day in the life of a software engineer | fear of A.I.

This YouTube vlog by Phil Choi combines a "day in the life" developer walkthrough with reflections on AI. Phil discusses using AI as a tool (mentions Copilot and concerns about environmental/energy costs), live-debugs a React/Firestore app (moving players between teams, JSX/objectEntries issues, backend/frontend hookup), and gives project updates (a soccer-management app, collaborators Gabe and Jocelyn, Charlie's chatbot). He also notes personal milestones: became a developer after age 30, has used Copilot since 2021, and started his YouTube channel about six months prior. The video closes with a holiday greeting.
Questions this video answers
December 26, 2024
Since 2021
After the age of 30
Chapters
You know what? I take AI coming in as a tool to help me. But the people that are fearful, what drives humans, you know, fear. Fear of not being good enough. That's what's gonna drive you to become better. I mean, I guess you get. I guess there's no getting better than the AI because AI is like, honestly just copying you. Merry Christmas Eve. It's the kid's teacher, bro. He listens to her a lot. I know. Way better than me, bro. I took the backpack away from him this morning and I threw it over, like, I threw it over where he couldn't see it. And the next second, he has the contents of the backpack in his hands, trying to put his shoes on. Like, if you think you're, like, too good or whatever, it's just, like, you're gonna get complacent. So every season there's gonna be something new, dog. Like, what about, like, the Google quantum computer that they made? You know, that shit's gonna, like, be able to brute force, like, and hack any password that you need because it has so much computing power. You know, we're just like a settings cog. You press us. We got all the features to manipulate everything that's in our way. Okay, you know what I was about to say in the video today? You're gonna. You're gonna ask me to rap, and I was gonna be like, I retire. I. I saw the videos. I knew how ass I was. You know, we're gonna need to fight technology with technology at a certain point, and AI is going to help us. As long as that technology is used for good and to help us, I think it can make us faster and advance our society a little better. My name is Phil. I became a developer after the age of 30. Senior developer. If you, like, comment or share, it'll really help the algorithm. We'll really appreciate it. If you guys have any story about how you used AI or anything like that, we read all of them. I'll respond to every single one of them. Thank you for making us a part of your day. Like, it was. It was good while it lasted, but then the money kind of dried up, and I was like, you do better things. That's why I'm here. Okay. All right, cool. So did you do the swap player? Can you try to move a player? Did I show Gabe my workout video? He was like, that's just ass, bro. So we have everything hooked up to the fire store and all that kind of stuff. Can we just move LCM to lcb? All right, cool. That you Guys have cool. And then if you refresh, it stays right. It persists. Can we put a console log here just to make sure that it's going into the. Move the keys in the map. Yeah. So can you look at that error message right above in your console Whenever you break out into jsx, just know that REACT is using some kind of computing power. So if you don't have to break out into the jsx, I usually don't. So when we used object entries, right? Yeah. It becomes an array of arrays. So I heard some news that like Copilot is free. I don't know because I got, I got a bill yesterday, my copilot. But anyways, I should unsubscribe. But I've been using copilot since like 2021. It's helped me a lot. Like even on like outsourcing projects or like when I'm like soloing it, it makes me feel like I'm coding with someone usually with like TypeScript. Nowadays they have like a definition file in the node modules or like some kind of declarations that. It helps me with like getting all the types and stuff like correctly. Because I'm sure I could like make the types myself, but they're already made for you, so it helps you find the things that are already built to like help you like with your code and make you faster and do things like the way other people have done it, which are probably like right and correct. Because like I told my mentee yesterday, like once, you know, like the JavaScript basics and shit like that you can find ways to like kind of like hack your way into like doing things, you know. But I think Copilot shows you like ways to like do it other way people have done it and give you examples. And also like programming like I realized like it is just looking for other people to answer. So it's just helping you. Is there any developer doesn't that doesn't develop with like Google? I honestly just ask questions to Google all day and Copilot just streamlines that a little bit for me. I think we have all the logic almost for like moving things within this team. But now we have to be able to move players from teams, teams and it's gonna be, it's gonna be fun. Oh crap. This is gonna be hard, dude. Cuz. Cuz the bench is an array. Yeah. It would have been super easy if we did the bench zero, bench one, bench two like you said. But LCM is null. LCV is that guy now for refresh. Okay, okay. We're gonna get this done today. Just. Okay, Bear with me. But if you get it done first, more power to you. But I'll be thinking about this for the next couple hours as well. All right? All right. Okay. All right, Later. Take it easy. All right. So Gabe came maybe three or four months ago and we did a lot of learning and I think he's already, like, he had some background already. So I remember doing the first lesson, he like, gave me a. He like messaged me and was like, I think we can go a little bit faster. So we started writing some express HTML JS stuff and now we've gotten into just doing react. Serverless stuff. Guess who's here, Yo. Yes, of course. Minnie. Minnie in the House. It's basically a soccer management kind of game. But we. There's this browser, this API called Soccer API. So we, we hit the API and we got all the players inside of our database. You know, I started doing project with Jocelyn. Like, she's like the first person we like, complete our projects. But I'm doing so many projects now. Yeah, not like, but like really interesting ones. Yeah. And they're all. Almost all. Almost complete. So they'll all come out at like the same time. That's really cool. We can showcase them. Like, I think Charlie's chatbot will be out soon. Gabe's soccer fantasy thing will come out soon. There's so much. Can we can create one too? If you ever want to make a personal chatbot yourself really fast in like, in like a day, like, yeah, super easy. I actually do want to create one, but I actually want to create one for Joe. So we have everything set up. Right. We have the users. Now we got to hook up the back end to the login, right? Correct. Okay, so now can you run npm, run dev? Oh, looks. Oh, looks nice by the way. Looks basic. What happens when you press my skill? Right now we do get the multiple options. What about a skill looking okay, still working. All right, Amazing. For now, we need to kind of hook up the back end to the front end. Right. There's like a lot of like, secret stuff, like security stuff that AI will never know because you hide it a little bit, like environment variables and some kind of security measures of like what kind of hashing algorithm or whatever you're going to use. You know, some companies, it's not going to be out there in the world. That's why even, like some AI, they don't allow it at like Samsung or like big companies because they use their own LLMs. Because they're afraid their secrets are going to get out. Right. There's some things that AI will never be able to do. Just taste it. Let me. Let me check this out real quick. You see that? Try some of this sausage here. This one? Yeah. Holy shit. Look at that. It's good, right? It's holy crap. Or, I mean, people don't think about how bad it is for the environment. You know, all these GPUs, takes a lot to run them, a lot of electricity, a lot of energy to run these models, train these models, and something's gonna get fucked up in the future. Not just, like, financial costs, it's like environment costs. And, you know, I always say there's three pillars of coding, you know, cost, speed, and skill. And with AI, we're. We're paying a lot. Not just financially, but, like, as much as we advance technology. Like, with technology. I feel like Mother Nature is getting fucked up a lot. Talk to you soon. All right. Bye, Jocelyn. Bye. See you. Merry Christmas, everyone. It's been a long journey. It's been around, like, six months since starting the YouTube thing, but, you know, it's the holidays. I just wanted to say Merry Christmas from me and my son. Thank you, everyone, for being here later.
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