When I began working on the Coding Akita blog, I wanted it to be a resource for really deep topics in web development that I felt like people didn’t really cover. Not only would it be a great read for other developers who wanted to understand patterns and architecture more deeply, but it would force me to research topics deeply and think about them. The truth is, I rarely write things I’m an expert on. I usually choose to write about things I’m curious about. It forced me to learn something and then present it in a way to people that they would understand it too. However, in the world of easy, cheap, fast AI, I don’t really think it’s as worthwhile endeavor anymore to write tutorials, how-to’s, or deep explanations of inner-workings.
My blog started after AI became “a thing”. But I still felt like there was a place for writing tutorials online. There’s a couple problems in my eyes with what my blog was:
- If people want coding info, they will just take it from an LLM.
- People are relying on LLM outputs more when they code, making architecture less important.
- People use LLM’s to do research on topics now.
I’m aware that I’m making generalizations with this list, but in my experience this is the way the wind is blowing. I’m finding myself going less to the experts I used to learn from and increasingly just researching things with Claude, Gemini, or Ollama. The ability to converse with documentation makes it easier to get more information and learn deeply.
Of course I think there will always be room for experts to share their thoughts, but I’m not the caliber of person who should be. I think I’m damn good at what I do, but I think there are people who are actually the best at it. Sorry, but when I want to read about subjects in lifting, I often turn to people like Greg Nuckols or Eric Helms. I don’t go to some random dude who’s been lifting for 5 years on YouTube.
So what’s left for the personal blog?
From now on, I’ll be posting smaller pieces of content that will probably be more opinion based. It also won’t always be about coding or web development. It might have some overlap, but I’d expect a wider range of topics. There definitely won’t be anymore tutorials or how-to’s. I may write an article on how to build your own personal tutorials with coding assistants, but that’s about all I intend to do currently.
In particular, I think software is a terrible thing to blog about. It becomes obsolete too quickly. And not just in terms of technology moving so fast, but also because you find yourself no longer agreeing with your own opinions and how-to’s in a year. That’s too short of a timeline to be correcting yourself.
But also, I’m personally just burnt out on thinking about making software and I don’t see it’s promises coming to fruition. I got into software because I like to make things. It sucks to have a whole field about making things degrade. You’d think that giving us all an AI assistant to help us make stuff would lead to better code and results, but I’ve noticed the opposite. And while logically, I tell myself that all this will have negative side-effects, most companies continue to do just fine. It doesn’t feel like people care about it anymore. So I’m tired of being the person who cares.
I’m tired of having the wind blow in my face. So I think I’ll just turn around for a bit.