Wake up, AI programming is not as simple as you think. Don’t blindly trust AI-generated code, current AI programming is not as good as you imagine.

I am a frontend novice. I spent 20 hours using Cursor to do secondary development on an open-source website project. After a flurry of activity, I found that none of the features were working anymore. And this open-source project was just a simple webpage website program.

This was my first time using Cursor as a novice. I had previously only used it as an auxiliary tool. My blog’s video playback page was written using V0 dev, the interface was refined using Kimi, and the video list page was written with Cursor.

While research CNI recently, I recalled an interesting issue I encountered during the development of network plugins and investigation of Calico: Calico assigns IP addresses to its own components’ Pods (e.g., calico-kube-controllers). How does Calico achieve this? From the installation of the Calico network plugin to assigning IPs to its own Pods, what happens at the underlying level?

This essentially poses a “chicken-and-egg” problem: running a Pod requires the CNI plugin, while the CNI plugin’s operation depends on the proper functioning of other Pods.

In today’s job market, freelancing is becoming increasingly popular and has become a choice for many. Recently, a friend of mine organized an end-of-year gathering for freelancers in Shanghai, where participants shared their career experiences and insights. Within an hour of the event announcement, the registration exceeded expectations and quickly filled up, highlighting the growing popularity of freelancing.

I have been a freelancer for 135 days now, and today I’d like to share some of my thoughts and methods during this journey.

On December 11, 2024, OpenAI experienced a major outage caused by a failure in the Kubernetes cluster control plane. For outsiders, this may simply seem like an interesting incident, but as an insider, I analyzed this failure from a technical perspective.

After reviewing the incident report, I came up with three questions:

• What is the Telemetry service used for?
• What are the “expensive requests” mentioned in the report? Why would this program generate a high volume of resource-sensitive API requests?
• Why did it impact the business systems?

After stepping away from traditional jobs, I realized there are so many other ways to make a living, and my perspective has broadened. In the past, I never paid attention to ways of earning money outside of employment—perhaps even looked down on them. Now, whenever I see something, my first thoughts are:

• How does this make money?
• What are the entry barriers?
• How big is the market?
• If done well, can this generate significant income?

Changing my mindset has opened up new horizons full of possibilities.

At 35 this year, I was laid off in March. It’s been a tough year, perhaps a turning point in my life. I’ve taken a courageous step forward to see if I can survive independently. So far, my efforts have been in vain, and I’m taking things one step at a time.

Difficult times are always agonizing. Be mentally prepared for a long period without income and start with what you’re good at.

If there’s something you really want to do, do it while you’re young.

With 2025 just around the corner, reflecting on the plans I made at the beginning of the year, I’d summarize them in one sentence: “50% completed, major plans abandoned, and life took a 180-degree turn.”