Relatable.

> with my colleague Douwe

Wait, meltano Douwe? Small world. Glad to see you're doing well. I always liked meltano.

> In an era when anyone can produce reasonable-looking UI

Identical looking slop? Every Claude-based vibe coded app looks identical.

> The fear of skill rot is legitimate. And the fear that if you don't go fast enough you'll be left behind is — while often overstated — not entirely unfounded.

You know what, that's OK. I just hit "OK" on LLM Scala code I _actually_ think is awful. It works. It's probably faster than the "pure" code I'd write by hand. The code I would write - as a FP and Scala/Elm/Haskell/... enjoyer - would actually be maintainable for humans, but LLMs struggle with it. But LLMs writing code for LLMs? Sure, have at it. Objectively lower barrier of entry.

> So if you're feeling overwhelmed, destabilized, simultaneously more productive and less happy, know that you're not alone.

But yes, I am indeed simultaneously more productive and less happy.

https://skaldmaps.com, my little side project, was only possible _because_ I was able to feed my real world knowledge about real estate, combined with GIS and SWE knowledge into various torment nexus... pardon me, LLM prompts.

Since I don't have the _time_ to write boilerplate react code (it's pepper and tomato season in Georgia, which _actually_ brings me joy), telling Claude/Codex/... how to write dbt models saves me time and I objectively get a lot more done, but it's not fun.

I guess that's also why I still enjoy blogging. You can't use LLMs for blogs without people noticing immediately. Shameless plug: https://chollinger.com/blog/

Enjoy my entirely human typos, since that's clearly rare these days.