Motivations

I've always taken a great deal of pride in the things I produce. It's not just that I made it, usually it's that I felt like I had the time to make it right.

That's why it's been a little confusing to me to see some of my particularly hopeful projects get less than the attention they deserved.

I've been pondering on this for a while. It came up just recently for me, and I think I could boil it down to a few things:

Work

My goals at work have always been to be on top of things. The tasks keep coming, and the pacing is never consistent. A commitment is a commitment, and then there's firefighting, and your priority list has shuffled around.

Usually there's a struggle, one beyond the initially quoted scope. And it's here that my soul gets drawn into my work-

It is very important to me that the things I put down make sense, and that the things I pick up make sense. When there's a gap, call it aging infrastructure, misunderstood requirements, bad or lacking security practices, "it just works" code -- what makes logical sense to me is to fill it.

At times I wonder if the culture around me is as attentive to these things. What happens is I end up identifying a real problem, and a real solution, and it takes more from me than I expect. Interdisciplinary problems have interdisciplinary solutions.

I have heard and practice awareness of the fact you can lean too hard into "fixing" everything. With this in mind, I still can't stop myself from trying to make sure the machine I'm a part of is well oiled.

Come the end of the night, I often find myself spent, simply wanting to disconnect.

Play

It would be all I loved to do to write and test code in my spare time. Truly, demoing a new idea could be one of the most exciting ways to spend a night alone.

Unfortunately these muscles, both real and metaphorical are stretched thin in the day-to-day. Somehow, somewhere, it got difficult to distinguish personal projects from work projects. Something about being on "all the time".

Shame! I think my favorite thing to do of all time is solve a real persons problems with code.

I guess work is a fine enough niche.

The AI of it all

I have a "code is poetry" type of stance at this time, September of 2025.

Most of the AI code I see is overly verbose while failing to capture the simplicity of their task or any awareness of the tools the larger project contains.

Most of the tasks I have to do require a finer level of control than letting 'vibes' drive the product. You've probably heard these

• It's good for prototyping
• It's good for one-off low value scripts

I'll say that one thing I think that generative AI does right is expose how needlessly difficult it is to start and finish web development, and how easy it can be. If it helps you build a demo for a client website, more power to you.

I'm not ready to lose agency in my own projects. Letting the tools work for you is a good way to be the newbie in your own repo.

Copilot and friends are great at tab-complete and summoning rituals. "Configure a rotating logger at 5mb" is something I have to do dozens of times but writing out in plain text I want that as a function is pretty nifty.

All that's a preface to say...

Man, it's kind of a bummer, isn't it? The industry suggests that n% of code is or will be written by AI. Regardless of the truthiness of the statement, you can feel around you that people think it.

I remind myself that almost all of our problems can be traced to systems level code that lacks investment. FFMPEG and its hand-written assembly isn't getting better with AI. We aren't solving the web platform issue with AI, or the fact that the web dev tech stack is too big for its own britches.

Real systems need real developers.

Still, when your body is looking for a reason to ask if your hobby is worth your time, AI is -that- guy to look at you and ask "is anything worth your time?"

Life beyond the screen

Who can say how the technology industry will evolve. Move fast and break things is a terrible motto but things certainly do happen.

I know where I don’t want to be: building products that trade security or durability for short-term growth. I’d rather focus on democratizing comprehension and building systems that prioritize security and longevity over growth-at-all-costs.

Technology that lasts years, not days, will eternally be my pursuit, and that’s the mindset I intend to bring everywhere I go. I really love to solve problems that are felt everywhere.

The digital biosphere's getting pretty difficult to inhabit for a regular person.

Sometimes it's nice to just go outside. You know, I heard

you can just do things.