Seeking Advice
A programmer recounts their inconsistent coding journey from age 10—spanning web dev, game jams, and frameworks—culminating in a national gold medal at an AI Olympiad despite never completing meaningful projects. They now feel lost, unsure if they still enjoy AI or game development, and ask for advice on what to do next.
Background
- This is a post on Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com), a Y Combinator-run forum where tech founders, engineers, and investors discuss industry topics. "Seeking Advice" posts from young self-taught programmers asking for career direction are common there.
- The author describes a long self-taught coding journey from childhood — starting with HTML/CSS in NetBeans, then w3schools, FreeCodeCamp (a free online bootcamp), and React. "The AI hype" refers to the 2022–2024 boom in LLMs like ChatGPT, which made many developers pivot toward AI work and prompt engineering.
- They won a national gold medal in an AI Olympiad (a science competition on machine learning theory and practice). Being "saved by my practical score" means their hands-on coding ability compensated for weaker exam performance.
- Core dilemma: they clearly have talent (medal, self-taught under difficult hardware conditions) but feel burned out, unsure if they actually love AI or game dev, and stuck in a cycle of starting projects and never finishing them.