How did we get here?
March 19, 2026
(To start, I’d like to apologize in advance for this blog post being quite rushed and not having as many details as I was originally planning on writing about. I have been sick these past few days, but I still feel that this would be worth finishing on time.)
The day was March 19, 2021. But to understand what happened that day, and why I consider it to be significant, we need to first understand the background.
Like nearly everyone else, March 2020 changed everything for me. For the first time, I was completely isolated from all of my friends and everything I enjoyed at school, with the only way of talking to them being through instant messaging and/or voice calls.
To say the least, I felt alone and constantly annoyed.
Unsurprisingly, I also did basically nothing during distance learning. School was almost entirely irrelevant to me during that time period.
For a few months, I found myself trying to have some sort of presence online. I was very bad at it, perhaps unsurprisingly. Eventually, it felt like everything I had done just fell apart.
And I was getting tired of it.
On March 19, 2021, I made an influential decision, not realizing until far later the impact it would have. I decided to “anonymously” (well, not really, but in practice) create a few online accounts (most notably GitHub and Discord) and just write code.
I wasn’t perfect in how I did it (there were definitely some stupid arguments along the way), but overall, it was an amazing feeling.
For the first time, I had a place where I could sit down and build what I wanted to build.
Part of me wants to skip this detail, but at the time I was very specific about wanting this to be mentioned if I discuss that time period in the future.
There was once a game called Mazean. The website still exists and is maintained by the same development team, but it’s a completely different game now on a fundamental level and is honestly an insult to the original.
I think the best way to describe it is a 3D sandbox game designed around hexagons. Each scene has an infinite hexagon grid and starts out almost completely filled in aside from a randomized room template, and then you can destroy hexagons to create more space for additional structures.
There was also a way of uploading images to put them on walls. It’s honestly a miracle that there wasn’t any notable abuse of that feature, but it doesn’t entirely surprise me either because that game had an incredible community.
It had multiplayer functionality as well as a built in chat system too, so you could easily explore and collaborate on scenes together.
One day, although I don’t remember exactly when, I heard that the very circumstance which made it possible for me to privately have a presence on a computer off to the side was going to stop being the case.
I pretty quickly warned everyone I had any notable contact with, and it felt incredibly difficult to do. For some of them, we later crossed paths again, but for many of them that was the end of it. Part of me wonders where they are now.
I remember the moment that I went to the tray icon for the Discord desktop client (which I used at the time) and pressed the quit button for the final time.
For about a week, I didn’t really do anything. But then, as I described in Iron devlog 1: Some history, I built some custom server software for Minecraft Classic.
The day I turned 13, I made a GitHub account, although I later moved to Codeberg. A few days later, I set up a GPG key and uploaded that code.
In August 2024, I started my first year of high school. To say the least, it took a very long time to get used to it.
I missed being at the middle school I was previously at because of just how many amazing experiences I had there. However, nearly everyone who made that school as incredible as it was when I was there had moved on and ended up elsewhere.
I remember that fateful day in November when I realized that the world was going to go downhill for at least the next few years.
Then “vibe coding” happened.
Initially, it was just the sort of thing that existed but I didn’t really need to think about since it had no direct impact on me.
However, by the end of 2025, nearly everything I had enjoyed using for web development just went all in on the hype with no sense of ethics or even just enough of an actual engineering mindset to see the obvious technical downsides.
There is nothing that annoys me more than large companies blatantly stealing the code of everyone’s passion projects (many of which are released under copyleft licenses), throwing it into a language model, and expecting us FLOSS developers to not only be okay with that but use the technology (and pay those same companies to do so!) to the point where building software is no longer anything enjoyable or even understandable.
It felt like every month or two, I would discover that something I enjoyed for years just became AI slop. That continues to happen now.
I’m getting tired of being betrayed this way. I’m tired of dealing with this.
At this point, I am skeptical of any FLOSS project, especially web-related, that isn’t explicitly against using LLMs for code. I don’t really trust nearly anyone anymore.
Sometimes, I think to myself: Wouldn’t it be easier to just give up and accept dependencies including LLM-generated code?
But I never let that thought win, and I (hopefully) never will.
I am not here to give into the very destruction of creativity which is taking place.
I’m here to build things.
And peer pressure won’t make me give up what I enjoy the most.
Even though it’s possibly the most difficult ethical stance to take now as someone building software.
Sometimes, people ask me why I have basically no optimism nowadays.
It’s not like I don’t know how to be optimistic. I once lived there.
But not anymore.
And, to be clear, that’s not to say I can’t dream of a better future - I can and do.
But a brighter future won’t be tomorrow.