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Its worth mentioning that this essay has some signs of being either partially AI generated or heavily edited through an LLM. Some of the signs are there (It's not X, it's Y), With the blog having gone from nearly zero activity between 2015 and 2025 to have it explode in posts and text output since then also raises an eyebrow.
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The issue is that before AI, 1% of the population was capable of creating 1 side project per year. After AI, 10% of the population is capable of creating 10 side projects per year. The competition grew by 100x. The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking.
The whole side project or even private project thing doesn't just hinge on being able to produce software. There's a lot more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would he have written instead?
My point is that there's nothing to be written there "instead", it just is not needed text that is added to make the text longer, typical of AI writing that parrots the same points over and over to make up for word count. Here's another example from the blog: > Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. > Not m…
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I think from time to time, it's better to ask the AI whether the codebase could be cleaned and simplified. Much better if you use different AI than what you use to make the project.
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I mean if you've built 7 side projects (and we assume it's the same phase since total time from idea to shipped product barely decreased), how are these things still a bottleneck to you? I'm assuming you're building in a domain/language you're comfortable with by now (unless you're crazy and try something fundamentally different on each of those shipped products). Why will the 8th project still have those things as t…
At work, I was told to use AI but it doesn't actually work for anything that I couldn't have handed off to a brand new undergraduate intern. So I use it for things that I don't care about then go spend twice as long rewriting what it output because it made the task longer by being wrong.
... most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it. The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended. That is what drew most of us to this profession. It is a creative act, a form of craftsmanship, and for many engineers, the most satisfying part of their day.
Actually surprised none of the other comments have picked up on this, as I don't think it's especially about AI. But the periods of my career when I've been actually writing code and solving complicated technical problems have been the most rewarding times in my life, and I'd frequently work on stuff outside work time just because I enjoyed it so much. But the other times when I was just maintaining other people's code, or working on really simple problems with cookie-cutter solutions, I get so demotivated that it's hard to even get started each day. 100%, I do this job for the challenges, not to just spend my days babysitting a fancy code generation tool.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is that before AI, 1% of the population was capable of creating 1 side project per year. After AI, 10% of the population is capable of creating 10 side projects per year. The competition grew by 100x. The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking.
No, why? Why do you look at it that way? Why does anyone beside you have to care about what you do? Just build something for yourself. You will always have things you'd like to build for yourself. You will be in competition with yourself only and your target audience will be yourself. Market forces do not apply to side-projects, because that's what people do for fun. Just because there are chess computers, doesn't me…
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The issue is that before AI, 1% of the population was capable of creating 1 side project per year. After AI, 10% of the population is capable of creating 10 side projects per year. The competition grew by 100x. The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking.
A lot of the moats are gone, but quality (and security) is in a nose dive. AI built project might be the Ikea furniture. Good for the masses, but there's still a market (much smaller) for well crafted applications and services. It's hard to say what it'll look like in a couples years though. Maybe even the crafting is eventually gone. /shrug
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, why? Why do you look at it that way? Why does anyone beside you have to care about what you do? Just build something for yourself. You will always have things you'd like to build for yourself. You will be in competition with yourself only and your target audience will be yourself. Market forces do not apply to side-projects, because that's what people do for fun. Just because there are chess computers, doesn't me…
Ironically I had a very smart and otherwise reasonable math professor who, shortly after Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, said in class that chess was no longer interesting.
If you have no reaction at all, you probably weren't paying attention.
Eventually though, people _should_ recover and return after having processed the changes. So maybe the professor was still recovering at the time?