From what I've heard, what few interviews there are for software engineers these days, they do have you use models and see how quickly you can build things.
The interviews I’ve given have asked about how control for AI slop without hurting your colleagues feelings. Anyone can prompt and build, the harder part, as usual for business, is knowing how and when to say, ‘no.’
Software development hiring is terrible right now, but hiring has been pretty slow in general. We gained 2 million jobs in 2024 and only 500,000 in 2025.
Autopilot / FSD was a mess. Autopilot is very old tech and people confusing "self driving" with it, which it's not. We'll see how many pony up for FSD, but I think the play is to force people to try it.
They handed people free trials before, which is using the carrot and not the stick. Around where I live, with HW3, the last trial made it clear that it was just not worth it at all, as there's key areas around my house where intervention was mandatory.
I can tell you the light rail in Austin is a complete failure. There was some ridership before the pandemic, but after a few years, the numbers are dismal. They've covered the windows with ads, so you can't even tell how empty they are inside. Meanwhile, they crisscross the city, constantly blocking streets with rail guards just to shuffle a handful of people north and south.
I think you’re thinking of streetcars—trains that share right of way with cars. Light rail often has its own right-of-way with priority over cars. (That’s what the crossing guards are for.)
> Light rail often has its own right-of-way with priority over cars
It’s still at grade. Priority is meaningless if there is a car in the way when the guards come down. And those guards, in interrupting traffic, are annoying to drivers. (I’d also point out that the line between trams, street cars and light rail is ambiguous. It’s an American term describing principally European infrastructure.)
> Priority is meaningless if there is a car in the way when the guards come down.
This possibility is so far outside my experience I can only think your perspective has more to do with emotion than logic. Maybe it happens more often in your city than mine.
I'm not sure how you'd measure the effectiveness of light rail/trams vs buses - a hybrid of average journey duration, number of passengers, and I suppose some ROI type metric?
Either way personally priority bus lanes feel significantly more flexible and cheaper to implement than LR/trams...but that's just a personal opinion.
Having only used the base price of each, I loved the ux of cursor and what it enabled me to do, but I hit my monthly cap in 2 days. Whereas Claude code (on pro) I do hit my session limit and even weekly limit once but never have I had to been tools down for 20+ days.
I hear codex is even more generous.
Admittedly all seem cheap enough, but there does seem to be a large diff in pricing
I’m with you, I’ve used CC but I strongly prefer Cursor.
Fundamentally, I don’t like having my agent and my IDE be split. Yes, I know there are CC plugins for IDEs, but you don’t get the same level of tight integration.
This is exactly how I write code. I never engineer anything until I have to. I don't try to get rid of code duplication until it works. And I try to be as "least clever" as possible.
reply