So this is how I am returning to writing an article on my website after 3 months. Another rant. I was planning to do a blog post on how the IT world is already crumbling. But it was my birthday recently, so I did some thinking about what I have achieved within the last year. And I found out, it was almost nothing. AI is just taking my motivation to create something myself. At this point, I also want to mention that this is not a blog post about how useful AI really is or if it will replace software developers. This is a rant about how AI has changed my attitude toward coding.

I may be relatively young compared to other software developers, but I am old enough to just say, “Back in my time, we didn’t have LLMs to code for us”. For most of the time, I was coding a lot of cool stuff. I coded math libraries where I converted concepts I learned at school into code. I coded Discord bots and APIs. I did some web development. I tried to program Minecraft mods, even though I was terrible at Java at that time.

Only a bit before I finished school and started to enroll in University, one of the biggest recent innovations was made available to the public. ChatGPT 3 was revealed. At that time, it wasn’t even really good. It was able to do some really basic stuff, and I really loved it. I didn’t have to implement sorting algorithms. I didn’t have to implement Levenshtein anymore. It was just a relief.

But soon, more and more models were published. Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT 4, Gemini 2, ChatGPT 5, Gemini 3, … and the list goes on and on and on. As time went on, the models got better at coding. Some really clever person invented agentic coding, which even removed the copy-and-paste part. I will just write a prompt of what I want, and it will be coded by whatever LLM.

When you combine this fact with the other fact that the big AI companies are just scraping my work and using it to train their models, regardless of what license I put into my code repository, I really can’t think of any reason why I would put effort into my code anymore. When I publish a really cool library, it will just be trained into the model, and everyone else will just write a prompt to recreate their own version of it. Or the model will just put my code into other code bases just because it happened to have a piece of code in it that the LLM needs right now.

One of my biggest problems I have with motivating myself to code is that I do not want to make anything useless. I want to create something that other people will also use. Some piece of software or library that is used, respected and developed and contributed to by some user base. If someone finds a bug, it will be reported, and we can find a solution to make the library even safer and better.

But once again: what is the point of doing this when everyone just says “AI, create some code that replaces the library xyz, but better”. If I remember correctly, there have been efforts for code origin attribution, yet I have never seen code being attributed in any vibecoded code base. Someone still needs to invent that. On a side note, I think it would lead to safer AI-slop when the functions are somehow connected via a code attribution system, and when someone finds a bug or safety issue in one of the used functions, it is replaced everywhere else too… oh wait, that is called a package management system and already exists!

I can’t prove it, and it is just a feeling, but AI is greatly failing at using smaller libraries that were not used in their training data. Naturally, it is the same with new libraries.

So, just to summarize everything up to now, whenever I code something, it will be stolen by big AI companies, I will receive no attribution, no one will try to improve my code, and no one will use my code anyway because AI will just recreate the code independently in other code bases whenever it needs to.

Another thing that is just killing the mood is that almost every month, some influential CEO of “Big AI company Inc.” is yapping about how their AI will now revolutionize the software development sector. All the junior developers will be gone within the next few months, and we have to prepare for the complete collapse of the software industry as we know it… It is crazy how this affects someone who doesn’t even believe in AI (a person like me). Just being told that your skills will be useless for years is doing something to you and your mentality.

There have been a few things that I was actually able to learn over the last year. I was able to get a VPS and set it up, even though I needed help from a friend for that. I made my website which I really like. I wrote blog posts completely without AI, even though I am sure they are now training data. I got a home-lab, which really ripped a hole into my finances thanks to AI pushing up the hardware prices. I learnt Rust to a level that is actually useful. LLMs won’t take that experience from me.

Now I know that a lot of you will just say that if coding was actually fun to me, I wouldn’t care if AI is getting better at it. That is true. Yet coding itself isn’t the only fun part. For me, it is creating something. Something that others will also use. I don’t doubt that AI can be a useful tool. Is it so useful that it is worth all the IP theft, environmental issues and highly increased prices at literally all consumer electronics? I really doubt that.

I hope that the hype around LLMs will die down soon. I don’t even require it to go away completely to be happy. I just need that phase of fearmongering that I’m not getting a job soon, and big tech companies shoving AI everyone’s throat to be over.

Happy coding!