M. Garrett Amini

Engineers and PMs are being incentivized to complexify instead of simplify. I've definitely been seeing this trend grow over the last 5 years. https://lnkd.in/geizav_r

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I never post here, but it seemed like the only space with people who may understand. Running a "hobby" site dedicated to indie games is rewarding in some ways, but absolutely aggravating in many others. Perpetually fighting with the chicken/egg problem of how to get more traffic when generally featuring games nobody has ever heard of is sometimes plain exhausting. Just wish Nintendo themselves, or I suppose Golin (on their behalf) would see the value of what I've been consistently doing for nearly 9 years now... but anyway. I sent this in response to a perfectly-reasonable disclaimer from a developer explaining why they may not have codes for me, just figured it was worth sharing some frustration. "Just wanted to potentially save you time, while also making a case for myself. I absolutely understand that you're likely swamped with requests, and that it makes sense to use what limited keys you have to reach the highest potential number of people.   That said, one of the reasons my viewership (despite having been around now for nearly 9 years) is that I'm the person running towards the fire that is discovery for smaller developers and indie projects... the majority of which nobody has heard of and that don't get a load of traffic precisely because people can't seek our or search on games they've never heard of.    Within a few months I'll be crossing over 5,000 games reviewed, and I give every game I play and share about the same chance, whether single-developer or triple-A. These days I share gameplay video for every game I review (something not enough outlets do, many seem content to include stock press images with their reviews with no other coverage), at least one short, a written review, a video review, and then for games that rate high enough they can be included in future feature videos, which include ones for sales as well as best of genre and best of the year ones as well. [Previous game of theirs I did review redacted] has probably been in videos of mine at least 50 times over the years all said. So I flatly agree that I don't meet the standard you all are hoping for, but the reason for that is that I'm trying to help bring exposure to games that don't get enough. Even for more known or popular games my continued efforts to keep reintroducing their names over the years also creates new opportunities to be seen, even long after they've collectively been lost in the pile of loads of new games every week. Just figured I'd make my case, it's frustrating that no matter the effort it's a struggle to reach people when I'm offering something they don't know about more often than not."

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The purpose of this post is to touch base on Ollama and how it can help with both privacy and running a cost efficient pipeline for indie devs. If you haven't heard of ollama, I highly recommend checking their website and read https://lnkd.in/gUvgcRSY. In a nutshell, it allows you to run certain models locally or in a docker container which can help with hosting models on your machine or server. It has a lot more features which I'm still learning about. I've been playing around with qwen3:30b for majority of the time and just recently updated to qwen3.5:35b. Both run smoothly on M4 Max / 48GB but could've run better on 64GB only if I knew better to get that upgrade. I'll write more on the projects that I'm working on in future, but in a nutshell, I used LLM to run a two-phase pipeline: - Filter 1.3million records from jsonl and reduce it to 50K useful records for the app - Run through all 50K records to select most meaningful samples among several examples for each record. In addition, fallback mechanism for any missing data needed

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The reality is that every engineer is becoming a tech lead with a crew of agents. In that world, the primary job shifts from writing code to coordinating work: tasks, context, handoffs, and verification. That likely calls for a new kind of UI, one that feels closer to Kanban, Jira, or Asana than a traditional IDE. We don’t know yet if Intent is the final winning approach, but I’m excited we’re shipping a research preview instead of standing still. PS: What’s one small, recurring pain in your daily workflow? Drop it in the comments. If it’s a good fit, I’ll build a prototype with Intent and share what we learn.

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