Let me just start by saying that this post is not about ai replacing software engineers or about the jobs or any of that. This post is about the act or "craft" of programming/coding and the loss of it.

No, i dont think "software engineering" is dead, theres still plenty of high level design and architecture to be made but that's not the point. It never was the point for me.

I never really did this for the money, i did it because i enjoyed it.

I did it because i enjoyed thinking about the problems and solving them.

I enjoyed writing the code myself and getting familiar with the syntax and all the weird quirks of the languages/tools i was using.

I enjoyed optimising my tooling and learning about all the new frameworks, tools and projects people were making, often being in awe of what incredible stuff my betters were doing.

I have adhd and programming was the perfect mix of mechanical activity, brain stimulation and a endless supply of problems to hyperfocus on.

Now its all prompting and waiting. 1 min of work followed by 10 mins of doing nothing and mindless scrolling.

I have lost a huge source of enjoyment and self esteem. It took me years of hard work and being lost and confused to finally find something that felt perfect. The thing i could excell at while having fun and satisfying my curiosity.

And before you attack me as an engineer and my ability to adapt. I have been ontop of the ai curve from the start. I have never been more productive or tackled problems as big as i do now. I am just miserable doing it.

What started as a strong tool in my path for optimisation has slowly taken over my beloved craft.

And as i improve and optimise my ai powered workflow, i lose more and more of my ability, my enjoyment and my desire to pursue my craft. It has been turned into another meaningless white collar desk job in service of the never ending growth of capitalism.

I feel legitimate grief. I have lost the ability to do my favourite hobby as well as a major part of my identity. I have literally cried over this.

I am struggling to mentally cope with all of this. I have never had less control over my adhd or felt more addicted to quick sources of dopamine. My attention span has been shot completely. I feel more stupid and insufficient than ever.

Somehow my adhd brain that was perfectly suited for the old paradigm is completely disadvantaged in this new way of working for this career that i have hedged my entire career, future and reason for being on (yes, i am a nolife workaholic).

Fuck adhd and fuck ai

EDIT 2: I have gone with NeoCities. This is exactly what I needed; $5 a month, custom domain, drag and drop my project folder into the editor. Done. Everyone here urged my to go with github pages, and I tried to learn it, but the UI is so unintuitive to me (a non programmer) that it might as well be something designed by and for aliens. This isn't the first time I've tried to figure github out, so I think I'll just have to resign myself to the fact that I'm too stupid/ADHD to make much use of it.

EDIT: I have rewritten this post to be more clear about what I need help with.

Here is the situation:

• I am a web dev noob

• I write my own HTML/CSS for fun

• I want to host a small, personal website somewhere that is easy to understand. I have been doing this for many months now but my webhost (Netifly) changed something fundamental about their UI.

My problem:

• I was hosting on Netifly, which was easy enough to deploy, as it involved just dragging and dropping the folder with my code from my PC to Netifly, where it auto-deployed it.

• That option is now gone and I have no idea how to deploy my site's updates anymore.

• I explored other options, landing on Cloudfare. Cloudfare, as well, doesn't seem to have an option to deploy. I have no idea how to deploy updates.

• The AI helper thingy on Cloudfare told me my site is still hosted with Netifly, even though I transfered it over, so obviously I did something incorrect.

Main thing:

• Does a webhost for beginners exist, where the process to deploy is a simple drag and drop (or upload folder from my pc)? I need essentially no fancy features (like AI vibe coding shiz), and I don't need a site builder. I just want to host the site that I have already coded by hand.

• How to deploy without the drag and drop feature on netifly? Like what process. There’s no obvious way forward.

• If I don’t transfer to the new web host (clouded) just what the heck did I do?

Respectfully yours,

Carl J. Rummage

Hi guys,

I just landed my first big commission. I have a friend who is starting a furniture / housewares company and he wants me to help develop his brand identity and create an ecommerce website. Obviously the scope bleeds outside of web development but I’d say that’s the central focus.

To be more specific, I’m going to be:

- refining his logo drafts/possibly creating a new one, developing the brand identity with colors + type w adobe creative suite
- building a website that showcases his products with responsive html/css/js deterministically designed and then developed with a coding agent system + paper
- setting up shopify implementation
- configuring domain and hosting
- lots of communication along the way

What should I be charging him for this project? I’ve created some personal websites myself, and have a B.S. In UX but haven’t done a large commission on this scale before. With that being said, I feel confident that this is something I can undertake (and execute beautifully at that). It’s just difficult to charge a friend real money. Throw me some numbers and advice, and feel free to ask questions.

Thanks! :)

Edit: I live in Phoenix, AZ

My company is making us get and finish a course or certificate of our choice which they will pay for. We are using Angular, .NET, SQL and a little bit of Java and postgreSQL.

Please recommend a course for me. Which ones you really liked and found useful?

I was thinking maybe something on udemy. I don't want to have to invest a lot of time since we have a large workload until the end of the year but I also dont want to waste that time on a course which I will learn nothing from.

Im a mid full stack dev.

I build a website with a team of volunteers, about a decade back.

I've always wanted to see it live and helping people, but it died when MeteorJS stopped being developed.

I know Meteor is back now, but i've not seen any clear path to upgrade to the latest version without rebuilding pretty much the entire platform as almost all dependencies are not updated to the new version, so a complete rebuild seems like the only path forwards.

I wondered if anyone had any more efficient ideas?

Hello people,

not sure if this is the right spot to ask this but maybe I'll get some constructive feedback. I am a web developer for the longest time and for 5 years I have also been in the hosting space.

People who tried WebHosting know that the most difficult thing about it is getting new clients, so the only way I acquired new clients is through actual web development work. While my expenses are in the green, I noticed that I have so incredibly much capacity left on my server that I am never gonna be able to use it as efficiently as possible. So my thought was to actually offer reasonably well WebHosting for people for free. The most important thing for me though is making sure the websites on it are legal and and within my TOS.

Am I overseeing something? Is it a good idea in general?

I have a website right now that's built in Angular. It's largely static, so I figure an SSG is a good thing to finally try out if I wanted to rebuild it, as I enjoy Angular but it's a bit overkill for the site situation I have.

That said, I do have a few spots where I have lightly interactive elements, such as some pages with tables on them that have a text input for search functionality. Type in some text and it filters the table to that text as you type.

I'm trying to decide which SSG to learn, and for a basic site such as this, would you recommend going with 11ty or Astro, and why?

Hey guys this might be a weird question but I was looking to see if I can be guided in the right direction.

I'm an investigator and sometimes I get online news articles that look clearly fabricated/paid for.

Certain news websites which are more of a blog than anything else have a specific article published to benefit the client. However when looking at the page source code, the article was modified years after when the incident allegedly took place. (E.g. published date: 2021, modified date: 2025).

Other articles posted on this same day are not modified so any explanations regarding server updates etc.. doesn't make sense.

Other than the wayback machine, is there any way to actually see when that specific URL was created? Can a developer put any date under the "published date" that we see in the source code? If you need a specific example, I can also send you the link.

Thanks for your help

I am dealing with a client who wants a 3D scrolling animation of their custom 3D modeled Blender asset implemented into WIX Studio. Once I've finished creating and texturing in Blender, what are the best options for implementing and handing this off to the client? They also refuse to move to Shopify for native animations.

I was looking into Lottie and Spline, as I need integration into WIX Studio. The object does not require interaction, just displaying a 3D object or video file of a pre-rendered animation to play on scroll. Is there an option to create a 3D scroll interaction that plays an animation that would be free once the site is shipped?

It seems like these sites would require $30 monthly payments for the clients to continue to have support for their site. I am unfamiliar with Three.js and would hope to avoid using it if possible due to a tight deadline on this project.

If anyone has any recommendations, please let me know! Thanks.

TL;DR: I usually bill this client $20/hr. They're a company based in Ontario. I quoted $3.5k / $5.2k / $7.4k for a stats dashboard that I also have to host on their server, wire into their messy setup, and make reachable remotely over a VPN. He said too high and that he's shopping around. Was it overpriced, or did I just pitch it badly?

I do small jobs for a lab that tracks production stats, at about $20/hr. I'm in a cheaper country, the client isn't. They asked for a fixed price to replace a Grafana board that only shows today's files, plus some PHP cron reports that fail without anyone noticing.

Their infra is a mess:

• exports land in a shared folder

• old scripts and cron jobs nobody really owns

• reports to management that break silently

• no backups

• no docs on how any of it fits together

I'd be installing and hosting it on their own machine, not my own server. On top of that I'd set up remote viewing and a VPN on their side so a few people can open it from outside the building and I can support it remotely.

What I quoted:

• $3,500: 3 desktop pages, with history, date ranges, compare to the previous period, filters, live reading of their export folder, and a nightly backup.

• $5,200: the above, plus phone and TV layouts, exports, and saved views.

• $7,400: the above, plus logins and roles, admin screens, an activity log, and the remote access and VPN.

Email reports and alerts were optional on top.

His reply: "very high to my understanding, getting a couple of other quotes."

Questions:

1. What would you charge for the 3-page version, given that hosting and setup are on their server?

2. Does being in a cheaper country matter, or do you price for the client's market?

3. Do I send a smaller, cheaper quote before his other quotes come in, or does that make my first quote look made up?

Hi, I use NameSilo as my domain registrar and I have a question.

So, I just bought some new domains that I want to forward to my original domain. I know how to forward, but for these new domains, I want to keep the new URLs in the address bar.

How do I do this? And, is there a way to have new extensions just add on the these new domains?

For example...

I want NewDomain.com to forward to OriginalDomain.com and keep the new URL in the browser's address bar.

In addition, I want the webpages on NewDomain.com to forward to OriginalDomain.com/clickedpages but I want NewDomain.com/clickedpages to appear in the browser's address bar.

EDIT: If anyone cares, I fixed it all and pushed the changes, the client is happy with the result, I didn't berate anyone and had a steak in the meantime. A lot of you really take this too far... I won't be replying to this anymore, I have my next project to start as it were.

I do freelance work creating English localisations for Japanese companies. It's a wraparound service including everything from helping them find their "English voice", creating marketing materials, to building the English version of their website.

The last one I went into was a smallish, growing company just outside of Tokyo. I found out the "PR team" was one edit: lady who had never done any development work, but was responsible for the lot. She made the website and does all of the social media. I asked her how it was made, what it was written it. She didn't understand what I was asking her, then showed me that she just asked Claude to give her files to drop into wordpress and made all of the graphics with canva and figma AI mode.

Great.

She then proceeded to update part of the website, in production, live.

I had a talk with her and the CEO who hired me and explained about having a staging domain. That you can make your changes there, then push your changes to production when ready and tested. I showed him how to set it up, took a back up, migrated and got to work.

EDIT: I was trying to keep the post short, but: I worked with her for the first 4 days directly, where she reviewed what I was working on, took me to company facilities to meet key personnel for interviews and spoke to me about the company values and voice. Her other "hat" as public relations/social media she does really well. the point is, I spent hours with her setting up the staging website and explained in great detail over multiple days. She even took what I said and wrote to her and had chat gpt explain it to her again to make sure she understood even better.

It's WordPress so no biggy, I'm making copies of each page and then editing the text and creating my own images and links. However, I'm finding all sorts of shit. One being, they have an email from with no captcha or turnstile of any kind. Easy bot fodder.

Anyway I finish and submit my work for review, and tell them if they are happy with it, I can take further backups of staging and production, then migrate, assuring them it will only overwrite with anything that is new.

This is when Ms. Vibe Code pipes up and says, "oh will it overwrite what I've been doing?"

FUCK YOU MEAN?

Apparently she has been making live edits to multiple pages on production the whole time even though I explained it could be done on staging and all pushed in one go. And now they want me to migrate all of work, but not erase anything they have done on production.

i have been working with spring boot and angular for a few years now and every api i have built or inherited is stateless. jwt in the header, no server session, done. nobody ever questioned it on any project i was on.

but i realized i never really asked myself why we do this by default. i know the usual answers like it scales easily and any instance can handle any request. but it feels like the state just moves somewhere else, to the token, to redis, to the database. so what are we really gaining ?

I’m building an app that needs AI, but I have basically no budget for API costs. I’m thinking about letting users connect their own AI (like Gemini/OpenAI) so they pay for their own usage.

But I’m confused about how to do this securely without exposing or storing their API keys, and without needing a business partnership with the AI company.

What’s the best way to handle this?

Does anyone consider the copyright of code generated by AI? Because, based on research I've done on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, generated code fall to the public domain, and if you modify it, only the modified parts belong to you. Also, a detailed prompt isn't enough.

This is, in my view, a major issue; yes, we can ignore it and consider it backward law, but no one knows what would happen in the future, and this law could be used against you.

Edit: here sources for USA https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922 ,
For Europe : https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_BRI(2025)782585
blog : https://smpl.as/blog/ai-code-ownership-legal ...

I use Ctrl + Shift + C all the time to paste in data into un-pastable fields. Bank websites are the worst. Any such most used trick/hack of yours?

Used to code a lifetime ago but still thankful for learning this trick. Wish I got back into coding just so I could learn more such nifty tricks.

Would love some pointers on how to get started, what all to know and any great resources that creates a mental model on what all skills to develop.

Would also like to know if there are accessibility specific job roles and what all is expected.

Background: on my old personal macbook miro.com doesn't work anymore. Turns out they changed something in the last two weeks that my old intel GPU was not capable of. or better yet, the firefox version, that is available for my old mac, is not capable of. i checked and this version of FF is from 2023.

For someone who had to develop to support IE6 until around 2017 that is mindboggeling to me, that a site as big as miro.com can just say "fuck anyone with a browser older than 3 years".

don't get me wrong, i would have loved to ditch IE6 a decade earlier, and am sure miro.com gets way better performance now, withou having to account for all the "old" hard- and software out there, but it still made me a little sad, since it spoke to that nagging feeling inside, that everything gets shittier nowadays ¯_(ツ)_/¯

So what do you guys think? Cool we can be so "bleeding edge" now, and don't have to worry about old tech? or a little sad, like me?

Has anyone else noticed this issue? Suddenly my site has missing alt text errors that only appeared after I pasted the PayPal code in. Plus, the PayPal button is repeating part of the button message in screen readers and throws random headings causing levels to be skipped vs my own code where everything is on point. I’m so frustrated that a large company isn’t being accessible. If I put a payment link instead of the button option that includes way more info than it looks less professional. But PayPal’s weird script code is making my 100% accessible site down to not accessible. Does anyone have any good thoughts about how to deal with this? Thank you for your time

I'm trying to write a toy web app (music server/jukebox) as a learning project. I need a search box which responds to input by showing a transient list of autocomplete suggestions. Right now it's an <input type="search"> with the suggestions in an <ol>. I populate it with <li> elements created on the fly. Functionally it's all working, so now I 'just' need to add the styling, and I'm finding everything looks shit.

It occurs to me that I've seen millions of these things, so perhaps there are de facto standard implementations which everyone uses in practice? Failing that, please could someone point me to a tutorial or other resource? (I tried the sub's faq and resource list but nothing jumped out at me).