> But the risk is that someone else will go even lower than your offer until the role can be done internally by another person using an AI agent.
I have assessed various AI models & agents. I don't think I can be replaced by them, so I feel safe on that end.
That being said, I don't think my potential employers fully understand that.
> The point is, most businesses that are non-quant and non-big tech, non-big AI do not want to pay the extortionate level of taxes in the UK and it makes SWEs in the UK look very expensive and the jobs + office move off-shore.
Yes, this is where contract work came particularly handy. But the government made a big deal about taking them offshore due to IR35 pushing them out
> What’s funny is that many companies hiring “AI engineers” don’t really know what they’re doing. I’ve had interviews where they openly said: “We don’t really have AI expertise, but we know we need AI.” That’s how things are right now. It’s both good and bad. They can’t really judge your skills properly — but that also means your chances of passing are higher.
A lot of money is being thrown around at AI, it's a good time to open a company :) I agree.
> As for the Ruby/Rails world — I’m honestly very disappointed. The market feels completely saturated. There are too many experienced engineers competing for too few roles. Being good is no longer enough.
Ruby/Rails, and other platforms NEED deep AI integration. That wave is coming.
I am surprised that people don't do a rails new for their new startups. I still see it as the king of web frameworks.
> With LLMs, the world changed. You take the best tools available. Next.js with standardized React components instead of Stimulus and Turbo. Hosted auth instead of rolling your own. When I needed to integrate something like Clerk, I just dropped in a component and moved on. There are tons of ready-made solutions in the React ecosystem.
Show me those ready made solutions? I haven't used them commercially so I can't vouch for them
> Now compare that to Ruby. Are there modern AI libraries? Yes, technically. Are they well-maintained? Not really. You’re often dealing with abandonware. LangChain officially supports Python and TypeScript — not Ruby. And like it or not, AI today is happening in Python.
True, I should probably ship something in Python and just add that to my inventory.
> The more time you spend clinging to Ruby/Rails, the further behind you get. That’s just reality. My advice is simple: if you can, move on. The opportunity window in AI is wide open right now, but it won’t stay that way forever. 2026 is probably the last really good entry point.
> I'd also recommend looking beyond startups and pure software/tech companies. There are many businesses in eg manufacturing, or in less mainstream locations, that struggle to hire decent devs.
That's where I'm aiming for.
I know there's a million companies that would benefit from my work and can pay well, but they're just not the ones that find you on Linkedin, or post on Hacker News
That was back then when we were in our infancy as an industry and everything was about spitting out some cool graphics in less than 100 lines of JavaScript
Right now(specially looking at the world economy) It's all about getting yourself a nice, stable placement.
I haven't stopped hacking away, but I need an income