I am not go­ing to code for a bit. I mean, I am go­ing to be­cause that's what I do for a liv­ing but I am go­ing to stop cod­ing my own stuff for some time.

I am not burnt out, I have ideas, and I want to work on them, but if I don't stop I am go­ing to en­ter an un­healthy loop and then I will be burnt out. Things are mov­ing a bit too fast.

I am hav­ing fun cod­ing with AI. I am writ­ing things I al­ways want­ed to see ex­ist that did not ex­ist be­fore but the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of projects and some of them gath­er­ing an ac­tu­al us­er base is ... a con­cern. I may have too many things go­ing on.

Plus I am fix­ing 2 hous­es.

Plus I have my fam­i­ly.

Plus I take care of my 92 year old mom.

Plus my dog is not do­ing great.

Plus, plus, plus, plus.

So, self care sea­son it is! And that does­n't in­volve the re­al­ly in­sane amount of sil­ly free work I put on my­self. I will be back in a month or two. Or not!

AI, right? What a thing!

I am a very se­nior de­vel­op­er. I learned pro­gram­ming on some of the first pro­gram­mable per­son­al com­put­ers and I may end pro­gram­ming in the last ones. That is a very weird co­in­ci­dence, that such a time span would be the last 40 years of my life.

I am al­so a very good pro­gram­mer. Re­al­ly, I am very good. I am not the great­est but I am waaaay bet­ter than av­er­age. There is very lit­tle I don't feel ca­pa­ble of writ­ing my­self. If any­thing, I have sort of a fetish for wheel reim­ple­men­ta­tion be­cause I feel I can re­write al­most any­thing bet­ter than what is out there by some mea­sure.

And to be hon­est, I don't know how to feel about AI.

On one hand it's the death of a hob­by. Cod­ing is not re­al­ly the point any­more. Sure, I still code bet­ter than, say, Claude, but not a lot bet­ter. And it knows more lan­guages than I do.

I have much bet­ter de­sign skill­s, I am way bet­ter at choos­ing things, I am 100 times bet­ter at hav­ing ideas. But writ­ing them down as code ... he's maybe 50% of the pro­gram­mer I am and I can run 5 copies of him.

So, the ques­tion ev­ery­one asks: are we pro­gram­mers go­ing to lose our job­s?

Sure, some. Me? May­be!

But that's ex­pect­ed when a tool is much bet­ter than what there was be­fore and pro­gram­mers have a weird ten­den­cy to be more nu­mer­ous with bet­ter tool­s.

Com­pil­ers made pro­gram­ming much sim­pler than be­fore, and there were many more pro­gram­mers af­ter they were in­vent­ed. IDEs made pro­gram­ming sim­pler, and there were more pro­gram­mers af­ter they be­came pop­u­lar. So, LLMs are mak­ing pro­gram­ming sim­pler... who knows!

For peo­ple that are not fa­mil­iar with pro­gram­ming maybe anal­o­gy help­s. Imag­ine you are a knife mak­er. You make knifes by hand. Each knife takes a day. Of course there are in­dus­tri­al knife mak­ers that make a mil­lion knifes a day. But sud­den­ly comes the knifer­-2000 and it costs $200 and it makes 10 knifes a day.

It means any­one can make knifes, all they need is $200, some knife-­mak­ing in­cli­na­tion and a need for a knife that is not served by the in­dus­tri­al mak­ers that sell knifes for a dol­lar.

In soft­ware de­vel­op­men­t, very few peo­ple have knife-­mak­ing in­cli­na­tion­s, and peo­ple that need non-in­dus­tri­al knifes are su­per rare.

So, yes this makes the life of the ar­ti­sanal knife-­mak­er hard­er, but the idea that any small busi­ness is go­ing to go and cre­ate their own ap­p/knife be­cause now they can is kind of sil­ly.

It may mean the end of the small de­vel­op­ment shop, it may mean that on­ly huge com­pa­nies sur­vive, it may mean those com­pa­nies may need few­er de­vs, too.

But I think it al­so means some­thing else. I think it means hob­by­ists are go­ing to have a lot of fun. Open source de­vs in their home shops are go­ing to have a lot of fun.

What am I bas­ing that on? Well, on the lots of fun I have been hav­ing.

While dur­ing the day I am a mild-­man­nered dev on a medi­um-­sized cor­po­ra­tion, my re­al per­son­al­i­ty is "guy with strange ideas who wants to turn them in­to code".

And boy is that guy hav­ing fun.

Projects I nev­er tried be­cause they were too much ef­fort now are not.

Like, I have had a thing for spread­sheets for maybe 20 years. And why not write an ex­cel-­com­pil­er? Well, sure

And why not write a "pow­er­point" that us­es mark­down and runs in a ter­mi­nal? Well, sure

And why not write a tool to em­u­late hard­ware on servers and let you con­trol them over the in­ter­net? Well, why not in­deed!

Lit­er­al­ly, any­thing I want to make, I can make. Maybe no­body will use it. Con­sid­er them the com­put­er equiv­a­lent of Warham­mer minia­tures. I wrote all that just be­cause I want­ed it. Me.

I al­so think AI is go­ing to change the pro­gram­ming lan­guage land­scape and it may al­ready be vis­i­ble. My guess­es:

• Lan­guage read­abil­i­ty mat­ters less
• Lan­guage per­for­mance mat­ters more
• Those who say LLMs will write ma­chine code are id­iots

This should re­flect in things like Python's pop­u­lar­i­ty de­creas­ing, Rust/­Go pop­u­lar­i­ty in­creas­ing.

Ide­al­ly it would be the death of server-­side JS/T­S, be­cause I can al­ways dream the world will be bet­ter in the fu­ture.

It al­so means (or rather, I al­so guess) stu­dents and very ear­ly ca­reer de­vs are in a pile of trou­ble be­cause they are not go­ing to get the for­ma­tion they need to sup­port the bad parts of LLMs (sys­tems de­sign! taste! method­olo­gies!)

For ex­am­ple, strict TDD works great with LLM­s. If you can give them a good pre­ex­ist­ing test suite they are go­ing to come up with a work­ing so­lu­tion that pass­es the suite in no time.

Sep­a­ra­tion of con­cern­s? They love it! Helps es­tab­lish con­tex­t.

Lo­cal­i­ty, mod­u­lar­i­ty? Yes please!

All the soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing "dis­ci­pline" just works when not deal­ing with hu­man­s.

Damn, you can use freak­ing cas­cade, and it will work. What do you think all those "de­sign mod­e" and "ar­chi­tect agen­t" are? Cas­cade baby!

This is go­ing to be an in­ter­est­ing time, and I can say that from the nice po­si­tion of "I am close to re­tire­ment any­way". For peo­ple who were pre­par­ing for a long ca­reer in soft­ware de­vel­op­men­t, it's al­so go­ing to be in­ter­est­ing, in a not so nice way.

They will prob­a­bly evolve and de­vel­op a dis­ci­pline to man­age these sys­tem­s, which is not go­ing to look noth­ing like prompt en­gi­neer­ing, har­ness fuck­ery, agen­tic work­flows or what­ev­er peo­ple are talk­ing about this week. All that is just the dead chick­en run­ning around look­ing for its head.

What will come? Fuck if I know.

man­grul­lo (noun)

Pro­nun­ci­a­tion: /maŋˈɡru.ʝo/ (mah­ng-­GROO-y­oh)

Plu­ral: man­grul­los

Def­i­ni­tion: A rus­tic watch­tow­er or look­out post, typ­i­cal­ly con­struct­ed of wood, used in the ex­ten­sive plains of the Pam­pas (pri­mar­i­ly Ar­genti­na and Uruguay) for sur­vey­ing the sur­round­ing land.

Ev­ery­one that does self­-host­ing run­s, to some ex­ten­t, in­to the same prob­lem: Now, you are a sys­tem ad­min­is­tra­tor. Per­haps it's not re­al­ly a prob­lem and it's more like the point of the whole ex­er­cise, but be­ing a sysad­min means chores.

One spe­cif­ic chore is main­tain­ing your apps up­dat­ed. One so­lu­tion for that, which I was us­ing is watch­tow­er which runs in your serv­er and ... well, up­dates your stuff.

Main prob­lem with it is that it's aban­doned.

So, you can use a fork that is main­tained, or you can find an­oth­er tool, or you can write one. I wrote one. It's called Man­grul­lo, and it does rough­ly the same thing with some ex­tra bells and whis­tles.

• Has a web dash­board you can use to do things man­u­al­ly
• Works head­less like watch­tow­er if you pre­fer
• Works as a CLI tool, log in­to your serv­er and run it your­self
• Can op­tion­al­ly NOT DO MA­JOR VER­SION UP­DATES. You know, be­cause you are a bit of a chick­en (or you ac­tu­al­ly use your ser­vices)

You can get it from http­s://­man­grul­lo.ralsi­na.me or GitHub it should be easy to set­up.

It's kin­da ex­per­i­men­tal but all its users (me) are us­ing it with­out trou­ble.

For a long time I used a paste­bin called Snips. It is great, spe­cial­ly be­cause you cre­ate the pastes from the ter­mi­nal by us­ing ssh! I even had a self­-host­ed copy.

My main prob­lems with it were:

• ON­LY via SSH, no web in­ter­face
• It's a pain to run on ARM un­less you dis­able lan­guage guess­ing

So, I wrote my own paste­bin called Pas­to. It is a sim­ple paste­bin writ­ten in Crys­tal. It is easy to use and it is easy to self­-host.

How easy to self host? It's ONE BI­NA­RY. Sure, you can run it via dock­er, but you can al­so just, you know, RUN IT. It us­es pret­ty much no re­sources. No data­base (things are stored to disk us­ing Sepia)

What fea­tures does Pas­to have?

• Free pub­lic in­stance at pas­to1.ralsi­na.me
• SSH paste cre­ation
• Web in­ter­face
• ANONY­MOUS SSH lo­gin
• Once you are logged in, you can cre­ate/ed­it/delete pastes from the web in­ter­face.
• Full REST API
• Comes with an MCP for our LLM friends
• Au­to-­ex­pir­ing pastes
• En­crypt­ed pastes (ze­ro knowl­edge)
• Burn-after-read­ing pastes
• Anony­mous pastes
• Hun­dreds of lan­guages sup­port­ed for syn­tax high­light­ing.
• Col­or Schemes for the UI
• Col­or schemes for the syn­tax high­lighter
• Shows mark­down as HTML (so, easy to cre­ate throw­away web­pages!)
• QR to scan for paste URL
• Pri­vate Pastes
• Re­spon­sive UI
• Runs on a pota­to
• Can be rate lim­it­ed if you want to make it pub­lic
• Is a PWA
• MIT Li­cense, yad­da yad­da, it's in Github

Hope you en­joy it!