u/almost1it

I studied EE in college but have been working as a Software Engineer for the past 10 years. I've worked for a range of companies now, from startups to big tech, and mostly dealing with web technologies. While the compensation is nice, the work itself (full stack web development particularly) is starting to get a bit boring.

Recently I've been reading up on a bunch of topics around robotics and its gotten me interested enough to see if this is something I could pivot my career towards. Has anyone made a similar transition? How did you go about it and what was your experience like?

Happens in both plan and build mode. The API key is distributed by my company's OpenAI platform account. Only today it just randomly started stopping mid stream before work is completed and I have to frequently prompt it to continue.

I also have a personal Max plan that I use for side projects on a different codebase and authenticate with OpenCode via oauth and never ran into this issue with that setup.

Anyone experience this before? Unsure if this is an opencode or OpenAI issue. I don't think there is any limits placed on my keys.

Recently I've been trying to experiment with how to actually build a software factory where you can get many agents working on long running tasks even while AFK. I'm seeing this trend appear more frequently in tech companies like Stripe, Ramp, and Spotify and wanted to build a version of this for myself to see what it would look like.

I came to the conclusion that I need to solve for three things first:

1. Coding agents need to be scaled up to work concurrently without conflicting with each other.
2. Coding agents need access to their own dev environments with all the right tools to build and verify their work.
3. Coding agents need to be decoupled from my local machine.

Based on this I wanted to build a tool that I can use to easily replicate my dev environments into many isolated VMs that my coding agents can operate within. I see this as the first step before getting it to integrate with all the usual apps like Slack and Linear.

There are a few products working in this space, but I think we should be able to build software factories with completely open source primitives rather than being forced into a platform.

Website is here: https://bastion.computer/

Repo is here: https://github.com/bastion-computer/bastion

If anyone is interested in this space, I would love to get your feedback. I still have some ways to go in improving the system (more integrations, observability, etc). But I’m already using this as part of my daily workflow and its been great.

Recently started at a new company and from the interview process everything seemed great. Role was well defined, small team, business was growing, and TC was within the range.

I have no issues with working overtime if the work is interesting and I can see my efforts translate to meaningful progress. When I joined I was given ownership over a new product line the business was about to launch. I spent 3 months on it and was genuinely excited to release it to the market.

Right before launch, the product went through a hard pivot because leadership thought the segment wasn't valuable enough. I disagreed since I thought there was value in launching anyways and building off the learnings to go up market. Since I was new, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and bought into the pivot. And its been going down hill for me ever since.

Grinded out another month to pivot the product and just as we were about to launch again, leadership changes their mind a second time. This happens a few more times over the following weeks. Sometimes pivots will happen day by day. And theres been occasions when we've pivoted back to what we were doing before too.

I get markets change and businesses need to adapt. But these pivots don't feel like they are signals from the external market and is just leadership talking themselves into a circle. As a result I'm finding it hard to produce good work when everything I've done since I started has been deleted and nothing I've done has yet hit production.

To give the founders credit, they are quite capable and very friendly to work with. I also know startup are generally hard no matter what, so I do empathise with them too.

Anyone been in this situation before?