Disappointed developers

• Things ancient Romans taught me about software development: click-bait title, AI-generated image and latin quotes, as a whole it's pretty lame but I liked this one:

Panem et circenes

Bread and circuses. A great deal of software engineering job is maintenance; it is necessary but not appreciated enough. To silence the murmurs, you need to show some impressive dashboard, shiny UI, or AI-related feature to management from time to time.

• After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain: very good piece on how alienated you could feel when you're down the rabbit hole with coding AI agents.

It’s a confusing experience. It’s like I need to get somewhere and I can either walk, or jump on this spaceship that travels at 900mph, but its controls are half in Hungarian and half in Ancient Greek. With enough trial and error I can probably get the spaceship to take me to my destination, but that’s a lot of work in itself and at the end of the day I’m left wondering if I should have just walked.

• The Copilot Delusion: another great piece.

Copilot isn’t that. It’s just the ghost of a thousand blog posts and cocky stack-overflow posts whispering, "Hey, I saw this once. With my eyes. Which means it's good code. Let’s deploy it." Then vanishing when the app hits production and the landing gear won’t come down.

• Don’t Rob Yourself of the Eureka: How AI Is Killing the Joy of Being a Developer

That experience made me realise something important: the pause, the friction, the mental churn—that’s the good bit. That’s the joy of the work. It's not just about finding the answer. It’s about becoming the kind of person who can.

But culturally, we’ve stopped valuing that. Everything is a shortcut now. Get slim in 30 days. Learn Spanish in a weekend. Master JavaScript in 4 hours. It’s not just that we want results faster—it’s that we expect them without the process. And AI, for all its usefulness, feeds that hunger. You don’t have to wrestle with the problem anymore. You can just paste it in and move on.

• Azure AI Foundry and GH Copilot failed demo at Build 2025.

• After reading this piece on nuejs blog, I thought: why reinventing Jinja on your way to simplify React?

• Fatih Kadir Akın is part of the AI enthusiasts. He writes about how AI generated uis will revolutionize frontend development, by automatically fine-tuning UI based on user usage. Interesting point.

• Perhaps the best conclusion of this section is this talk from Cory Doctorow at PyCon US about his concept of Enshittification. Everything is shit, no one cares.

Tools

• Interesting thread about CLI tools: just, chezmoi, atuin...

• Building your own personal knowledge management system: Amber Williams decides to create a tailored, personal, Obsidian-like knowledge management system. Makes sense, but just the security aspect of it would have scared me off.

• Obsidian TUI. In Rust, of course.

• A Markdown assistant Marksman. Plugins for zed and VSCode exist. Brings back my idea of creating a plugin or an editor to write notes for Pelican blogs.

• Big news for the Obsidian fans: Bases is a core plugin that presents your notes as a table view and sort them with little effort (very roughly explained). Everyone seems very excited about it. It's only available in version 1.9.0 and up, though so I couldn't test it.

• Devstral: Mistral open-source model for coding agents. News went a bit unnoticed given how fast OpenAI and MS move these days.

• Piksel, an application to make pixel art sprites, online or natively on Linux.

• Impression, another tool to burn ISO images on USB sticks.

WTF of the week

• A US newspaper publishes a list of fake books. Like this. No review, no shame.