No I don't think the future is AI

The future is not AI. The age of giants is coming to a close and the age of resiliency is beginning. The future is accepting that anything with a shareholder or is growth driven is no longer a reliable partner.

Including the projects we trusted when they promised they would never.

The future of the web is indie, decentralized, open-source, self-hosted, cat girl .meow TLD’d, Rust-y, projects that are created for the few who still care to engineer.

Meanwhile, the productivity driven people will loudly showcase what they can do with so little of their own time. Congratulations, you can make many low-quality products very quickly and all of it will feel the same because statistically they are.

We are seeing the software IKEA-tization of the industry.

There are still those who make furniture by hand, but they are rare and out of reach for most. However, the difference between furniture-makers and our field is that we do not require physical proximity to learn, we do not need to invest in high quality tools as we do not require massive data centers (for most things), and we’ve seen what a fewer people with internet in the 90s can accomplish with much shittier hardware.

If you are worried about the future of software, learn embedded systems programming. Learn to push the limits of the hardware with the constraints it has. Learn how to repurpose old hardware for something else. Learn how to build a TCP/IP stack. Realize that bloat is a bad thing, because it squanders resources that you could use for something else. Learn to refactor well and by hand. Learn how to the secure things you build and learn that the safest service is one you never turn on. Ask someone to break what you build and explain how they did broke it. Understand that the current future trajectory doesn’t guarantee that YOU will benefit from Moore’s law when your RAM, Storage, and Compute will increase in cost exponentially.

If you aren’t interested in the programming aspects of the industry: learn how to make the smallest filesize art, what different kinds of disabilities exist and what they need from their UIs, how to remove dark patterns, and how to market these things to regular people who are suffocating from enshittified products. Find the people who do like the programming and offer to team up with them.

Start a blog that doesn’t focus on being hyper-productive but on sound engineer principles. Boost the people you see doing the same. Give newcomers the same advice. Thank them for joining our industry and chastise them when they take risky shortcuts or take jobs to build a torment nexus. Help them network to find the ethical places to work so they don’t end building a torment nexus or making IKEA-quality software. If they insist on building their own torment nexus, then cease helping them and explain why before you cut them off. Do so publicly.

If you are entrepreneurial find ways to create informal companies that will never have shareholders or take VC money. If you do, hire the people who are trying to ethically engineer, especially juniors that can be mentored. Build diverse teams. Invest in them. Encourage the entrepreneurial ones to do the same as you did and help them. Look for projects that look promising and offer to partner with them.

The future is salvaging what we can from these dying giants and then helping each other move forward.

In my opinion.

I hope this post was helpful, or at the very least, interesting.