I wrote a triple nested for loop that took down a grocery chain's ordering system. I broke buttons across multiple sites as a senior engineering manager at Clorox. And I've sat in rooms feeling like the dumbest engineer there — more than once.

In this episode, I break down the three uncomfortable milestones every developer hits: wanting to stop being "the junior guy," shipping code that breaks production in spectacular fashion, and being the weakest engineer in the room. No fluff, no motivational poster garbage — just honest stories from 12+ years in the industry.

AI won't save you from any of these. You just have to go through them.

If you're in one of those moments right now, this one's for you.

Want to level up? 👇

Coding bootcamp for career switchers

Learned Javascript the right way

Break into AI engineering

Follow along with the project by going here: https://www.parsity.io/5-day-ai-advisory-board

In this episode, I walk you through a side project that, if you actually build it, will put you ahead of roughly 90–95% of software developers right now.

Most developers are using AI tools. Very few are actually building with them.

So instead of talking about it, we build something real.

The project is an AI advisory board — a system where you can ask questions like:

• What would Theo Browne say about Node?

• What would ThePrimeagen say about Vim?

• What would Alex Hormozi say about sales?

• What would I say about testing?

And instead of generic AI responses, you get answers grounded in real transcripts and real opinions.

We go step-by-step through:

• Calling an LLM programmatically (Gemini API)

• Setting up a backend route to handle requests

• Adding system prompts and guardrails

• Building a simple knowledge base

• Pulling in real YouTube transcripts

• Injecting data into the model at the right time (naive RAG)

This is the kind of project that forces you out of “AI user” mode and into actually building AI-powered products.

Resources mentioned 👇

• parsity.io/ai-with-rag
• The Router Pattern – A Smarter Way

I mentioned that I got a lot more requests for interviews. Here's the proof: Da Proof

3 Ways We Work with Software Developers (and noobs) 👇

• AI Dev Program – parsity.io/ai-dev
• Apply for our full stack software engineering program
• Learn JavaScript in 30 days... the hard way