Stop Running

I am 35 and I just caught myself forgetting what software development actually is.

Not the job title. Not the stack. The thing itself. For about ten years I lived inside the usual noise: monolith versus microservices, this language versus that one, this framework versus the next rewrite. Useful debates sometimes. Mostly theater.

Then AI arrived, and the theater got louder.

From CryptoBros to AIBros

We watched the CryptoBros rebrand almost overnight. Same energy, new vocabulary. Suddenly everyone was a software expert, a marketing expert, an AI expert. The feed filled with launches, screenshots, and urgency.

I felt the pressure even when nobody asked me to. Create the new SaaS. Create the new game. Create the new whatever. Fast. Come on. Rapidly. You are already late. Make it faster.

That pressure does not look like a manager standing over your desk. It looks like a timeline where everyone else appears to be shipping while you are still thinking. Indirect force is still force.

Thanks to that, I lost interest in programming. In solving problems. In the small joy of discovering a new language and feeling my brain stretch around a different model of the world.

What is left when the LLM writes it

What is the real difference between PHP and C++ when your job shrinks to explaining what you want to a language model?

I do not ask that as a joke. I ask it because for a while the answer felt uncomfortably close to “not much, if you only care about output.” And if that is true, then the craft collapses into prompt quality and shipping speed. That is a thin life for anyone who once loved building software.

So I had to dig back to something older than the current wave.

Solving problems, not performing solutions

I rediscovered that I need to focus on solving problems. Not AIBros-type problems. Not “build a website for the tyre shop, cold call the owner, show a demo, get paid.” That story is lame. It is not true in the way it gets sold. Only people without enough real-world scars believe it that easily. The same people who, four years ago, fell for the pump and dump.

The wrong mindset is creating something in order to sell it.

Nothing is sellable by default. Need makes something sellable. And how do you understand a need? You experience it. You live inside the friction long enough that the missing piece becomes obvious. Inventing a product first and hunting for buyers later is backwards. It turns software into inventory.

Software is the tool

Of course we can talk about software philosophy. Data structures. Performance. The quiet satisfaction of ordering fields in a class so the shape of the system feels honest. We can write books about that, and sometimes we should.

But that is not the center for me anymore.

My main interest is solving problems. Software is the tool. Sometimes the right tool is a small script. Sometimes it is a careful system. Sometimes it is not software at all. The moment the tool becomes the identity, you start optimizing for looking busy in public instead of removing pain in private.

Years of SaaS mythology

Years of SaaS bros trained a lot of people to believe that “having a solution” is the whole game. Ship the wrapper. Add the landing page. Announce the waitlist. Call it a company.

That is not the truth.

A solution without a real need is cosplay. A need without the patience to understand it is guessing. The hard part was never generating another product idea under artificial urgency. The hard part was always noticing what actually hurts, staying with it, and building the smallest honest response.

Stop running

So this is the motto I am keeping: stop running.

Stop running after the next launch narrative. Stop running after every model release as if missing a weekend means missing a decade. Stop running after the feeling that everyone else already built the thing you were vaguely thinking about.

Slow down enough to remember why you opened an editor in the first place.

I still use AI. I still ship. I still care about languages, architecture, and craft. I just refuse to let the pace of strangers redefine what my work is for.

If there is no need I have felt, I am not building a product to prove I am still in the race.

I am stopping. On purpose.