- The Death of Boilerplate (and Sanity) In 2025, our code editors no longer feel like simple text files. They feel like a deeply passive-aggressive collaboration with an entity that has read the entire internet—and therefore knows enough to be dangerous.
We were promised we'd stop writing boilerplate. And the AI delivered! Now, the boilerplate is a single line of natural language: the Prompt.
"Give me a fully-typed, serverless function that uses the new fetch API to retrieve user data from a PostgreSQL database, handles errors with a custom JSON response, and also... make it sassy."
You hit enter. The AI spits out 300 perfectly-formed lines of TypeScript. You feel like a genius.
Then you run it.
- The Great Prompt Debugging Session The code fails. But not because of a missing semicolon or a bad variable name. It fails because of an extremely subtle contextual error in your prompt.
You realize you didn't spend three hours debugging JavaScript; you spent three hours debugging English with a machine that takes everything literally.
The AI: "The function failed because the data retrieval from users table resulted in a 404 Not Found."
The Problem: I told the AI to use the new fetch API, but it assumed the database was a REST endpoint and not a Postgres connection. I failed to use the word "ORM."
The Fix: I had to adjust my prompt to: "using Prisma ORM to connect to a PostgreSQL database..."
The code now works. But my git commit message reads: feat: Implement user API (after a fierce 3-hour argument with Copilot about the definition of 'data retrieval').
- The New Developer Stack in 2025 Our tech stacks are getting lighter, faster, and way more type-safe. Here’s what's dominating the developer conversation right now:
TypeScript: Has just officially overtaken Python and JavaScript as the most used language on GitHub. Why? Because when you have a super-powered code generator, you need a super-powered safety net. TypeScript is the adult supervision for our AI-generated fever dreams.
Serverless/Edge Functions: Companies are finally "sobering up" from those massive public cloud bills. Moving back to a "pay-per-use" model is less about performance and more about the boss being tired of saying "Hello, giant bills."
The Vibe Check: The newest trend is "Vibe Coding." Coined by Andrej Karpathy, it's the idea that developers are no longer writing the lines; they are setting the vision and the constraints (the "vibe") for the AI agents to write the entire feature. Our job is now more like a high-level creative director than a manual laborer.
- The Moral of the Story The most valuable skill for a developer in 2025 is not knowing the deepest JavaScript tricks. It's the ability to think like a compiler and communicate clearly with a non-sentient intern.
We have delegated the writing of the code. We have not delegated the thinking about the architecture.
Keep your TypeScript strong, keep your cloud bills low, and for the love of all that is clean code, be explicit in your prompts!
Top comments (1)
This hit way too close
Even as someone still early in my dev journey, I’ve already felt how one vague word in a prompt can send the model off in the wrong direction.
The part about debugging English instead of code is so real the tools are powerful, but they force you to think a lot more clearly about what you actually want.
Also agree on the TypeScript point… AI makes you appreciate strong types more than ever.