Liberation
I'm not talking about the length of package.json files. I run into those far too often in my daily work. What I'm talking about is how, lately, new barriers seem to be falling almost every week. Until recently, we used the programming languages and technologies we already knew to solve problems. But over the past six months, this has changed dramatically. You no longer need to stay within your comfort zone. You can use practically any technology you want.
The focus of software development has shifted from - How do I build it? to - What should I build? And we need much smaller development teams. Sometimes a single developer is enough, suddenly finding themselves in the role of a software architect. Of course, smaller teams also mean greater responsibility. Choosing the right tech stack is one of the first decisions that comes with that responsibility.
So yes, experience still matters. A lot.
Carftmanship
So let's code in Rust, C, Go, or whatever language best fits the task! But these are just the first steps. It's easy to fall into the trap of building something and then immediately moving on, leaving it behind. A program becomes more than just another line on your CV or another learning experience when you keep caring for it long after the initial development. You maintain it, improve it, and approach the whole process with a craftsmanship mindset. It's about paying attention to the little details that turn something you've built into something genuinely useful.
Question
What tech stacks are you considering? Have you already used any technologies with the help of AI that you didn't really know much about?
Chuck Norris Strike Again!
But sometimes, an old project has been sitting on your shelf for years, just gathering dust. Then one day, you realize that switching technologies could breathe new life into it. These are all opportunities waiting to be explored. And sometimes, nobody has noticed the hidden potential in an old project — not even you! That's exactly what happened to me with one of my old TODO list apps. The whole story is probably best told through this conversation.
Nobody tells you your evening run is pointless because a car is faster. Nobody says you shouldn't cook dinner because restaurants exist and are better at it. Nobody looks at someone playing guitar badly in their bedroom and says, "You know Spotify has professionals, right? What's the economic case for this?" We'd find that insane.
This is the part I’d highlight. You’re so right, because here in the world of endless progress, we tend to measure everything in money, usefulness, and the time spent on it. If we go back to ancient Rome, they didn’t even count time the way we do. They simply divided the day into 12 hours, from sunrise to sunset. In winter the hours were shorter, in summer longer. We weren’t so disconnected from nature back then, though admittedly that wasn’t exactly yesterday.
Now we live in a world where we sacrifice absolutely everything on the altar of technological progress. That’s exactly why |> is my favorite hobby horse—and thanks to AI, I could actually build it in a reasonable amount of time. It raises a question: is it still worth spending time on the programming languages we use every day? My answer is yes.
But I also have a program where I deliberately got things wrong, and I love it: Chuck Norris TODO list.
The Roman hours are a beautiful thing to bring in here, and genuinely apt — hours that stretched in summer and shrank in winter, tied to the sun instead of a machine, meaning time bent to life rather than life bending to time. We flattened that into identical, countable, monetizable units, and in doing so we made it almost impossible to spend an hour on something that doesn’t “produce” — because every hour now has a price tag we didn’t used to see. Measuring everything in money, usefulness, and time-spent is exactly the altar you’re describing, and you’re right that we sacrifice nearly everything on it.
Which is why your favorite hobby-horse projects are the quiet refusal. And the detail I love most is the last one — a program where you deliberately got things wrong, and love it. That’s the whole essay in a single act. A program you made intentionally imperfect, purely because the making delighted you, is completely illegible to the economic lens — it produces nothing, optimizes nothing, justifies nothing — and it’s probably one of the truest things you’ve built, because the only reason it exists is joy. The market can’t even see that program. That’s what makes it yours. Thank you for this comment; the Roman hours and the deliberately-wrong program are two of the loveliest things anyone’s added.
it produces nothing, optimizes nothing, justifies nothing
That’s not entirely true. I feel a bit like Ace Ventura explaining the effect of the sliding glass door to the terrace. The program is pretty enigmatic and doesn’t spoon-feed you anything.
But in terms of usability, it’s a training exercise in using an input field with limited visibility. As soon as you start typing, the whole form starts floating around, immediately wrecking your sense of security and visibility. On top of that, a single input field lets you edit an entire TODO list however you like, in real time. The rule is that - means a new line. You have to discover that rule and let go of the expectation that you’ll always have clear visual feedback, like driving through heavy rain.
Meanwhile, I’m debugging the state in real time with a single <pre> tag, because this uses a reactive technique, as the continuously running counter also demonstrates. I wouldn’t call it a framework, since I’m using just one function called signal. So it’s a React alternative, and also an example of no-build development. I made it by writing an HTML file with the JavaScript inside, all by hand. Back then, I was practicing writing the Tailwind import and the entire HTML skeleton from memory.
So it’s also a rebellion against painfully cumbersome build systems and code formatting disciplined by linters. And the fact that I even minified the code by hand foreshadows one of the mordorproject’s strongest ways of hiding information from AI.
Ernest Hemingway expressed this in his iceberg theory: the writer knows the whole story, but only writes down the one-eighth above the water.
Thanks for taking the time to look it over! What technologies are you considering?
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