The least surprising thing about the AI "revolution" is the number of experienced tech-leaders pushing their departments to go all-in "vibe coding" to help unlock those sweet, industry-promised 5x+ production gains.
Doesn't that mindset go completely against everything these same sycophants have preached repeatedly that "coding shops should abide by rigid, well defined coding standards?" Of course it does! But hey - once most folks begin licking that profitable corporate boot, they acquire a taste for it.
"Make sure every coder in your department can work every part of the code" has been the mantra for well over a decade in corporate America. Translated : "we wanna make sure we can keep the shop hopping at close to full capacity when you eventually burnout.. Or worse.." And don't even think about implementing a math/logic based formula in the code you develop, even if it cuts runtime and offers better scalability... that's considered "clever code", and never has a dirtier term been muttered within a "real corporate software development department!" Doubt that? Go drop that term on the socialmedias where all the "I've never produced real code outside of education or my job" folks haunt; they hate it more than doctors hate those 5 weight loss tricks click bait ads espouse.
Anyhoo, back to the AI + software coding/dev portion of my rant - how does this all end? Well, with corporate 'Murca involved, my guesses are :
- An overall reduction of pure coders/devs
- Little chance for employees to develop and enhance on-the-job coding (and, more importantly, dev) skills with even more reliance on SaaS "out of the box solution" trash
- Most remaining coders/devs stripped of what little creativity was left in their job and simply troubleshooting, refining, and attempting to standardize AI developed "vibe coding" handed to them via product owners and "thought leaders"
..hmm..say.. if you replace "vibe coding" with "Excel VBAs" that last dot-point sounds an awful lot like an even more boring version of early 2000s corporate America... eek!
...and the second dot-point? Well, that kinda implies that "ya kinda gotta really love creating things with code and learn it on your own time really well to even get a shot at making it a profession".. The exact mindset of old-school 80's and 90's hobbyists.
But most notable is the first dot-point : less overall opportunities to code/develop, period.
If you haven't sussed it out from my ad nauseum whining, I'll be quite frank here : IMO working for corporate America blows ass, and trusting them now is a bigger fool's errand than ever. So.. what are the alternatives? My go to advice (as a part time indie-game dev) - create your own thing! Game.. write that SaaS "plug and play" solution.. contract firm.. Anything! Of course, that's not always easy or realistic for tons of reasons. So aside from that, what should you do to best protect yourself if you reeeaaalllyy do enjoy coding/developing? Well...
AI shills love to say "learn to rely on AI to help you code", but that's probably a horrible path to follow unless you actually get to "create" the product instead of simply implementing someone else's product vision and then gutting through their AI vibe code.. it may allow you to hold onto a bad job "professional debugger" position, but for how long? And you think code requests are unrealistic now?! Hah!
Contrary to line-towing experts, I'ma recommend to embrace well designed, math-heavy "clever coding" techniques and wield that ability like a weapon. Because sure, that "bland ass, generally non-efficient and busted ass AI code usually generated off of hyper generic code" can work with proper tweaking.. Maybe. And when it does, it can scale some POCs out to full blown working models using horizontal scaling with proper debugging and oversight. Buuuuttt...
.... when some of those models get too large and their computing cost gets too high, I'm damn sure the corporate answer is gonna cease being "just throw more compute at it" and morph into "we gotta stream-line this code asap." And if you're adorable enough to think a company drunk on cost savings wants to bring on a huge consulting firm to "properly rewrite things" at this point in the process, my suggestion is for you to drop everything and jot that into your dream journal and go take your unicorn for a spin.
But the person that has the best chance of keeping the chaos under control affordably by patching without a full-blown rewrite? Well shit - that's a marketable set of skills very few people will likely have going forward. And while those skills won't garner you the asinine amount some of these new tech-slurping AI carnival barkers will get, they may at least somewhat gleam that odd cube of coding creativity combined with steady work. It may not always be "fun", but at least it's a bit more specialized and engaging (bonus points : it'll confuse the shit out of AI, because it doesn't have enough similar reference points to cosplay expert like it currently does using "vanilla" code).
So yea - potentially meet the new coder; same and hopefully as clever as the (very) old coder.
What.. you're not "grind to shine"-ing?!? Are you even LinkedIn-ing brah?!
My daughter was recently offered a PhD-tract STEM graduate teaching position with a full stipend. My wife and I agree that it's an amazing opportunity, and are encouraging her whole-heartedly to pursue it even if it "pushes back" her professional career.
"With such a competitive and technical job market, aren't you afraid she's losing out on valuable work experience..."
No.. hell no...not at all.. absolutely frigging positively no! Back to the LinkedIn "professional influencer" mines with that psychobabble BS you sleeper-cell corporate shill.
On that note : LinkedIn culture is fascinating to me. That place has it all - Over-caffeinated AF recruiters, 26 year old life-skill coaches, non-persuasive "influencers", MLM product "CEOs", and never-employed "thought leaders" all trying to out-meme / "hot take" one another. Boot-licking mid-level managers cosplaying "industry pillars" in hopes of catching the eye of their 34 year old CEO who most recently posted shirtless pictures of himself from his 3 week ayahuasca retreat with his third wife. Ex-Facebookers who have likely been blocked by their entire family reply-guying political trash to everyone within arms length alongside recently laid-off schleps with no severance thanking their ex-employee for "such a great opportunity to grow". VC guys telling you if you aren't working 60+ hours a week from the office 90 minutes away from where you live you "aren't grinding hard enough" in the same scroll-read as boomers that "made millions" without "any of that technology witchcraft." All under the guise of "professional networking."
The "real job market", IMO, sounds like ass. So what's the rush to get there? Especially given that (if you believe my past rants)
AI is a comin' (even if it sucks) like it or not...
With all of the chaos surrounding employability, I'd argue it makes little sense to look for an entry-level job in this rapidly changing landscape if you have a paid-for, upper education alternative. Also - working hand-in-hand with fellow STEM PhD students and professors sounds a lot more challenging and mentally rewarding than dilly-dicking around with a shit company that is
actively working to outsource your job or, alternatively,
replace your "skilled labor" with the same LLM you are training.
"Worst" case scenario? My daughter comes out the other side of this entire PhD endeavor even more intimidatingly smart than she is now. And, while stuff like that may frighten the trad-wife incel crowd, anyone with a grain of common sense and self-worth realizes the value of "book learnin'"; education and thought are two of the few things corporate America can never strip from you regardless of hard how they try.
So with all that on the table I just wanna say loud and proud to my amazing daughter - you go girl!
POTPOURRI
Awarding Assholery : A widely accepted but completely unacceptable Email pastime
bubsmeany
Disclaimer : I generally deplore email as a form of communication and I pretty much always have. Spams, scams, and "thank you ma'ams" (as well as a lot of other shit that doesn't rhyme quite as nicely) are all culpable toward making email a hot mess. "But filters ..." I hear folks cry like marginally wounded animals fortunate enough to escape a bear trap with the majority of their appendages intact. But the fact legitimate sites ask you to "check your spam filter" for missed correspondence only confirms this weapon of protection is oftentimes too blunt. And while it's easy to blame the "worst email" offenders like those I mentioned above, far too many legitimate websites only compound the issue.
An amazing online community I want to be involved with that requires an email confirmation? Sign me up! A super cool blog that wants my email address to continue reading? Well that's.. passive aggressive.. Not sure why it NEEDS my email address but.. Okay? 15% off my first order and future discounts via email? Ehh.. we all like to save money...
...aaannnndd... now my inbox is an absolute clusterfuque. Sure - there's an argument to be made that it was all my fault. But I'd retort by adding I shouldn't have to sign up for everything, everywhere, all at once to squeeze what little bit of enjoyment out of this horrible-ass 2025 internet experience as I can. Maybe there's a middle ground to be had? I have.. thoughts..
I operate my own website based game that sends its players sporadic emails. When a player signs up initially for an account, I send an email confirmation. When a player needs to reset a forgotten password, I absolutely send them a password reset email. And.. ? That's it. That's the list. I won't send a player anything they don't expect.. because I completely, hundo p respect my player base.
"But newsletters are a different beast..." Well, okay... ish... But are they really? Almost everyone in my immediate universe would rather read a creator's takes on a well formatted website instead of an inconsistently formatted email client. Oh wait? That's offered.. but only after I sign up with an email address? Well - that sucks phat ass, especially if I'm being sent an email EVERY... DAMN... TIME there is a blog update.. or new merch drops... or there's a new sponsor to pimp... etc.
And, yah, I casually doled out some "alternative facts" a couple of paragraphs prior - I totes understand the concept of email advertising and why newsletter folks want my email address to send me garbagio constantly even if I send that shit directly to my spam folder. I'll opine eventually on the "phantom engagement" models many third-party advertisers employ to prop up sketchy business props like "email advertising" and "podcast advertising". But what if you aren't one of these (intentional) agents of inbox "phony engagement" chaos and actually care about your user-base? Here's a thought :
If an individual doesn't respond to an automated email after XX attempts in a row, automagically cut the blast rate.. rinse, wash, repeat. Example : a daily email (please don't do that.. but) that goes ignored for 14 days in a row would turn into a weekly email... which if ignored 12 weeks in a row would turn into a monthly email.. etc.. you get the idea. And if a person that was previously ignoring emails reacts a couple of times in a row? Well - move that person back to a "blastier" tier.
And I realize no third-party bulk email senders (which most newsletter honks rely on) offer this sort of customer "quality of life" hack... because... ? Well, sending a metric fugton of emails is relatively simple. Customer service and product nuance is a much, much trickier (and expensive) beast.
Now that helps explain some of why our inboxes are a fuggin' mess. But as lame ass media consumers and small-time internet schleps, our options are limited... in theory. In practice? Absolutely not.
We all gotta start working towards a better experience because the one we have now is fugging EXHAUSTING. If you run a site, don't be embarrassed to wear the "quality of life" things you do to offer your users a better experience on your damn sleeve. Let's all work to collectively and passive-aggressively expose the "secret assholes" that happily bomb their "supporters" inboxes. And if you don't run a site - stop supporting anyone/anything that doesn't respect your mental well being.
And no.. I'm not one of those "never support consumerism at any cost" turkeys - I personally don't mind being the collective consumer+product under the right circumstances (and, as such, I support multiple podcasts and websites via direct donation). But when I become part of a simple "numbers game" that turns into a mini-propaganda machine simply to drive traffic?
I quit Twitter and Meta products for those reasons and, IMO, an indie creator being a "non-corporate yet still inconsiderate dillhole" isn't a "good enough" reason for me to support them even if I agree with their message.
And if you are the sort of indie creator I am unintentionally referencing with this blog post? Seriously.. just be better - the people that love you and your message deserve it.
DEV
The bell tolls louder for Classic ASP
bubsmeany
Full disclosure I'm not overly proud of : I (currently) still have a site humming right along using Classic ASP. Prioritizing my site's conversion to Python is kinda how my whole journey into writing the Jenkwerx framework started but, as a busy boi, my progress has been slow. The goal is to be completely Microsoft OS web free in 2026; fingers crossed there! But I'm not the only website that has to eventually quit kicking this pesky can down the road.
For being as short lived as it was (development period was only 4 years between 1996 - 2000), Classic ASP was wildly popular in the early days of the "first internet boom" and has been
surprisingly resilient. Microsoft has been slowly trying to kill it since its last stable release, originally by introducing ASP.NET in 2002. But what makes Classic ASP almost universally hated by "code purists" since its release lends itself to how it lasted so long : it leveraged VBScript.
People forget (or are unaware) of how
insanely popular Visual Basic was in the mid-to-late 1990s , not to mention Excel
leveraged (and still uses) VBA to help put Lotus 1-2-3 out to pasture. And when that internet money train pulled into the stations in the late 90s, ASP Classic allowed many devs (professional and hobbyist alike) a familiar onboarding that Cold Fusion and Perl couldn't match.
Sadly, that's all irrelevant now. While understandable, Microsoft continues to chip away at Classic ASP dependencies, most notably the recent deprecation of VBScript.dll. And while anyone running a Classic ASP website is well aware our current websites are all pretty much living on borrowed time, the timeline to address it gets shorter by the day. We do know a few things, however :
ASP Classic
appears to work on Windows 2025..
But it almost always leverages VBScript.dll, which has been
deprecated...
Some optimistic and very experienced developers believe Classic ASP will continue operating just fine through 2030 and beyond and I hope they are correct. Pessimistic developers like myself, however, aren't convinced, and this VBScript depreciation with nebulous "complete removal" dates feels like Microsoft trying to speedrun things. For that reason I'm getting even more proactive to convert this insanely large Classic ASP site I currently operate. Classic ASP has been a "manual add-in" for years now, and each time I have to start on a fresh server I always experience some wonkiness; I fear (even if it's technically "available") it's only going to get worse as time progresses.
I'm trying to get my site completely rewritten by mid-year 2026 at the latest, but I do honestly believe I'll have until "around 2027" (as Microsoft quoted as the second phase of VBScript.dll deprecation) to complete things from my end. Best case scenario : I'm acting a bit chicken-little like and Classic ASP continues to function on newer OS's well into the future so as many sites as possible can safely be refactored. Given, however, that scenario would require me to put my eggs in the Microsoft corporate basket...again... I think I'll just get my ass firing on all cylinders instead..
POTPOURRI
You gotta know when to code 'em, know when to fold 'em... coding burnout is a mo faux...
bubsmeany
For all intents and purposes, coding/software development is still a relatively new profession. Its effects on the mind have thusfar gone pretty much
unstudied to any great degree.
Enter - my lame ass. I've gone through several professional iterations but all of them share one thread : a form of computer coding. Between those career reboots, writing
bulletin boards as a teenager, and creating online games, I have been coding full-scale projects in some capacity for roughly 40 years. As such, my perspective is a bit more long-term than most folks.
One of my recent incarnations has me collaborating with younger coworkers who plan to "code as a career." But, after years of "coding is cool and I can't wait to learn" conversations, their enthusiasm toward coding has recently waned .. and I totes understand their unfortunate position. I, too, have hit varying levels of "coding burnout" over my lifetime. The spells have usually ranged from several months to upwards of a year..
and I'm not alone...
And, while I've opined on the
weaponization of Scrum by shitty organizations, that's only part of the "burnout factor". I could ponticate on that ad nauseum, but here is a
well-rounded article written by The Senior Dev instead that I (almost) wholeheartedly agree with that touches on the majority of issues better than I ever could. But my ass is old enough to at least add a unique postscript : I can confirm first-hand that even nearly-perfect work situations will usually lead to coding burnout as well. It may not be 5 years.. Or 10 years... but at some point when you put enough miles on your coding tires, you will almost assuredly need to deal with it regardless of how nice the roads you navigated were. Even creative+fulfilling coding requires long hours
staring at a screen, hyper-focusing on the minutiae. All professionals are coalescing there, of course, but early coders were one of the first set of professionals trapped on that digital hamster wheel.
So what solutions can I offer? I'll tell ya, fug being a bootlicking mid-level manager unless you absolutely wanna be. I tried that once out of desperation to avoid another extended burnout and just added fuel to an already raging mental dumpster fire. So sadly, outside of anything more than having a temporary backup plan and a bit of savings, I'm still working this Rubik's Cube out mah damn self... I can tell I'm careening toward my fourth (or is it fifth?) coding burnout, and the causes are too complicated to solve via a Reddit thread full of know-it-alls. I'll keep you guys updated...
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