DEV Community: octave Nkurunziza

Let's agree that at some point, Alex Karp is right.

octave Nkurunziza — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:55:34 +0000

I'll put it like this: Alex Karp isn't necessarily someone to believe in, but we can't ignore that what he's saying holds truth.

These Silicon Valley guys are starting to act like they want to write their own rules. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, here's the interview: ALex karp interview.

So, what Alex is saying is that he understands what it actually takes to conduct government and business contracts something the AI frontier labs are now taking on and executing. His point is that they don't fully grasp the ins and outs of handling AI contracts for critical enterprises and governments, including military contracts, deep government research, war contracts, and the like.

I know we're all thinking: maybe this is just Alex's game to win contracts because he feels like he's losing. Yes, that might be true, but he's using factual arguments. What he's saying, at some point, is true.

First, he called their business a scam. As much as he may be deceiving us this time, I'll allow myself to be deceived, because these business models seem insane to me. They overhype their products, charge insanely high prices, and deliver little to no real value. But again, we don't really have anything against them because all they've said is, "This model is even dangerous." Take, for example, how much Fable consumes and what value it gives none, correct me if I'm wrong. I don't see any real value. All it does is switch to Opus 4 or whatever decimals they add. For enterprises, this is even crazier: you're lying to them, charging insane prices, and in return, you get their intellectual property. The same applies to regular people you charge them insane amounts and then take their data, how they think, and what they think about. In my opinion, that's not ethical.

Alex also pointed out in that interview that you can't just hand over sensitive contracts like military or war contracts to these Silicon Valley guys who've only been around for a few years. You can't take people who think like that, who are so detached from the real world, and give them your most sensitive data. Me too I don't get it when I see governments making sensitive deals with these kinds of people, it feels like outsourcing sovereignty on an insane level. As a citizen of a country, I don't understand when my government goes out and says, "Ladies and gentlemen, an achievement, we closed a deal with this Silicon Valley guy who thinks he has some prophesy , and we're going to give him money and our data, and he'll give us tokens and charge us for using them."

I believe some businesses have already started facing the consequences of these business models from Silicon Valley, but they're not willing to say anything because they think others might be getting good ROI and maybe it's just their own problem or they don't want to admit they made a mistake. They believe that at some point, things will get back in line. Maybe.

Look, my point here is: AI is a great technology, but the people running these frontier labs are killing it. They're making it hard for people to actually build something meaningful with AI. These shady business models and crazy psychological marketing tricks are making us worried and pushing us to use AI out of fear, rather than as the tool it should be. We need someone else to take over this technology and turn it into something truly valuable for everyone.

Here is my wild take:AI Is Scary, But Not Because It’s Smart

octave Nkurunziza — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 22:16:52 +0000

Let me start like this. As a human being, I’m telling you the truth: you actually matter more than anything.

It’s just that you’re always on your screen, watching Dario interviews, reading AI tweets, and now you believe you don’t matter anymore because some man said we don’t need you.

Look there are still many beautiful things in life if you ignore Dario Amodei for a minute. Spend time with friends in person, Play Minecraft, Watch football, Drink a beer, Dm women and get rejected, Having a cheating girlfriend and still in relationship with them, Have a friend with benefits and many more. Just live a little.

But let’s move ahead and go straight to the point.

Why is AI actually scary?

Its Not because it writes code, Not because it can generate a landing page, Not because it can write a scientific essay or do your accounting and finance and wipe out all your bank.

AI is scary because it arrived at the perfect time, with the perfect people, with the perfect money, and with the perfect fear already waiting for it.

AI didn’t enter a normal world. It entered a world that was already mentally cooked.

Let’s go back a little.

COVID happened. The whole world changed. Restaurants closed, Small businesses died quietly, Airlines were parking planes. People who had spent ten years building something watched it disappear because somebody coughed in another country.

Then tech had the opposite experience. Companies started hiring like drunk uncles at a wedding. Money was everywhere. Remote work became normal. Everyone was building products, hiring teams, raising funds, and acting like growth would never end.

Then the pandemic boom ended. Reality entered the chat. Companies started laying people off like unused clothes. One day you were “family.” The next day your Slack stopped working.

That’s when the word “layoff” became a global horror movie. People saw something they thought was impossible. They saw companies fire thousands of people and still keep the website online. That broke people’s minds. Before that, many people believed If I work hard, I’m safe. Then after layoffs, people realized: Oh, this company can delete my badge, cancel my email, and still post about mental health awareness next week.

That’s when people became fragile. Not stupid. Just fragile. And when people are fragile, every prediction sounds like prophecy.

Then, during this fragile era, the glorious warrior appeared. The almighty Sam Altman. The man of his word. The god of fundraising. With enough connections, enough money, and enough timing, it was his time to shine. And he came with AI. But he didn’t bring AI into a peaceful world. He brought AI into a world where people were already scared of losing their jobs. That’s important, Because when someone says: AI will replace you, People believe it faster when they have already watched companies lay off entire departments without replacing them. We already saw the first part People disappearing. Now imagine someone saying: This time, there is a replacement. That is a totally believable disaster.

That is not just a product launch. That is psychological warfare with a checkout. And after that, they discovered the cheat code. Fear sells AI better than features. If you say: “This tool can help you work faster.” Some people try it. But if you say: “This tool might take your job.” Everybody listens. Your father listens, Your cousin listens, Your friend who still thinks HTML is a programming language starts asking if he should actually continue to learn.

That’s when AI marketing became dark. They stopped selling productivity. They started selling survival. They started selling panic. They started selling “adapt or die” with a monthly plan.

And they did not market it the same way to everyone.

No.

They studied generations. For people with families, bills, rent, kids, loans, and blood pressure, they used one word: “Replace” They told them: AI is coming for your job, AI is coming for your career, AI is coming for your industry, The only way to survive is to keep the enemy close. And by “keep the enemy close,” they obviously mean: Buy our subscription. Beautiful business model. Scare the man. Sell him the thing that scared him.

For young people, they used a different weapon. the fear of missing out and the sense of rushing everything. They told young people: There is no time, Learning is too slow, The world is moving too fast, Skip the process. Use AI and become 10x, Become inevitable, Become the main character. God forbid a young man opens documentation and suffers like his ancestors. God forbid a junior developer spends six months understanding databases instead of asking AI to build “a scalable SaaS with too much security.”

They said No. Just subscribe. The path to greatness is now $20 per month and a prompt that starts with: “Think like Jeff Bezos.”

And this is why the whole thing became madness.

Look AI is a great invention. But it came with greed, trauma marketing, billions of dollars, and the almighty yapper Dario Amodei.

Now Dario is in every interview sounding like a prophet who believes people will finally understand him after he dies. Someone should tell him he sounds like his product on a free trial.

Every interview has the same energy: “Humanity may collapse, Jobs may disappear, Society may never be the same. Anyway, Claude Team Plan is available for enterprises.”

Like are you warning us or onboarding us? Because at this point I don’t know if I’m listening to a safety researcher or a man doing apocalypse sales. And that’s the scary part. The people selling the product got so deep into the fear that even they started believing they dictate how we live.They talk like they are holding the remote control to humanity. Like tomorrow morning Dario can wake up, drink coffee, blink twice, and 99% of jobs disappear. Like cmon humanity does not move as fast as you dream about it dario.

But guess what the fear works because it touches everything people are insecure about. Their jobs, Their intelligence, Their future, Their value, Their identity. AI did not steal the spotlight only because it is powerful. AI stole the spotlight because it walked into a world where everybody was already anxious and said: “By the way, I might be the reason you don’t eat next year.”

Well people panicked, every student is confused, every worker is scared. every founder suddenly added “AI-powered” to a product that was just a CRUD app last week.

All this hype, psychology marketing, and huge funding is what created the chaos around AI.

Again, AI itself is useful. The issue is not the tool. The issue is the circus around the tool.

So what is the moral of the story? Ladies and gentlemen, none. Whatever works for you, do it. If going with the hype helps you build, learn, move faster, and achieve your goals, go for it. Use AI, Run the loops. Talk to Claude like it owes you money.

But if the hype is depressing you, making you unable to sleep, making you feel like life is running away from you, mute it. Mute the tweets, Mute the interviews, Mute the prophecy merchants. Do your step-by-step way. Learn at your pace, Build at your pace, Move in a way that gives you peace. Both ways can work if you actually do the work.

I’m just a random dude writing whatever comes to mind. But one thing I know is this: If you sit down, do what gives you peace of mind, and stop feeding your brain fear every morning, things will work out better than you think. Stop engaging in rituals that make you afraid every day. You don’t need to rush just because a billionaire with a podcast microphone said the future is ending. Maybe AI changes everything. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe Dario becomes a prophet. Maybe he just needs sleep. Either way, you still have to wake up tomorrow and live your life. So mute the noise if you have to. Open your laptop. Touch grass when necessary. And stop letting every AI tweet turn your brain into a haunted house.

How Senior Software Engineers Use AI

octave Nkurunziza — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:52:39 +0000

Let me start like this: you are here because you’re wondering whether you’re using AI the right way. good for you. You’re probably not.

The good news, though, is that there is no universal “best way” to use AI. It depends entirely on your skill level. I know that’s disappointing.

You listened to Dario, Jensen, and half of Claude opus tweet, and now you’re convinced claude is going to transform you into the next Bjarne Stroustrup before lunch, It won’t.

The uncomfortable truth is that AI can only amplify what’s already there.
If you’re a beginner, AI will mostly give you beginner-level code. The funny part? You probably won’t notice. To you, AI looks like a senior engineer because you’re comparing it against your current skill level, everything looks advanced when you’re new.

People buy an Opus subscription and suddenly start talking like they’re about to revolutionize software engineering. That’s like getting a driving permit and now you think the only difference between you and Lewis Hamilton is networking and connections he has.

Take a simple example.
A beginner asks AI: Think like jeff bezos and build me an e-commerce application where users can place orders, check out and pay me make it unhackable and have too much security and make it faster. AI happily generates 4,000 lines of code. The beginner celebrates, LinkedIn gets another “I built Amazon in a weekend” post, Life is good.

Meanwhile, a senior engineer asks something completely different. Create a confirmCheckout() function that takes a cartId and userId validates that the cart still belongs to the user, recalculates the total from the database, creates an order inside a transaction, reserves inventory for each item, and publishes an order.created event to Kafka after the transaction succeeds.

Notice the difference?

The senior engineer isn’t better because they tell AI to think as senior engineer at amazon. They’re better because they know what exists. You cannot ask for something you don’t know exists.

Nobody wakes up one morning and says: You know what this application needs? Distributed event processing. If they’ve never heard of distributed event processing.

I always laugh everytime i see someone posting a 20 page prompt to transform the whole industry and its all about:
Be careful.
Double check everything.
Think harder.
Think even harder.
Think like a senior engineer.
Think like a principal engineer.
Think like the primegen at netflix.
Think like Linus Torvalds in his prime.
debug like tsoding

At this point you are praying and hoping for the best.

The best engineers I’ve seen don’t use AI by dumping an entire application into it and hoping for the best. They use it the same way they would use a junior developer. One task at a time authentication, validation, Database schema, Dockerfiles, Background workers, API handlers, One piece after another. The AI isn’t building the system, the engineer is.

For example, I don’t need to tell AI: Read my entire codebase, analyze every file, understand my business logic, discover my purpose in life, and then create the perfect application. I can simply say: Create a function using Drizzle that fetches users, joins products, joins reviews, and returns the result or Create a Kafka publisher for an item_added_to_cart event. See small tasks clear objective, easy to review, easy to debug, easy to understand. And most importantly, I still remember what was built because i was actually involved.

One thing nobody wants to admit is that AI doesn’t magically remove the need for skills. It actually exposes the lack of them. When something breaks, the person who understands databases fixes it, the person who understands distributed systems fixes it. the person who understands networking fixes it. The person who only knows how to paste prompts into a chatbot starts another chat and types: “Why isn’t this working?”.

Then I see people looking at senior engineers shipping incredible products with AI and asking: “Am I using AI wrong?”. Not necessarily. They just know things you don’t know yet. Thats it. There is no secret prompt, There is no hidden AGENTS.md ritual, There is no sacred YAML file blessed by the AI gods. They’re simply operating with more knowledge.

And before somebody quotes Dario, AI is not a replacement for learning. its a multiplier, A multiplier applied to zero is still zero. The fastest way to improve your AI output isn’t finding a better model. It’s becoming a better engineer. Learn database, learn networking, learn how large systems actually work. Then watch how dramatically your AI results improve.
Stop treating every AI prediction from tech executives as gospel. Just remember the people telling you AI will replace every engineer on Earth are often the same people raising billions of dollars to sell AI. I m not saying they are wrong, But if a car salesman tells me I need a car, I at least check whether he’s standing next to a dealership first.