There's a lot of good descriptions and observations on this article. But I don't like this language that just assumes we all use AI, we've all pulled away from the code. It all seems to be part of the collective brainwashing and psychosis that says "it's a new age now, everyone is doing it this way."

> It’s less coding than it used to be, or a different kind of coding. More describing and steering and deciding, less typing the actual lines.

Lots of us are still coding. A lot of the beloved infrastructure all these vibe-coded rocket rides are built with is still being hand coded by humans who care and want to build solid, good things.

I like the AI images, the style is nice and is well executed especially the mirror reflection one, it accurately, well, reflects what pet projects become. But, I disagree that they're monstrous just because they get big.

> I watch engineers pick up design so the thing looks good and feels good, not just runs. The work pulls you into the parts you used to hand to someone else. We’re all stretching wider than we trained for. Whatever the work needs, we learn it.

Even back to the mid-90's I've always approached projects like this -- soup to nuts, all the way from idea to conception to creative ideation to implementation to digital life!

I also used to assume everybody did lol, until I worked long enough professionally to watch the landscape subdivide like a fractal into what we have now.

There's a LOT of bad shit to be said about AI coding, but I also have this feeling that something about it all is rekindling that ancient one-man-band approach that can actually work if you're able to play all the instruments. Really interested to see what comes of it once the breathless hype dies down a little bit.

I can relate to this, and the point about costs resonated with me in particular. I wonder how this will evolve in the future and how soon.

These blog posts, lamenting losing something, create fascinating juxtaposition against posts from people having more fun than ever, and they’re often published on the same day.

Hot take:

Coding by typing sucked.

Being stuck on some esoteric problem and having to rubber duck your way out of it. Your value being connected to the amount of stuff you could do that few others had the patience for, instead of how empathetic you could be to user needs.

Even wilder, these laments ignore history.

In “The Mythical Man-month” they talk about spending weeks debugging wiring on a breadboard so a chip could be designed based on said wiring. Does anyone in 2026 wonder if their CPU neds debugging? Only the most esoteric of situations and it’s only a last resort. I’ll concede it’s not zero people but it’s not more than a handful. A faulty chip design is the last thing you think of when you have a bug.

In the 80s there was a “golden era” of coding 8-bit machines where you could understand the whole machine. Did anyone worry their CPU was mis-executing instructions? No, their idea of “understanding the whole machine” depended a huge pile of abstractions that had been made reliable thanks to solid engineering.

Can you understand the whole machine in 2026? How it boots, how your filesystem works, where the caches are, all of it? No! There was a point at which we let go of that need in order to gain greater leverage.

At some point you have to let go.

Current coding agents are in their “debugging breadboard” era - they’re unreliable and not worth the valuations the companies are getting. The craft is changing though, and letting go is the future.

The challenge we face now is how to engineer probabilistic systems into shape. But guess what? Most other engineering disciplines deal in a messy thing full of probabilities called reality. We have tools to deal with this - tolerances, fudge factors, the works.

Complaining about progress is going to age really poorly.

The ai art is atrocious - the styles are all over the place (flat cell shaded vs ghiblified vs hyperdetailed with too much text), repetition ad nauseam, varying color schemes and shapes around the same subjects (is the scaly monster pink? Green? Rainbow colored scales?), the scale is wildly inconsistent, absurd composition (the dog is going nowhere instead of the door), the ever present piss filter and just way too many of the god damn pictures.

Truly an ai post of all time - a thing that demonstrably had 0 effort put into it.

They'll become cattle projects you don't know the names of.

Like an LLM listening to you curse at software, fixing it/creating extensions etc., installing them, and you're not even aware.

I find it baffling when people complain about this like AI use is mandatory.

You explored agentic coding, didn't like losing control to vibes, so stop doing it.

The beauty of pet projects is that they are yours to define, you set the terms, if you dont like how agentic coding played out then just dont do it?

You're not under pressure to ship, youre not being forced by a manager, this is yours : so own it. The only "pressure" you are under is the pressure in your mind that youre getting from sitting on social media drinking hype juice all day, the lesson here is the motto of the royal society - Nullis in verba- THINK FOR YOURSELF

AI slop text, AI slop graphics, and a particularly obnoxious "oh well everyone's using AI now, no-one writes any more because they don't need to" tone.

Absolute trash.

Please can we have a filter to keep the AI slop - and all the metaslop around it, articles about the guts of LLMs - off the feed?

Cute art

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