10th Open House

AI Tools and Interview Resources

This was a shorter session, and the first part continued from what we discussed in the last open house.

Hiring situation

I also wanted to talk about the hiring situation. Right now, hiring is low. The image captures what many companies are thinking: maybe we do not need seven engineers if one engineer can work with a bunch of AI agents.

I think that is mostly a short-term reaction.

In the long run, companies will realize that one engineer cannot sustainably replace an entire team. People burn out. Context switching has limits. There is only so much one person can focus on, even with very good AI tools.

So hiring should pick up again, but teams will likely stay smaller than before. You may see three engineers where there used to be seven.

AI costs are also rising fast. Companies will eventually have to optimize those costs instead of blindly throwing tokens at every problem. That should push the market toward models and workflows that are more cost-effective and token-efficient.

Use More Terminal

Use less GUI and more terminal.

Warp

Warp is the terminal I personally use. I can run multiple agents, keep my tabs organized, and avoid reaching for the mouse as much. The defaults are sensible, and the keyboard-driven workflow feels great once you get used to it.

As a frontend engineer, you should get more comfortable with the terminal. In the future, I expect more companies to use disposable virtual private servers for AI-heavy workflows because some of this tooling is still risky. It should be easy to nuke a VPS and spin up a fresh one.

That also makes it less likely that your personal device gets compromised. Use whichever terminal you like, but build the habit. I find Warp the easiest because of its defaults.

If you still need an IDE, try Zed. It is fast, clean, and much nicer to use than VS Code for the way I work now.

Use More Skills and Sub-Agents

Start doing this as soon as possible.

If you do something repeatedly, turn it into a skill. If a workflow has multiple steps, run it through a sub-agent. If you have a pre-workflow or post-workflow checklist, make it an agent. Even better, move it into CI when possible.

The goal is simple: stop repeating yourself manually.

My Top Resource Recommendations

This blog post was quickly ~~AI-generated~~ written by me using the sticky notes from the live session. Do join our discord community to get early access to the live sessions.