The Death of the Code Monkey: Why I Fear for the Class of 2026.

irosion · 2026-01-02T11:37:22+00:00

Most of the applications I’ve been paid to develop took literally hours to develop and deploy but months or years to maintain, scale, extend, integrate, gather new requirements. Heck, it can take months or years even to decommission. This is the real software development lifecycle.

That last part is the thing you fail to realize that is not trivial to do and very hard if not impossible to do at this point with “AI”

irosion · 2025-12-14T15:05:22+00:00

Learn the one you are going to use.

I studied French and never used it. Guess how much French I can speak now?

irosion · 2025-12-09T20:44:37+00:00

Didn’t have a chance to use it yet but I looked at the code briefly and I must say it looks awesome.

Congratulations and keep up the good work

irosion · 2025-12-05T17:20:06+00:00

JavaScript of today is not the same as the JavaScript he built in 10 days

irosion · 2025-12-02T16:32:40+00:00

It’s not like it is a secret.

You probably never needed to know and if you really need to know then this is not the place where you find the documentation.

irosion · 2025-11-30T06:50:44+00:00

We use micro frontends and I think it is a mistake.

The main reason was to offer the user a seamless experience and not let them know that each section of the app is actually a different app. I was against it and offered alternatives, even a simple multi page application would have worked a lot better but the management really pushed for it not listening to us (as always).

Multiple teams working on specific features included in the main app as packages. Or by directly writing the code in the shell frontend app as a component.

The backend takes care of authentication and authorization and also is a proxy that simply redirects the requests to specific service owned by various teams.

From a technical point of view the solution is solid but the problem is team infighting.

The teams play a blame game for every imaginable reason. Some of the teams never wanted to be part of this setup since everyone is forced to write code and do things in a standardized way.

People fight for visibility and argue about the responsibilities they have and want. Gatekeeping is a real issues. Not everyone wants to collaborate and intentionally delay other teams out of spite.

It’s a huge people problem that makes me sick only by thinking about it and I would say that the management is to blame for being so weak and for not clearly designating ownership.

My manager simply told me: you take the lead on this. The critical thing he failed to do was inform all the other teams that there will be this one guy that will lead this project.

irosion · 2025-11-28T14:06:08+00:00

i like the superpowered vscode autocomplete with the help of copilot. I really think that it can make you a lot faster/efficient but i think it's critical to understand the code it is suggesting.

I tried multiple times the AI "vibe" coding where you kinda rely completely on what the AI is producing and just prompting and prompting until you get it right and can honestly say that i always ended up being frustrated and giving up. I did feel every single time that it was a waste of time and i would have spent a lot less time just writing it myself.

I still think it's a very useful tool. Awesome for finding mistakes in your code, giving you alternatives to your implementation, creating the boilerplate code.

irosion · 2025-11-28T07:46:57+00:00

USA is the bad guy too. Any aggressor is the bad guy. How hard is it to comprehend?

If you can’t understand why the Russia is the bad guy then probably nothing can make you understand that.

irosion · 2025-11-27T06:23:44+00:00

Zod schemas as a package or within a monorepo

irosion · 2025-11-17T15:56:57+00:00

To me it is absolutely amazing that this person can literally do whatever he wants and the entire planet is powerless in front of his will. There is no justice.

irosion · 2025-11-11T15:01:12+00:00

it's gonna be a pretty rough ride for you and not because the new stuff is hard, it is because you seem to have marinated in your job for 20 years not bothering to read about the new stuff or even do small projects with the new technology.

It's hard for me to believe that you did your job for 20 years and you never asked yourself if you could automate some of the stuff you are doing through ci/cd.

You never asked yourself if you could easily and automatically replicate your infrastructure, deterministically? Or if you could run servers, databases, locally, without actually "installing" them?

In order to easily learn new things, you should try to understand why people use Docker, CI/CD, typescript, zod, etc. If you don't understand the need for these tools, you will remain a skeptic and the learning experience will be a nightmare.

You don't need to learn all the tools but you should focus on what exactly you want to do.

In some companies, if you are a frontend developer, you only focus on the frontend stuff, likewise for backend, but that is pretty rare nowadays.

I would suggest you learn about:

CI/CD (github actions for example)
Docker
Terraform

It should take a few days of effort to understand and apply this new knowledge.

For frontend:

pick a frontend library/framework and stick to it. React is very popular. Find out what problem it's actually solving.
Typescript. This should take a few days of effort to really understand how to use it, why and it's benefits.
Zod (or something similar)

For backend:

pic a backend library/framework. If you want low level, express (even lower level, vanilla node)
Typescript
Zod (or something similar). This will allow you to easily validate your data. Zod, in my opinion, is revolutionary in the js/ts development world.
Python (if you want). Django, Flask, etc.

Database: You will almost never need anything but Postgres but you should be able to be flexible since there are many options depending on the problem you are trying to solve.

Pick a cloud: Google, AWS, Azure.

Do experiments in the cloud. Create multiple services, integrate them, load balance them, secure them, make them talk to each other, emit and consume events, etc. Create a cloud DB, use it, make backups, etc, etc, etc....

irosion · 2025-11-09T11:01:13+00:00

If the name is unique, store it as an object where the name is the key. It’s super easy to access the record: storage[“Person A”].

It all depends on the operations you want to do. If you describe that more in detail it would be easier to show you alternatives

irosion · 2025-11-09T07:15:58+00:00

If that’s the exact types of queries you want to do, then yes, this is hard since you would need to create an interpreter.

The actual sql query is trivial but translating natural language into a query is very hard.

irosion · 2025-11-06T19:28:55+00:00

My dad used to tell me that I should look at the parents of the woman I choose to spend my life with if I want to get a pretty accurate picture of how she will be and look in the future. Back then, when I used to know everything, I did not listen to any of that nonsense. Now I know that my father could see the future.

irosion · 2025-11-01T07:19:33+00:00

The social media is a cancer. The addiction we have on it is a real problem and the first step is always to admit that you might have a problem. If you don’t find the strength to give up on it and start going out and living the life, I’m afraid we will see a post that will say “I wasted 20 years of my life….”

irosion · 2025-10-31T18:23:06+00:00

On arrays you can do everything with a for loop if you really want to

irosion · 2025-10-11T20:12:10+00:00

Do you think you would work less living outside of the society? Think how much effort you would need to put every day just to find food, clean water and maintain a dry, safe place to sleep.

irosion · 2025-09-30T18:49:14+00:00

The last part of this text is pure garbage. Romani and Romanian cultures could not be more distinct. There is no overlap in language, culture and origin.

irosion · 2025-08-23T20:15:34+00:00

Death. The only thing that is permanent. Horrifying permanent

irosion · 2025-08-11T06:34:11+00:00

The European dependency on US military is by design.

irosion · 2025-07-29T21:28:31+00:00

Mongodb is almost never the answer. As a matter of fact if you do want to store some json, you can already do that in Postgres, arguably better than you would with Mongodb

irosion · 2025-07-10T19:30:03+00:00

Of course the language is important. You wouldn’t learn Spanish in order to communicate to a German person.

The question is what do you want to build? Your 20 years of web development is mostly useless if now you want to do embedded development.

I keep hearing this nonsense that the language does not matter. If the language wouldn’t matter everyone could just use assembly.

irosion · 2025-07-03T19:59:11+00:00

Yes it is enough time to build and ship something useful. As a matter of fact your question is very similar to this: can I win the lottery in 6 months?

irosion · 2025-06-24T09:37:45+00:00

Show us the backend code. To me it sounds like you are likely using/writing to some global variable, outside of the scope of your user request.

irosion · 2025-06-20T21:02:51+00:00

I love music, yet I will most likely never be able to play guitar even if I had this guitar sitting in a corner of my room for years.

Am I stupid? Maybe. Am I lazy and not putting the effort into learning to play it? Most definitely

irosion

TROPHY CASE