Jan 15

 A couple of useful days(ish) of work. Rare these days.

Progressed the AI work on by implementing caches on processed responses, saving us half the expensive AI calls, and, got round to finally putting in systems to cope with the utterly ridiculous things that are trying to be shoved through AI context. 40+ page documents of text walls. Needless to say the AI takes a long time to think about it, and blows through token limits like no tomorrow.

The upshot from this is that a serial queueing system becomes mandatory. Turning beautiful parallel scalability into ugly serial bottlenecking. But. This is the reality of trying to shove an elephant through the eye of a needle. You need pushback. Before the elephant is wedged in the needle.

This mimics way way older systems I have designed in the past that take that whole offloaded job, processed on server cluster, come back later kinda paradigm. Some of our major clients have been running that architecture for more than 15 years at this point - processing literally millions of requests with bullet proof stability. It's one of our key products that I single handedly built. A proper piece of enterprise gear. 

The AI stuffs needs similar. Except. It doesn't scale sideways. It keeps workers to a minimum, or even one. It's not so much that the AI endpoints can't deal with it. It's that you don't want to be blowing that much money and processing power on it. And the AI endpoints are configured accordingly to put shots across your bows when you're starting to burn a million tokens in seconds. Slow down.

Of course. The reason this exists at all for this current work is the absolute car crash of up front specification and no one - including the business - having a fucking clue as to what they're doing apart from the magical thinking of, Just Make It Work AI style. Yes. But. Guys. You can't expect to throw a 40 page document that is text dense to an AI and make it work easy peasy. That's. Expensive. And not what you want. What you actually want. Is pulling useful data from more form like documentation. Not reading someones goddamn essay on War and Peace.

Communicating these points is like teaching pigs to sing however. As brutal as that statement is. It's the truth. God knows I have tried. But. For our work. Clients. Our ethos. It ends up just being easy to show people rather than tell people. The unfortunate upshot of that is, someone, me, gets to code all possibilities, all ridiculousness, and make it robust. Just to prove an obvious fucking point that no, you wouldn't want to work that way anyway.

Thus has it always been.

Good IT it isn't.

But it definitely is sellable. Because it makes every compromise to make it as dumb as rock at the pointy end so even the most intellectually challenged client gets it. Making IT simples. Overly simples.

It puts a lot of stress and strife in my life.

You have to pay the piper somewhere.

I also had a mini meltdown at Andy when he tried subtly moving the goalposts.

Really. It was just an accumulation of things. No one doing their job right - setting up one of our newbies to fail without any thought of the process. The continual fail to get any kind of fucking spec or test case documents for the AI project. The continuing grumbling shit show that is devops. The ever rolling pain in the fucking arse that is our not senior "team leader senior dev" and his diva ways.

It is all, as I explained a bit more calmly to Andy the following day, sand in your crack. One on their own. Is frustrating. Add them together. It's death by a thousand cuts. Constant sand in your knickers. And just indicative of things limping along with chewing gum and sticky tape.

And I still have to be the fucking only adult in the room. Still.

But most of all. It's frustration with myself. I cannot burn at the rate I used to. Once upon a time I would take all that friction, all that bullshit, and a slew of people doing a half assed job, apply my elbow grease, and get it all done. I don't need anyone else to be anything but a shitshow.

But those days are gone. I can't do that shit anymore. And I get frustrated with myself. And I am also aware it's only a matter of time before those things break. It is very unsustainable.

We have done well in the last 18 months to move mostly past that stupid reliance on me. But. It still comes up. Sometimes in storms of concentrated bullshit, one thing after another. And it's not just coding. It's everything. Even down to just planning, or writing documents, or just basic fucking thinking. Breathe in. Breathe out. Why. Do I have to tell people how to breathe.

It's that learned helplessness thing. And also rot creep.

I did actually go through the expert theory thing with Andy today as well.

The whole. I have been wrong to date about what an expert is. The weapon of last resort. The place where the buck stops. The doer and fixer of all things no matter what.

No. Wrong.

Advice. Design. Help. But NOT the unsustainable resolver of every boo boo you have. The systems. And people. Need to fail if they are going to fail. Even if the expert could save the day. Basically. Sustainability from your expert cohort. Not continual heroic saves that enable learned helplessness and a continuance of declining standards.

It's an interesting concept to wrap your head around. At least. It is for me. Perhaps everyone else just gets this.

Of course. Telling this to Andy is also somewhat a difficult thing. It's like the crack dealer telling the crack addict, that crack is bad for you. Lets stop.

Anyway.

Some useful work done.

And Andy as ever was understanding. And agreed with my points. This is one of his strengths. Not to be underestimated. We also talked a little about the.. difficulties of somethings going on in the office. We talked about some management difficulties in office which I'm not going to get into. But typically I am understanding of such things. And will stick up for people where there is reasonable cause. And we do a terrible job at supporting people. Sometimes no job at all. It is, in my estimation, one of the reasons we burn people out. We expect an awful lot from people. To reach above and beyond their capabilities with little to no hand holding. In some instances. It's just setting people up to fail. And at the very least. Giving them a hell of an anxious trial by fire.

Both myself and Andy have worked in places that were like that. We both had one boss that was quite like that. For some years there was definitely a move fast and break things approach that expected a *lot* from people.

It has been a feature of my entire IT career however that I've always had a lot of expectations put on me. I've never in my life been "just a developer". Ever. It's always been a very multi role kind of career, where for much of it I was expected to be as productive as a full time dev AND do a whole bunch of other roles as well with cherries on top. From analysis work to project management, to r & d, to wrangling clients. The works.

On the plus side. It makes you phenomenally well rounded. On the down side. It's a meat grinder. It is very far away from a happy embedded corp developer who takes one work task off the stack and then submits a pull request. But perhaps that also fits with the fact that for a lot of my IT career I have been a consultant and shifted perpetually between many clients, typically multiple at once. That also tends to give you a huge grounding, because you see so many varied projects, techs and industries.

It's also one of the key bits of experience that most of the devs that go through our hands lack. They are not that caliber of dev. This gives us a little bit of friction in our consultancy work where there is a bit of an expectation that you at least are half aware with big architecture and strategy and all sorts, and aren't just a shut in developer working from the supplies closet.

Tricky.

Anyway.

Meh.

Yesterday, perhaps predictably. I crashed out. After work. After ranting at Andy. Immediate crash and burn.

I went to bed at 6pm. And didn't move until 13 hours later give or take.

And during those 13 hours I felt like shit.

Today I have done quite a bit of work again whilst still feeling like shit. I feel. Ah ha ha. Flu like. But without the temperature. And if I even do anything even slightly physical - stand up to make food. I crash out. Quickly. And hard.

Today has been one of those operating along the absolute bottom kind of days. I can feel how ill I am. I Can feel how fucked up my eyes are. They feel. Horribly punched - they don't seem to recover at all anymore. Just. Slowly worse. But remarkably. My brain has kept firing through this. And I have bashed out some code.

Mid afternoon now. My brain is foggy, and headachey. I am exhausted. Tired. Eyes are punchy. I feel mildly ill if I lie still. And quite ill if I move. Sigh.

Situation Normal All Fucked Up. SNAFU.

I would still, as ever, take that pill.

And end it all. Right now. If it was there.

In the meantime....