Ok, yes, I am no good at blogging. But it's 2026, AI is everywhere, writing slop, posting slop and flooding everywhere. So let's have another go at trying to make something real. What's happened since my last entry?
I took voluntary redundancy, and got a hefty payout. If I had known the job market was going to be this bad, I might have stayed, but my people manager would not have changed and we did not like each other. I was also straight up told that if I didn't take the redundancy and stayed on, they didn't have anywhere for me to go as the team I was on was being merged with another and downsized.
So I started on my personal projects while looking for work. Since AI was infiltrating software engineering, and anyone with a ChatGPT subscription was calling themselves an engineer, I decided to try the whole vibe coding thing. Started building my game with it. That was a terrible decision. I felt fast but I was constantly fighting it, even when doing what all the boosters say to do. I have been doing this engineering thing for more than 20 years, I know my stuff.
I'll tell you what happened though. I lost my mojo. I felt my ability to problem solve fade away. Writing code has never been the bottleneck in software engineering, it's the process of writing specs, understanding the domain problems, working the edge cases and whatever *DD is the flavour du jour. Those skills, they fade very fast when you abdicate that part of your process to the slop machine.
I have spent the past little while trying to detox from the slop machine. It's hard. It's an addiction. The answers feel easy, the machine is a sycophantic yes man who is confidently incorrect and will gaslight you. It's insidious.
So I am going back over all the things that the various machines wrote for me and really, the only answer is to rebuild. I look at how it has structured Rust, and it... I am not that great at Rust, but it's worse than I am. It's not idiomatic, it has never been able to keep a big context window, significantly less than what I can keep in my own head, so it's refactored and broken so much stuff. I am trying to rescue my work.
As for work? I have gotten to the last round of interviews on several jobs, where it was me or one other person, and it's always been the other person. I am fed up. I am starting with Stagecoach as a trainee bus driver. I don't even know if it will pay the mortgage, but it is paid work, something I have been without for more than a year. It's not glamorous, but it's better than a kick in the teeth, and at least I will finally be part of a proper Union. Software devs really need to Unionize.