From the company’s perspective, your goal is to build the minimal thing that does the job to make money. Minimal can definitely include well-designed if you can clearly articulate why it will be more and reliable will help you move faster in the future. There is a constant tension between business need and building good software. Typically, engineers are the champion of good software. This can be a healthy relationship as the real world has constraints on your time. You learn to make trade offs as you go, even if they are wrong.
I like to think of learning to write software as learning to cook. You start by learning some basic skills (e.g. chopping, frying, seasoning) and you practice them through recipes. But as you really learn and become more of a chef, these are just skill sets and experiences you pull on to make the right thing in the right moment. Just as a good chef can make an amazing meal with minimal ingredients and time, good software engineers can make useful and reliable software that makes appropriate trade offs.
Turn off all notifications except SMS and phone. Change email to pull, not push. Delete all social media apps, use the phone browser for it. Remove all work applications from your phone. Either you’re working or you’re not, no in between where you get pulled in against your will (I have a work phone provided by my company, so it’s easier).
I did this 8 years ago and I can’t recall anything important that I have missed. I can still look at email/social media/whatever in the browser or I sit down at my tablet/laptop. I still have Spotify and YouTube on my phone, but I try to limit entertainment apps on it.
This works for some people. But for me, Facebook introduces nothing negative because I don’t follow any ragebait stuff, and instead get updates from people I (somehwat) know, and bands I’m interested in.
It seems to trigger based on the browser window being too small. Yes, it is possible to access messages by requesting the desktop site, but it's pretty inconvenient.
Using it for messaging is different. I took "the mobile app" to mean the Facebook app with the timeline, groups, etc... (com.facebook.katana on Android), which also doesn't let you access messages. They really seem to want to promote their Messenger app as a distinct product.
I'm not sure messaging can work well in a mobile browser because notifications would not be timely, but maybe you're using it for a purpose that doesn't require instant notifications.
The app I use is actually "Facebook Lite" and it does include Messenger.
>maybe you're using it for a purpose that doesn't require instant notifications.
Yeah, generally if I'm messaging in Facebook, it's someone I don't know well - often kind of temporary connection through a community group, like arranging a time to exchange a second hand thing. I'm happy to manually check when needed. (That is, back when I used to use this method before I gave up and got the app.)
This comment does give a bit of insight into why Facebook tries to prevent people using mobile browsers for messaging though.
I was aware of Facebook Lite and had it installed at some point when I was more willing to use Facebook. I (probably wrongly) remember it not having messaging, because there is or was a separate Messenger Lite application.
This is exactly where I am now. I had fun solving problems for the sake of solving them for the first ten years of my career. But the last couple of years have burnt me out as I realize this is not worth my time. I’m in the process of trying to find a worthwhile problem to solve, but it’s difficult to not just be jaded.
I’ve found it to be quite good at Python, JS (Next + Tailwind + TS type of things), and PHP. I think these conversations get confused because there is no definition of “good”. So I’m defining “good” as it can do 50-80% of the work for me, even in a giant code base where call sites are scattered and ever changing. I still have to do some clean up or ask it to do something different, but many times I don’t need to do anything.
As someone else mentions, the best working mode is to think through your problem, write some instructions, and let it do it’s thing while you do other work. Then come back and treat that as a starting point.
This is my current Reddit use case. I unsubscribed from everything other than a dozen or so niche communities. I’ve turned off all outside recommendations so my homepage is just that content (though there is feed algorithm there). It’s quick enough to sign in every day or two and view almost all the content and move on.
Are you trying to make a distinction between writing software vs writing code? LLMs are pretty great at writing good code (a relative term of course) if you lay things out for them. I use Claude Code on both greenfield new projects and a giant corporate mono repo and it works pretty well in both. In the giant mono repo, I have the benefit of many of my coworkers developing really nice Claude.md files and skills, so that helps a lot.
It’s very similar to working with a college hire SWE: you need to break things down to give them a manageable chunk and do a bit of babysitting, but I’m much more productive than I was before. Particularly in the broad range of things where I know enough to know what needs to be done but I’m not super familiar with the framework to do it.
I like to think of learning to write software as learning to cook. You start by learning some basic skills (e.g. chopping, frying, seasoning) and you practice them through recipes. But as you really learn and become more of a chef, these are just skill sets and experiences you pull on to make the right thing in the right moment. Just as a good chef can make an amazing meal with minimal ingredients and time, good software engineers can make useful and reliable software that makes appropriate trade offs.