as a software developer, it feels like it’s gotten harder and harder to be someone who still cares
I’ve been pretty busy recently with a number of things, both for school and for myself and the people around me. It’s the latter category that I’m really focused on right now, though. I put a lot of effort into making things that I’m proud of and that I want people to enjoy using.
You can see this in a lot of my projects, but it’s especially clear in NUSGet and TigerDine. These are very different apps, written in different languages and with different frameworks, and targeting very different audiences. But there’s still a common thread: they’re the product of me seeing something around me that I didn’t like or that didn’t work and making something better. And then once it was out in the world, I listened to what people had to say and tried to make it better however I could. Many hours and many late nights were spent debugging until I could get them to a state that I could be proud of. But ultimately, I am proud of them.
A little while back, I ported libWiiPy over to Rust, thus creating rustwii. I replaced my command line tool WiiPy with a Rust equivalent first, and then I kinda stepped away from Wii stuff for a bit to focus on other projects (especially since I was off to college soon, and would soon be far more focused on creating TigerDine). I had always wanted to try and port NUSGet over to Rust too, because that seemed like a logical next step, but I just hadn’t gotten around to it. Then, the other day, I decided it was time to take a peek.
I wanted to find a good UI framework, and someone else from Computer Science House recommended one to me on Slack, which I will not be naming here because I think that the specifics are not important here. I looked in to it, and wasn’t surprised to find that the website was very obviously created by AI. This was already a bad first impression. I looked into it more, and really the entire framework seemed to be largely AI-generated top to bottom. The site was AI, the docs were AI, and the components looked exactly how you would expect, the shad-cn adjacent styling that Claude really really loves.
And then I found the list of apps made with the framework.
I’m not sure that a single app on that list wasn’t made at least largely with AI. And I found that really, really depressing. A framework made by LLMs being used by LLMs to make, at least in some cases, tools for making more apps with LLMs.
And all that just made me kinda stop and wonder: what’s the point?
I care a lot about the work I do. I’m not going to ship code that I don’t understand, and I’m not going to ship a product that I can’t confirm is working right. I want to make something that I can proudly display my name on. I want people to use it and for it to be useful, and for it to not cause headaches for them. I want to make software where the person on the other end can recognize that another human being sat down and considered how something should work or how it should look.
But it just feels like that’s not what most developers care about anymore. You can see it in all of the websites that look and feel exactly the same. The hundreds of ChatGPT-written to-do list apps. The dozens of “AI agent first” code editors. It feels like the goal is to just pump out as much code as quickly as possible. And it just needs to mostly work right now. Who cares if it works later? And who cares if it’s even maintainable? You can always just give it back to Copilot and have it make the changes for you.
You can also feel it in the way that it feels like services that you could previously rely on are crumbling around us. At the time I’m sitting down and dumping these thoughts out into Obsidian, my website is down. Why? Who knows. GitHub is just failing to provision a TLS certificate for the site again, it seems. I probably don’t even need to embed the image of the timeline of increased GitHub outages as Microsoft has pushed AI usage internally more and more for you to know the one I’m referring to. Can I prove my specific issue is related? Maybe not, but I can certainly tell you that in the ~5 years I’ve been hosting a website on GitHub Pages, this issue has only popped up in the last 3 or so months.
Why should I care about the thing I want to create when every piece of the stack below me was made without care?
It’s a tough thing to reconcile.
I don’t want to be all doom-and-gloom though. I do still care, and I will continue to care. I want to keep making things that I’m proud of, and I want to make your life easier when you use them. I want you to feel that every choice I made was the product of at least some human thought. And I want you to tell me if something doesn’t make sense, and I’ll make it right.
Hearing that someone’s day to day life is made a little easier because of something that I made is an amazing feeling. And not just because I want to be praised for the work that I do (though hey a little appreciation is always welcome), but it’s because I’m happy knowing that I had a positive influence on someone else’s life.
This is why I make software. I want to make things easier for people. I want to make things more fun for people. And I want those people to know that I cared about the process of making the thing that they are using.
And you won’t be able to take that away from me.