuinely freaked out. I don't know where things are going. Is everything I've done for the last 1, 5, 10, 15, 20 years is it worthless? Am I worth less now? And this is a question I just see like constantly to the point where at least multiple times a month someone's like saying they're going to kill themselves over this. Like, it's like insane messages going out there because people are, you know, I think a lot of people feel this kind of feeling. And so I guess in some sense I sympathize with that because how could you not, right? Like, I don't know if you've been on Twitter in the last couple days, but there's a very aggressive strain of AGI going on right now. And we're achieving it daily at this point. So, I I'd highly recommend a good social distancing for 24 to 48 hours to help slow the spread because it's going to be achieved several more days in a row if we do not stop. But for me, I actually feel it quite a bit in a sense that I feel this exact same sense of loss and I feel this confusion and I things and for the last 6 months I've kind of been in a you know, a bit of a funk. Shall I say if TJ I don't know where TJ went, but TJ, several phone calls to him being like, "TJ, I'm confused right now. Feeling a little control. And uh and the reason being is for the last 20 years I'm not There's a handful of days, but pretty much I've done 6,000 days of programming in the last 20 years. I don't know how many hours that equates to, but it's a lot of hours. I'm not that quick with math. Uh Of those 20 years, 14 of them have been spent doing Vim motions of some form, whether it's an intelligent J or a God bless my soul, I did VS Code for 6 months. Sorry, Maria. Uh I did a lot You know, I did a lot of it, right? And then I eventually landed home in Neovim. It was a great time. But and so I look at that and I realized something kind of strange, I guess. See, you guys were out smoking with cigarettes, partying, drinking grape juice, and I was out sharpening my blade, honing my skills, speed running Vim tutor, becoming the best you can possibly be at that program. You guys were probably having premarital sex. I was learning programming languages, okay? I knew Go, JavaScript, C, Rust, Zig, even some Jai at one point. Uh I've done I've done them all. And obviously this is an Arch Linux conference. I can tell a lot of chads out there. And so you guys were out sculpting your bodies, lifting heavy weights. No. I was becoming the ultimate generalist. I could build anything. I I at one point I had to build a Pac Perturber, sending something that looked like G streamer so we could test the latency from JavaScript to when audio hits HDMI and making sure that, hey, if we're going to be doing live video games, are we going to hear pops, right? Like, I have just been doing this thing over and over again, building developer tools, taking some idea and how do you make it into something people can look at and feel and test. And well, have I invested poorly? It's a question I keep asking myself over and over again. Have I invested poorly in my future? I guess in some sense it feels like that, right? I think that a lot of people can look at that and say, "Well, no one's So, I actually don't know what I just said there and the rest of the audio blips, which are another six of them throughout the next 10 minutes, I can generally guess what I'm about to say. From here on out you will see one of the you know, the old Jackie Chan movies, how the lips didn't quite match up to the dubs. Yeah, you There will be dubs going on. That's not worth as much anymore. And so I kind of feel a little bit like Jim Cramer. You know, like maybe there should be like an inverse prime index fund out there because it's way better. And so you know, perhaps this is just like part of being on X. You know, it's not necessarily the most healthy platform to be able to have any sort of correct perspective. It is just a platform to have a perspective. Speaking of perspective, have you guys heard of introspection? Figured at least one person would like that. Marc Andreessen out there, I'm so sorry if you ever hear I introspected by accident. I won't do it again, I swear. I'm not giving in to communism, don't worry. Uh so last 6 months I have been doing this. I have been introspecting and I have I keep asking myself the same question, which is do I have value? What is my value? Is my work history less? Is is like my time now worth less because of what the changes and all this? And I I know that a lot of people are feeling the exact same thing. So, I just have to answer that question. What is my value? And for a long time I guess I kind of gave into this notion or I started thinking about this notion or testing this notion like, is my value just having taste? This is that fancy word VCs keep using. I don't really know what it means, but apparently what that means is that your value as an engineer is how nice you can make a website look or maybe how nice your command line flags can be eaten by Claude Bot because that's what's going to happen, right? Or sorry, not Claude Bot. Sorry for the trademark infringement, Dario. Please don't come after me. Open Claw. Uh and so is that it? Is that Is that what we are as engineers now? Just taste? Just making sure things look nice? Make circle not square? Maybe. No, I mean, I hope not, but that's that's what it kind of seems if you read a lot of the writings right now. I guess another thing I thought about is like, okay, is it lines of code? Because during my peak, during my my heyday, non-Adderall supported amount of lines of code could be like 15,000 in a week. I could I could type really fast. I can Vim hard, man. But then Gary Tan does like 37,000 in a day. And he goes like 7 days a week. Like, there's no way I can compete on lines of code. So, my value it can't it can't be in that either because that I mean, I'm getting mugged left and right by a guy who dressed in a lobster outfit. Like, that's not it's not going to work out for me. Um so this is kind of the difficult part of the talk. I didn't really know how to do this. Um mostly because the transition is really bad. Trans we're going to do We're going to talk about a time when I was much, much younger. It was changing a job. I just got done by purchasing a house in Bozeman, Montana. Okay, if you don't know anything about Bozeman, Montana, it's now like Beverly Hills of Montana. Very expensive. It's ridiculous. But I bought mine on a handshake deal for 205. Look at it in the books, that's it's crazy it's crazy different now. Uh and part of that is that I lived in this, you know, nice little house outside of town and I had a nice job. My wife actually worked at the company called Zoot where she learned how to use Vim before me. Huh? Hubba hubba. That was crazy. That was very very attractive. Um I I hope she liked that. She might not like what I just said there. Okay, anyways. So, I got an offer to go work at a different company. And this company ultimately, I would say, became the company that shaped who I am as an engineer. I think a lot of people can kind of remember that one company that maybe pushed them a lot harder, did all that, you know, however that looks. And for me, I had that company. It's called WebFilings at the time, now known as Workiva. But I didn't know that at the time, right? When you take a job, you don't know how a job's going to be. And I I was sitting there thinking like, I By the way, I'm really bad with debt. I hate debt. And so just like sitting there, I was just freaking out. I just bought my first house. Now I'm going to a job. Am I going to be good enough for this job? I was just like so in the zone, focused on just these things that could possibly happen going to a new job. And I remember, I was I was my wife was right here and I was just walking We're walking to our neighbors and I was just so focused on it. And for the first time in my lifetime life hit me in the face. And by life I mean a 2 by 4 that happened to be sticking out of a truck. And due to the fact that I was so in my head and so upset, I walked directly into it and I was laying on the ground and I was shocked. It was a very shocking experience. And that was actually the thing that snapped me out of it. Surprisingly enough, when you're super pissed getting hit in the head with a 2 2 by 4. Slightly recommend it, but it has to be on accident. But that moment I realized like I was so focused on a future that I was crafting out of a narrative that I don't even know that I didn't see the actual real and obvious danger directly in front of me. I made up dragons that didn't even exist until I was laying on the ground. And kind of that that same thing happened to me again just recently. Sorry. Which was I had the same kind of two-by-four moment. And so, for the last 6 months, I genuinely have been very, very worried. Uh I've asked the same question, what is my value? What am I doing here? Um I for the last 2 years have had a couple medical issues. It's just like everything doesn't seem to be lining up like it normally has for some portion of my life. And so, it's been it's been difficult. And my second two-by-four moment, if you will, was I saw this tweet. And I'm not going to name names, and I don't want to make fun of anyone for this. But, the tweet looks something like Man, I'm trying to solve this really trivial issue. Has anyone figured this out yet? And then there's a screenshot. And the screenshot was Claude or some one of the one of the many robots having its internal monologue. And inside the internal monologue, it said, "Hey, forking Chromium is a really interesting question. We should pursue dot dot dot dot dot." And I thought, "How do you build a web project in which the result of whatever you've made choices of as engineers led you to forking Chromium? This is the worst decision I've ever seen. There's nothing trivial about it. Modern 2023 to 2025 hardware takes 6 hours to compile the project. Like, this is not a How did you get here? Like, this is insanity." And then it just kind of dawned on me there that all the decisions I've made and learned and earned along the way, those only get, you know, if AI is to be a true multiplier, then every one of those little decisions actually do matter. Because if you don't, you're forking Chromium. Again, it is a terrible idea. Do not fork Chromium for any reason. Like, there's very few reasons you should do that. And I just sat I just sat there, and I was like, "You can't explain to a date like you're not going to just magically end up with a Boyce-Codd normalized database. Yeah, shout out Boyce-Codd. Where's my Boyce-Codd boys at? Anyways, but you're not going to just end there unless if you know what it is. You're not going to know why you should break that. You're not going to know why you should use standard in and standard out versus a web server. You're not going to know why you should make all these individual choices and these these decisions, they compound over and over again. It's not some sort of like, 'Oh, you have a five end problem.' No, you have a two to the end problem. And every one of these just get more and more weighty. And so, yeah. Maybe you use Neovim and open code. Trad coder, I don't know if you know that, but I'm a big fan of it. But, I could see why generation of code is super fantastic. Because if it works like with TJ, you could just have magical next to Machi theme just come popping up, and that's like super fantastic. And there's a lot of problems that are just simply really, really well understood and documented 5,000 times. built another parser. I don't think anybody needs to build another parser except in bash. Am I right? Uh Sorry, this is very stupid. Don't don't worry about that. Don't Ignore that. I forgot where I was. It was very funny though. I um And so, with that, it's like I guess the the big two takeaways is what do you do if you have all these skills? Well, even if you don't somehow we do get to this future where you're never typing another character. It is actually so valuable to have experience. If anything, if the cost of a line of code has dramatically dropped, then the cost of the right line of code has dramatically increased. It has to. Because that means everything is free. And when you have a bunch of options, like, who here's made their own pizza? Your first time you make your own pizza, it's terrible. You're like, "Dude, I love onions. Oh my gosh, SAUSAGE IS GREAT. OH, I LOVE PINEAPPLE. HEY, I love" And then all of a sudden you just have every ingredient underneath the sun on your pizza, and you're like, "This is the worst pizza I've ever made in my entire lifetime." Cuz when you have every option, it actually becomes dramatically harder to pick the right option. And so, for those that don't have skill, I'm throwing around a hot new term. Probably get this on on some of those highfalutin podcasts out there, but toxic productivity. You don't have to be productive at all times. Like, earning experience is more valuable than completing something instantaneously. Like, I think there's this mindset or this idea that if you're not continuously showing having some sort of end result that you can click or do something, then you haven't been productive. But, I can tell you the biggest and most influential moments in my life have not been from making something that's clickable, but from failing over and over again to understand why we do something a certain way. And sure, I could have read the friendly manual. But, I decided to save 5 minutes of reading the friendly manual with 6 hours of debugging, and I learned a lot from that. And so, please, if you're new, like, there's still so much hope. There's still so much cool things. We live in a world where you can actually be like, "Write me an OCaml parser." And like, that actually can happen. You can just do that now. That's neat. Even though you wouldn't want to maintain it, you can still do that. That's super cool. And so, I don't want people to get lost in this weird kind of world we have crafted where everything happens to be the end of the world. AGI's being achieved. Dario, once again I said, "Coding will be gone now in 12 months." It happened again. Can you believe that? It's just like, "Well, maybe. But, good decision-making can't be gone. Like, I don't see how you can get from A to B without someone with good decision-making. And I don't mean taste, I mean actual engineering decision-making that goes into this. Why should you pick this data format versus that data format? Why should you serialize? Why should you do There's I mean, The decisions are endless. And so, that's all I really wanted to say. Because that's how I got over my last 6 months of swirling around. And I know that a lot of people are swirling around. And I hope you realize the fun have and the goodness. And finally, I'll I'll I'll end with a DHH quote. It's fun to be competent. [applause]