So recent? I've been on sabbatical (the real kind, self-funded) for eighteen months, and while my sense has been things have not stopped heading downhill since I stepped off the ride back in 2024, to hear of such a sudden step change is somewhat novel. "Very different" just how, if you don't mind my asking?

(I'm also looking for local, personally satisfying work, in exchange for a pay cut. Early days, and I am finding the profession no longer commands quite the social cachet it once did, but I'm not foolish enough to fail to price for the buyer's market in which we now seek to sell our labor. Besides, everyone benefits from the occasional reminder to humility! "Memento mori" and all that.)

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nidnogg 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Don't you feel that sabbaticals kinda get you off the new tech wave anyway? I usually check in on news much more often when bored at slow work days.

On the side, this might not have to do at all with your case, but the reason I personally keep putting off sabbaticals is that I feel it can severely compound my routine wrecking habits and I don't think I'd be too strong-willed to give it meaningful purpose. Not to mention the first point, i.e. it would 100% make my industry pessimism worse. I'd like to not bounce away from tech forever. Rather, figure what scratches the same itch I've been seeking since the start.

I'm all about big road trips, big adventures but I think the couch potato risk is all too real for me.

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sd9 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I feel like the models and harnesses had a step change in capability around December, as somebody who’s been using them daily since early/mid 2025. It’s gone from me doing the majority of the programming, to me doing essentially none, since December. And that change felt quite sudden.

The more recent shift after December is mostly explained by people at my company catching up with the events that happened in December. And that’s more about drastically increased productivity expectations, layoffs, etc.

I’m also considering a self funded sabbatical. I could do it. What sort of thing have you been up to, any advice?

	▲	nidnogg 16 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I can relate to the feeling - this timing tracks for when most, if not all of my friends, all my co-workers (even the few who were resisting to adopt any AI toloing) flocked to just "Claude Code". Similar to how the masses gobbled VS Code a while back. Company started doling out Claude Code configs, everything is now cli/agentic AI harnessed and news about "90% of this company's code is now AI Generated" pop up every other day. It seems the last frontier to breach before this was nailing agentic black boxes to not crap out during the first hour of work. After that, it's really been much smoother for those tools.
	▲	throwanem 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Uh, don't come into it expecting to know exactly what you're going to be up to, might be the best advice I could give. Oh, do plan! But loosely: especially early on, as you get out from under the crushing burden of constant stress and misery, there will be surprises. I haven't been doing a lot of hobby programming, for example, not much more than a few faces for my Amazfit wristwatch - but my diary's grown by about a thousand pages, well above the usual rate, and I've begun a new series of crappy-camera snapshot albums, this latter especially being a real surprise despite that I have been a photographer for many years now. (My daily driver since 2021 has been a Nikon D850 with three SB-R200 flashes on a ring mount, mostly chasing wild wasps to get their portraits from six inches away. Shooting a total piece of shit for a change has been a hilarious revelation!) Imagination operates more freely and foolishness is less heavily ballasted, and any kind of emotional crap you've been keeping shoved to the side with the force of pressing obligations is likely to come out and start rearranging the metaphorical furniture. If you've got stuff like that, this will be a good opportunity to get to grips with it, whether you mean to or not. Prepare accordingly. And finally, there's not too many more appealing social presentations in my experience than that deriving from the confident knowledge that, within reason at least, one has earned and is now deploying the privilege to do more or less whatever the hell one likes: not the confidence contingent on a fat wallet, but that inherent in having only those scheduled obligations one chooses, and also in understanding precisely the difference underlying that distinction. Very few people in this world have the skill to behave as if their time were entirely their own to command, and this makes a difference in deportment that others will notice and attend without necessarily knowing why. It is more subtle and far less brash than the confidence in wielding the name of an employer that everyone knows, but for like reasons it also has worth and durability which the other does not. Whether or not you keep it, the experience of having had it is about as unforgettable and as indescribable as the trick to riding a bike. Thanks for the info! My last direct exposure to a frontier model was now almost twelve months ago, so I suppose I'll have to dedicate a few hours pretty soon.