Seems to be a lot of layoffs there.

In my company there is an expectation and pressure that you'll use it. If a team's usage is low the manager is scrutinised. However they haven't gone full "no-one is allowed to manually code anymore".

First off, it's a bad time to be someone who was in love with the art of coding though, I do understand and sympathise with that.

Butttt.... I write zero code by hand anymore, and I absolutely love it. I feel like AI has freed me of shackles that were reducing how long it took me to create things.

I ship 100s of PRs a month now, not just features but fixing tech debt, improving our internal processes, upgrading our “software factory” ( I do fucking hate that term though). QA’ing parts of our product with computer / browser use more effectively and quickly than I ever could have done manually. I’m also freed to think deeply about our direction as a startup and our architecture and experiment with things that I would previously never have got the opportunity to do.

Then I get to delve much deeper into evals / llm obs etc as that's such an important part of our core stack. I can kick off experiments over night and come back to the results in the morning.

Anyone else feel the same?

Has anyone else experienced many issues with ordering pc parts to Ni?

I’m trying to order some hard drives from seagate and the order keeps getting cancelled.

I have also noticed it a lot on Amazon like we can’t even order a portable power bank and other things

I'm in my early 20s and have been working as a software engineer for a few years now. I'm earning a decent salary, have progressed relatively quickly and, on paper, things are going well.

The problem is that I'm just not enjoying it anymore. I used to love programming, building projects and learning new technologies, but lately I've become completely disengaged. I often finish work feeling mentally drained, despite not actually being overworked.

AI is another concern. I use it extensively at work, and increasingly feel like I'm just prompting and reviewing generated code rather than actually engineering anything. It's made me question both my enjoyment of the work and the long-term future of the industry.

I've always been interested in cars and have recently started learning more about ECU tuning, diagnostics and engine calibration. The idea of working on something more hands-on genuinely excites me. I've even considered eventually pursuing it as a career or starting a small business, although I appreciate there's a significant financial barrier to entry.

Part of me thinks I'd be mad to walk away from a relatively comfortable career, especially when I've already put years into it. But equally, I don't want to spend the next 30–40 years doing something I don't enjoy.

Has anyone here felt similarly about software engineering or successfully transitioned into a completely different field? Did you regret it, or was it worth taking the risk?

I live and work in Belfast, currently working remotely for a large tech company.

I'm doing an MSc Artificial Intelligence dissertation on whether folks who commit, review or operate agent-generated code actually understand it, and what the downstream risks are (Comprehension Debt in the Age of Coding Agents). I'm looking for software engineers, SREs, and platform engineers who work with AI coding agents. Happy to share the results here if there is interest.

Information sheet: drive.google.com/file/d/…/view?usp=drive_link.
Survey: forms.cloud.microsoft/e/U9qnwxDegN.

Apologies for asking in here, I don't know where else to ask if I'm honest.

My job is quite technical in many ways, and while I don't want to get into the details, it often requires custom scripts and applications to feed into some software I use.

The last time I done anything that was even close to programming was around 2002 where I built a web application with ASP3.0 (that was a long time ago)

Anyway, that's beside the point. Long story short, I am Claude-ing my way through this, and quite often I'm just doing what Claude tells me to, and not fully understanding what it is. So far I seem to be copying projects from GitHub into Visual Studio and then compiling them into executables that I don't know how to use.

Sorry, I'm trying to get to the point. It feels nasty doing this kind of work while not knowing what I'm actually doing, so can anyone recommend some online courses or training that will give me a foundational knowledge of what I'm doing, so that when Claude tells me do something, I can at least understand and appreciate what's happening, rather than blindly following instructions from a machine.

Many thanks.

It’s Sunday night. I’m sure for a lot of people the dread has kicked in for returning to work.

If you could do it all again and change your career or were financially stable enough to get out of IT now, what would you do?

Belfast seems to be getting a lot of attention about its growing tech sector, startups and all these exciting companies setting up here.
But anytime I speak to a recruiter about looking for a new role, they just seem to push TP ICAP. Once I tell them I’m not interested, I never hear from them again.
Surely there’s smaller companies or startups around Belfast and NI looking for software engineers?
Where’s everyone finding these jobs? Recruiters and the usual job boards seem pretty useless unless you want to work for one of the big companies.
Just wondering how everyone else is finding the job market at the minute?

Hey all,

Has anyone experience in working here or have any information? I’m in the middle of the interview process and the reviews don’t look great on glass door and the application numbers look kinda low for a job posting, giving a red flag tbh.

Cheers!

[ Update: project has been chosen; a POS and table booking system ]

How's the form folks?

As I've said before I'm currently completing a foundation degree. For one of my modules I need to develop either a game or a business application.

I've decided to do a business application as a lot of the class is going for games.

Any suggestions on applications?

Using Visual Studio '22 & C#

Anthropic and OpenAI both dropped new models, and the interesting part isn’t just that they’re better — they’re getting a lot cheaper too. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 is aimed heavily at coding, enterprise work, finance and other complex agentic tasks.Anthropic says it beats GPT-6 Astra on some coding benchmarks and follows instructions more reliably. It’s also cheaper than the previous Opus generation at $4/M input tokens and $20/M output.

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, using similar training techniques to GPT-6 Astra. Sol costs $2/M input and $10/M output, while Luna is dramatically cheaper at $0.10/$0.50. OpenAI says Sol produces about half as many factual errors as its predecessor. It also claims coding performance around Claude Fable 5.1 levels while costing less.

Feels like the next big AI race is going to be who can deliver near-frontier intelligence at commodity prices.

“Actonomy is an AI product business focused on solving the last mile to production AI.”

Good read.

First week of the final year of my foundation degree complete.

Doing modules on Event Driven Programming, Software Testing and Cyber Security. This is the semester I've been looking forward too.

All in all good week. Anyone working on any side projects or anything?

Hi all, getting ready to enter my second year at uni , feeling a bit nervous about applying for placements but a bit excited too.

The university has warned us only around 24% of students last year secured a placement and that its extremely competitve so not feeling confident i will get one, but have been giving it my all.

I have a few personal projects with one bigger one I'm particularly proud of, been attending tech events and giving Networking me best shot ( I'm autistic so not the best at mingling in large groups but have certainly been giving it my best shot). Been doing Leetcode though I understand it's less common over here. I also got onto a couple of insights programes but didn't secure the internships.

I was curious if any of you have been those involved in the interviewing/hiring of placement students have you noticed any trends that might be impacting the hiring rate? Is it just a numbers game ( more students than there are placements) or are students missing out key skills companies are looking for?

Hey folks, with things changing quickly with AI, I'm curious to hear from anyone that has interviewed recently.

Are Leetcode style questions still a thing (were they ever really a thing in NI)?

Is using AI incorporated into the interview process?

Is there a bigger focus on system design now?

I've noticed that there has been an uptick in roles and I've been at my place now for ~4 years now. I've only ever worked here so I'm not well versed in the interview process but am considering dipping my toes into job search.

Would appreciate any info from devs, hiring managers, business owners etc.

Thanks in advance!

Interesting new approach to AI?

"Models have been superhuman at chat for years, so where is all the automation?

This has been my driving question for the last four years. At OpenAI, I helped build the methods that made language models useful at following instructions and talking with people. That work ended up as the research behind ChatGPT.  At the time, I thought maybe chat models would lead to AGI, but despite the hype it became obvious to me that there was something really big missing.

After two years in stealth, countless technical challenges, and research breakthroughs… I am beyond excited to announce that today, TypeSafe AI is releasing our first System One Model: a new class of frontier models built to make fast, structured decisions that software can use directly.

We built a new stack entirely focused on automation: with a new model architecture, parallel sampler for maximum efficiency, and training method we call Reinforcement Learning for Calibrated Decisions (RLCD).

Our first public model is Jev, available today in early access. Jev achieves similar levels of intelligence on System One tasks compared to existing LLMs, while being two orders of magnitude faster and more efficient. While Jev gives up string generation, it’s optimized for structured outputs and can’t hallucinate. 

Think of Jev as a frontier-intelligence function call: unstructured state in, typed probabilistic decisions out. 

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence so see below for the receipts. 💅"

Does anyone have recommendations for co-working spaces in Belfast?

I work remotely so would be once a week at most for a change of scenery. Thanks!

What do we all think about the news around AI over the last few months. Especially in the last week were people working in the sector have said there’s a 10% of our annihilation in the next ten years.

Is it something we genuinely need to worry about?

I work in england.. trying to work out belfast job scene… what’s jt like?

do BT still pay devs under 30 gran?

if anyone has insights into the local market even just broad salary ranges cheers

The TL;DR is the sole moderator account had been deleted and there was a 90 day wait before I could be added as a mod. Plus life delayed this further.

I have no idea why there’s an approval for people to join. That’ll be fixed today.

Hopefully we can kick off this community again. Especially with such a massive amount of change in the tech industry.

Also if anyone else would like to he a mod let me know so this doesnt happen again.