# Keeping Up

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/keeping-up/140382>\
**Category:** Offtopic\
**Created:** [October 31, 2026, 12:02am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/keeping-up/140382 "2026-10-31T00:02:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 6

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**Author:** ![dcelisgarza](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/dcelisgarza/32/215951_2.png) [@dcelisgarza](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/dcelisgarza)\
**Post date:** [October 31, 2026, 8:17pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/keeping-up/140382/6 "2026-10-31T20:17:58Z")

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You can see the progression of my AI psychosis/existential crisis, added to the fact that my former job is letting go of hundreds (closer to a thousand than 100) of employees—including myself two weeks ago—in the announcement posts for my package. You can see it starting from [this](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ann-portfoliooptimisers-jl-ape-together-strong/133099/6) post. I’m writing the more recent one and it’s a full-blown mindmelted treatise.

I’ve not written code in like 2 months. I somehow stumbled onto a ridiculous setup that ensures the clankers do a much better job than me. Now I’m not dumb, i’ve been programming for about 12 years, since my undergrad. Admittedly i’m self taught but i went from a chemistry undergrad in mexico, to software dev in fintech, to a phd at the university of oxford in 3d dislocation dynamics modelling, to implementing gcc’s iso fortran binding standard, to working in scientific computing in a structural biology group for the uk gov. I’m not a super specialist or expert in anything, but i have a very broad knowledge base (thanks 'tism).

My strength was always being knowledgeable enough to be useful but ignorant enough to find interesting, unorthodox approaches to problems. LLMs ate my entire lunch, went home, grew and harvested its own organic ingredients, made an improved version and ate it too in the time it used to take me to slice the veggies, plus it found a better cooking method and improved the spatial layout of the ingredients and kitchen instruments for optimal flow.

In PortfolioOptimisers.jl I somehow created a set of standards, systems, instructions, and skills that have the clankers producing performant, inferrable, correct, general, maintainable, testable, and robust code. I did it because I was scared they would ruin my efforts if i let them loose on something i’d worked on so hard, for so long over 2 full rewrites, thousands of tests and agonising over architecture, API, fieldnames, type and runtime guards, coding and documentation standards, but being very lax with error messages and not being able to keep up with my own docs standards. They’ve improved all aspects of my code, and fixed many composability bugs, increased test coverage, _fully_ documented my APIs, helped me write and keep examples up to date.

Here’s my [CLAUDE.md](https://github.com/dcelisgarza/PortfolioOptimisers.jl/blob/main/CLAUDE.md), it points to all the places i mentioned. The systems i mentioned are found in [code\_health](https://github.com/dcelisgarza/PortfolioOptimisers.jl/tree/main/code_healthhttps://github.com/dcelisgarza/PortfolioOptimisers.jl/tree/main/code_health), which i’ll turn into a standalone package at some point. It basically ensures the LLMs write unsloppified, performant and type stable julia code.

In aggregate these things make the clankers write code that is better written and documented than I ever did. I bet i could take these same concepts and apply them to any other project in any language and produce much better code than I ever could. It’s depressing and oppressive, yet encouraging and liberating but i don’t know which side wins out.

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