I would prefer to replace myself, yes.

I have a 37 year work history of finding ways to replace myself and folks like me. I already offer my clients free Ai consulting on the side to help them replace me. I'm already onto the "next thing" that will replace Ai in the headlines anyway.

I don't own a computer. I am not a programmer. I do everything from my iPhone.

In the past 10 years, I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on human programmers to create 3 web apps. Zero of them ever were finished. ZERO.

I used Grok AI to create 5 web apps. 3 of them were monetized almost immediately and have paying clients. All 5 have passed security checks that look for bugs or hack entry points.

One of the 3 monetized web apps took me all of 30 minutes using Grok, on an airplane, using my iPhone. I was able to download the files and upload them to a web server and the site was live. Literally 30 minutes and that website has created thousands of dollars of passive income.

I use vibe coding DAILY to make spreadsheets better for me and clients (I am not in IT). I use vibe coding DAILY to come up with cool functions for my web apps that people pay me to use.

The biggest three issues I've experienced in years are:

1) different formulas and way of doing them than Excel, so there's compatibility issues.
2) The UI is hideous on Mac (and Windows, presumably) at this point.
3) It's very slow to start (on Mac and Linux, haven't used Windows in years).

It's my go-to when I need to do things that I can't do in google sheets/docs, at this point.

I sympathize with your situation - this used to be a hard scenario to deal with, and there are a couple things you can do to make an upgrade break... but I don't understand how, frankly. I've not had an install break that wasn't my own fault in years (eg. specifying an arbitrarily small /boot partition).

apt update && apt upgrade, update the sources.list to the next major release; apt update && apt-get dist-upgrade -y and.... wait. Accept all defaults (unless you know better).

This has been foolproof for years for me.

The pay is fantastic, and as most of the Amazon employees working in an office are AWS employees working in "Sales", it's great for people who can babble and bullshit but with no real skills - particularly as their sales people don't work on quota and can do a very large number of things that contribute to looking busy but accomplish nothing. Even skilled people struggle to get anything done there due to their "gotta follow the rules" formulaic "success criteria" culture. This is partially why you end up with a lot of Indians working there.

Think of the worst parts of writing reports or doing homework in school - that's working at Amazon.

Let's not conflate things here.

It's trivial to click the "I've got a disability" box when applying for a job, and it doesn't necessarily mean you're disabled or have a disability, except per the definition of law.

Eg. things like alcoholism, prior or current, ADHD/autism, prior cancer, anxiety disorders, and/or being morbidly obese.

Also covered under the ADA, would be something like ripping a tendon or breaking a knee in a sporting activity and needing to (temporarily, albeit for more than several weeks) walk with a cane or need other special considerations.

I don't NOT have sympathy for a lot of these, but they're hardly a basis on which a person shouldn't be able to come to the office.

(That also doesn't change the fact that these RTO efforts are draconian and stupid, and 100% aren't being used for honest purposes by Amazon.)

That reminds me of an actual deployment. USAF, our backup generator had a blown regulation system. Our solution was literally that whenever we had to go onto it, we'd station an airman at the generator manually turning the adjustment knobs to keep it at 240V@60Hz.

I almost wonder if that's actually a dude who was on the flight or someone taking advantage of an opportunity to get in the news.

Seems so unlikely.

I own a tiny indie studio in Chicagoland and my peers own the some of the huge studios in Chicagoland.

Cinespace is dead right now. It has ONE show active. The other studios are so dead that they're secretly hosting bar mitzvahs and pickleball tournaments for $1500 a day just to pay property taxes.

My studio is surprisingly busy but I'm cheap and cater to non-union folks with otherwise full time jobs.

That's a bit like asking a new company with heavy manufacturing infrastructure to turn a cash profit the first year.

The whole idea is that with the base software done, they keep adding the extra features necessary for more people to file, with more and more able to each year.

I've started leaving off the prepositions, pronouns and such from sentences, and my 'pro' writing is starting to look more like casual writing - more terse. "You've got to lean into it." becomes "Lean into it."

Or I'll just resort to what an idiotic feminist college English lit prof used to call "antiquated 19th century writing style": writing long, syntactically complex but linguistically communicative sentences which convey a complex yet nuanced thought, something AI will absently and superfluously munge.

Often these are interspersed.

In the long run, we'll lose out on more people being able to do the "hard" things. Sort of like when schools start hiring on non-excellence criteria, you end up with students who can't do the coursework and the field suffers as a result. That's what's happening here.

In 5, 10 years when people are like "we fucked up, quick, hire good developers again" - or good voice actors, or good whatever - there won't be anyone in line to take those jobs. They'll have moved on - either finding different things to pay their way, and are no longer looking, or they'll have fully checked out. Either way, they won't be looking for the jobs. You'll probably have a mess of H1B types take their role instead.

It's going to be a huge mess.

Is this software company, by coincidence, trying to be purchased or IPO? Because that's the kind of behavior that you see before a company's founders bank out...

Every single one of Amazon's hardware products is used to siphon your data and bilge pump ads and product placements to you.

You can argue that's true for all of Amazon's properties at this point.

They've become a behemoth of a company like Microsoft did in the 90s - starting in earnest about 2 years ago, based on what I've seen from those who work there. Their culture has changed and the leadership has all but abandoned the leadership principles.

Okay, I think that you're too close to the experience - you made it, why can't others?
Basically, I'm taking more of a statistical approach - in the sense that for each obstacle you put in front of a bunch of students, a percentage will fail. You don't want to give students any more excuses to fail than you can.

I think that I 'm not going to use high school scores as a hiring metric, period. Heck, not even a college degree.

The real question would be whether de-emphasizing homework and weekly testing improves performance or not. "Too much testing" is a refrain I heard a lot a few years ago.