I setup a private GitLab instance for myself and have been doing some personal coding on the side. It’s been refreshing. I even have used AI with it but I don’t feel the pressure to ship and I have been reviewing and adjusting all the code it generates.

For work I’ve been getting closer and closer to “vibe coding”. I added a testing framework and have the AI do test driven development and generate tests for the code it writes. That at least catches some of the bugs. But the expectation at work seems to have shifted to “if we ship bugs whatever. Well just issue a hotfix”, “bugs used to make it into production before, why is it an issue if they do now”.

When it comes to reviewing PRs they’re 30,000 lines and it’s exhausting to review those day in and day out. I’ve just stopped reviewing them, if something breaks it breaks.

My main concern with this is when something breaks that’s actually important like security or payments related. In fintech that could be a very costly mistake.

I think having an ownership stake also makes a bit of a difference for me. Code I own and care about I actually take the time to refine. Code that if I leave I don’t get to take with me is just code.

I like to think of it as designing mass produced furniture versus designing a custom woodworking project you are going to hand make. The mass produced one has deadlines, manufacturing will probably mess it up, it doesn’t need to be perfect, at the end of the day you won’t even get to own the design you came up with.

The woodworking project doesn’t have a deadline, you can take as much time with it as you want, adjust it, re-cut the parts if they weren’t perfect and you get to keep the blueprints you designed.

The woodworking project probably isn’t scalable or financially viable but there’s no doubt the end product is vastly superior

I have a reolink doorbell and to my surprise it doesn’t require a subscription to keep recordings or view them from your phone. You just need to put an SD card in the camera. I think the subscription is only for cloud backup

No idea about their other cameras though

Personally I would do this

Find an old laptop, desktop, any computer

Put proxmox on it. It’s free and lightweight

Create a Plex LXC. Also free and lightweight. There are community scripts to do this.

You should get pretty good performance on Plex, you can manage the computer through a web browser and it only costs you whatever the cost of finding some hardware to put it on is

I had a surface book at work about a decade ago. Honestly if apple came out with something like that I would maybe consider it. But compared to an iPad this will just feel bulky. And compared to a MacBook does the touchscreen even add anything?