letting myself wander pt. 1 - the problems

buckle up, this is going to be a long one. I'm breaking it up into two parts.

For the last several years now, most of my projects have centered around building a business. This isn't entirely "how can I generate revenue so I can go live on a yacht and eat grapes all day": I viewed business in the realm of software development as this giant undertaking, this quest, conquering a difficult challenge. I viewed builders in the software space like many view ancient heroes of legend.

I launched... six? Eight? software projects that completely failed to generate revenue. Some bigger than others, all of them failed.

I don't view this as defeat, though it's pretty easy to. I took a look at what was consistently failing:

• I was unable to write good, bug-free software fast enough or reliably enough to execute.
• I was letting AI development get in the way of understanding the systems I was releasing.
• I was not at all actually, really trying to learn aesthetics, design and art.
• I was not working on monetizeable problems.
• I was not working on problems I cared about.

Software became a medium through which I was trying to actualize business, and because of that I stopped really caring about learning about the software itself. Why would I learn about it? That's not the goal, the goal is to make money. I was trying to become Pieter Levels.

And I'll repeat for clarity: I don't think it's bad to build a business, I don't think it's bad to try to break out of a 9-to-5, I don't think it's bad to want to make money (lots of caveats on that one) and I don't look down on anyone who does (more caveats on this one too), that's not the point of this rant.

What I think is bad is what I was starting to become, the things I lost during the journey, etc.

I lost a love and knowledge for programming

When Clode and Codex got better, like truly good enough to do most things, I stopped really caring about the code.

Contrary to a lot of the more Luddite folks, this isn't necessarily bad. You should still care that the software works, that it protects peoples' security and privacy, that it works decently well. But if you view software from a purely utilitarian standpoint, ie "it does what it says it does, it doesn't matter how it does it," then this is probably fine. Again, I don't look down on anyone.

For me, though, this kinda sucked. Because at one point I really did love software development. Like, the actual art of writing software to solve problems. I also noticed that when I let myself separate from that art and view the code as purely utilitarian, I started caring less about the quality: I didn't care that the site looks pretty GenAI Slop. I didn't care that the UX wasn't that great. As long as it achieves its stated purpose, didn't leak any user creds, etc., I did not care.

This... doesn't lead to good programs. It also definitely doesn't lead to good programmers. I probably forgot more than I would like to admit about actually developing software.

This actually lead to a negative feedback cycle. I cared less about coding and more about the code, so I wrote more code but learned less and forgot more. My code quality got worse, which meant I cared less about it so, while these projects kept failing economically, I actually became a worse developer, further removed from the craft.

I kept not caring about the aesthetics

I'm a backend developer at heart. At least, that was one of my excuses for my front ends consistently looking like trash. Design in software development isn't exactly in a great space right now. Design in general was starting to converge on corpo trash before AI development really took off, and now all websites look more or less the same. Most AI-enhanced developers are not going to put in the effort to really learn design and make something that looks unique.

This was me. As long as the features work, who cares if it's pretty? Who uses a website because it's pretty anyways?

I really opened up my eyes to this last week when I was using Godot. I opened up Codex and let AI write a lot of the code, appearance, UI, aesthetics... and guess what? It looked like shit. Not just bad, but literally "a 3D game whose aesthetics look exactly like the shitty web UI's that AI's make." I thought maybe adding a whole new dimension, and moving out of the browser and into a native game UI, and moving into a whole new programming language... maybe the UI would look better. Nope.

"But you were fine with websites looking like trash before, why have higher expectations for games?"

For me, web sites are entirely utilitarian. I really do not care how most websites look as long as they're usable. I've seen some truly bad looking sites, and yeah sometimes it's jarring, but for the most part, if it works, I don't care.

Games, though, those are different. Crash Bandicoot, Sly Cooper, GTA 5, Cyberpunk 2077, those are games with an incredibly unique look to them. Most of the value is in how they look. Yeah, the gameplay matters a ton, and there's a utilitarian element to it for sure, but it's totally different to have a shitty looking AI slop aesthetic to a game compared to a website.

This quite literally jarred me back to a sort of reality.

the business side

I also was picking really dumb problems to try to build my business around. Like my first one was "making it easy to download malware from hackers' infrastructure so you don't tip them off that you're investigating them." There are like 2-3 dozen people in the country that would use that often enough to justify paying a pretty small amount for.

I built one that let's you post a photo of yourself in exotic locations in front of your favorite car. First off, fucking cringe. Second, who would pay any more than a couple bucks one or two times for that?

I've started much bigger projects, but the issues I mentioned before usually got in the way: if you're trying to build a metaverse platform, knowing aesthetics matters. Ask Meta. If you're working on a cyber security model with AI, you better know security better than I do.

I also needed to work on problems I actually cared about. I don't care about making it easy to download malware. I don't care about instagram influencers posing in front of cars in Bali. I've worked on so many projects that I genuinely just do not care about.

this all came to a head

All of this came to a head recently when I started this "Lock In" period.

I was able to focus more, but all of those problems from before still persisted.