The story of this blog so far: 'AI', the death of web dev, and feeling like an outsider

This is the second of two parts on media creation. You can find the first part over here: Creating media with an uncooperative mind

Infinite negatives

In trying to figure out what I should write and talk about, I could spend the rest of my life outlining all the topics I don’t care about. The world is larger than our attention can encompass.

Even if I limited myself to going over the topics you might expect somebody like me – based on the public image I’ve chosen to project online – to reasonably cover but won’t, that’d still require me to write more words on subjects I dislike than on the ones I like.

This blog has always been a practical venue. I had blogs before – I’ve been writing online in one place or another since the mid- to late nineties – but this was the first place I specifically used to position myself for a chosen career.

I’d focused on ebooks for my PhD, given up on them after graduation because they seemed dead in the water in 2006.

Then as soon as I settled into a web dev job, ebooks finally became a thing with the Kindle, iPhone, and competitors all popping into the market from 2007 onwards. So, after waffling about for a couple of years, watching from the outside as the topic I’d studied for my PhD finally took off, I decided to make a venue where I could, effectively, put up a sign saying:

“Are you interested in ebooks and publishing? I know a bunch of stuff about that! Have degrees and everything.”

This website was born. First as a straight website, as I was mostly blogging on Tumblr in those days, but later I turned it into proper blog, with an RSS feed and everything.

As the ebook side of the publishing industry went through its own bubble and bust, with the inevitable fraud, collusion, and antitrust convictions (because this was back when cheating the public occasionally had consequences) I tried to reposition myself more on the crossroads between publishing and web development.

As I became a senior web developer, the gap between the understanding of most managers I’d dealt with and the realities of software development became more and more obvious and acute. I figured I might be able to help bridge that gap by writing specifically to try and explain how uniquely software development interacts with management practices and theory. That way I could target two different audiences with a single topic:

1. Software developers who both needed to explain to their managers how their work, well, worked and needed to better understand what their managers were dealing with.
2. Managers who found themselves managing software projects but didn’t necessarily have visibility into some of the unique problems with software development.

That led to the book Out of the Software Crisis and related blog posts.

The book was both a product designed to help people do their jobs and a tool to help me position myself as a freelance consultant beyond the more narrow publishing and media space where I’d previously planted my software development flag.

It did result in a number of contract leads, but fewer than you’d expect. Next to none of those leads survived the first “weeding”. Most managers who exhibited an interesting in the problem of managing software development seemed to be major fans of extremely distasteful people with very poor judgement and warped priorities.

Somebody who keeps praising people like the 37 Signals manager who led their company into repeated crises by prioritising extremist politics over good management is unlikely to be a pleasant person to work with, even if you naively disregard their likely politics.

Once I weeded out the “37 Signals are great managers” sympathisers and related crowd – they seemed thick on the ground in software even after that company’s first “racism is good, actually” implosion – the remaining leads were old contacts from the publishing industry who had gone “oh, this means Baldur is a freelancer now” and got in touch. A significant portion, though not a majority, of these projects turned out to be related to corporate web developer education and training, which I enjoyed.

I did consider trying to turn the “momentum” of the book into other products – a course, mentorship, or the like – but, while I had experience as a lead dev, I’d left all of my ambitions of becoming a manager of some sort behind and I think there’s a limit to what somebody who has never been a manager can teach people with ambitions in that direction.

I didn’t feel I could teach a field that I wasn’t interested in practicing myself, especially since I was still deep in my Long COVID brain fog that had hit me just before I began work on the book.

Then, as the worst of fog began to inch away, the “AI” Bubble happened.

I never intended to write about “AI”

I’ve had an on and off interest in “AI” and Machine Learning for most of my career so, when Copilot and ChatGPT started to get traction, looking into it was a logical move.

What I discovered appalled me. All of those management principles I’d been trying to teach in my work and writing, all the development practices I’d been trying to promote, weren’t just being disregarded by these tools.

They were, and still are, the antithesis of sound software development and good management.

They are broken by design, all the way from the fractured ground up to the wobbly top.

• The error rates are unacceptable.
• The variability and volatility is unacceptable.
• The copyright ambiguity they create in the generated code is unacceptable.
• The disregard of consent, regarding both the personal data and creative works they derive their models from, is unacceptable.
• The abuses they enable are unacceptable.
• The environmental impact is unacceptable.
• Their political collusion with extremists is unacceptable.
• The sheer scale of destruction they inflict on the knowledge ecosystem and creative industries is unacceptable.

And, fundamentally, they make good management impossible. The way they function is incompatible with organisation, structure, quality, and variation control.

Any form of integration with your work will compromise your work, irrespective of the costs, origin, point of execution, or ethics of creation. The damage may not be apparent at first, but these systems, due to their design, will hurt you in the long run.

I and others have compared it with asbestos – a miracle material with genuinely amazing properties that is so incredibly harmful that it has even been banned in the United States. For the most part. That final attempt to close the gap on an asbestos ban took place in 2024, with the preceding debate coinciding with the initial growth of the “AI” Bubble.

It isn’t a coincidence that the asbestos analogy has been popular among those who criticise “AI”. It was at the top of the mind of pretty much anybody who was concerned about safety and consumer protection while ChatGPT was blowing up.

But I now prefer to compare generative models to leaded petrol:

It poisons everything, increases crime, harms your brain, makes the world genuinely worse in multiple ways, and could have been replaced with safer and more effective solutions at pretty much any point in its history.

The only reason people didn’t – why they chose to knowingly poison their children and their own societies – was to save a little bit of money in amounts that never came even remotely close to outweighing the immense costs to society.

This is a technology that should never ever have been shipped.

I’m genuinely disappointed in every single person who keeps promoting it in their blog posts, videos, or social media.

The Intelligence Illusion, where I wrote about the risks generative models create for businesses, was motivated by how appalled I became as I researched the technology and how it interacted with the theory and practice of management.

This both worked and backfired in ways that I never expected.

No freelance career yet

I did get a couple of interviews in the early days, as I was one of the first to push out a book on the topic, but once I got quoted out of context in a fairly awful New York Times piece I began to deny interview requests that were specific to “AI”. (There are a couple of outlets I’d decided in advance I’d say yes to if they asked, but they never asked.) I’d recommend people, and I offered to speak on background, helping the reporter understand what they were covering.

Only one took me up on that offer, which was a lot of fun, and the interview requests stopped after a while. Once reporters stop seeing your name in the venues they keep an eye on, they drop you from their list.

There was never any chance of the book leading to freelance opportunities. Every time I’ve received queries from companies on helping them form an “AI” strategy or policy, I replied with a short message saying that my advice is simple:

Avoid the tech until the bubble pops, then reassess. Most of the biggest web companies in the world today got into it or were founded after the dot-com bubble popped. Being late is a strategic advantage. If you want, I could help you outline how that strategy would work in detail – how to prepare for when the bubble pops – but otherwise my advice is simple: Wait.

I always thought this was a nice and neutral reply. Focused on the strategic benefit to the company. No mention of pesky ethics or environmentalism that might scare the punters off or disturb the unholy soulless inner workings of an MBA.

But the communications always ended at that point.

Almost all of my freelance clients continued to come from former publishing industry contacts.

The other problem was that the book itself and the associated blog posts arguably backfired.

Be careful in explaining your adversary’s mistakes; they might learn from it

The book helped the right people. But it also helped the wrong people.

The best way to explain it is to put it in the context of a different societal and economic transformation: the deindustrialisation of the US with outsourcing.

Companies all over the US were destroying local jobs, closing factories, and deindustrialising their country by shifting work abroad. If you believed that outsourcing weakened society, led to the downfall of the economy, and exposed the companies to hard-to-manage risks, one of the worst things you could do would be to focus on the risks to the companies.

If you were living in that era and had the skills and interest to tackle the issue, you could take the humanities and social sciences approach and outline the effects on the social fabric, local communities, education, and public health. If you were an academic or a journalist, this would be the approach that made the most sense and your position would give you enough standing to make people listen.

Or, you could have put on your policymaker or economist hat and dug into the fractures this created in your economy and the sociopolitical risks to the state. Anybody who had the ear of the lawmakers would have been a fool not to take this tack on the topic.

If your skill sets were management theory, systems-thinking, and the organisation and structure of work, you might have be tempted to cover how outsourcing specifically harmed the companies themselves, their function and ability to operate, in an attempt to talk them out of it.

This would have been a mistake.

These companies were deliberately setting out to weaken the bargaining power of the workforce. They already felt that the risks were worth it. All you could have accomplished by going over the specific risks of outsourcing they themselves were facing – the communications, the longer iterations, the disconnect between teams, etc. – would have been to help them mitigate the impact of those risks and further their goal of destroying labour.

Offshoring – despite being on a macro level one of the more catastrophic strategic errors in US history since the end of the Cold War – happened nonetheless. It made the companies and their owners richer even as it rotted their countries from within.

“AI” is flowing into those same dried riverbeds. It’s the same social, economic, and strategic mistake except at an even larger scale and putting even more at risk.

My book was helpful to many readers. I still occasionally get emails thanking me for getting their defences against LLMs up in the early days of the bubble. Not often, but occasionally.

But to some readers it was helpful in ways that I, the writer, did not enjoy or appreciate.

Many of the glowing recommendations and positive buzz around the first edition of the book came from consultants who then used it as a playbook for furthering “AI” adoption in business by managing the risks deemed important by the business. I even got an email from a Scandinavian VC and “AI entrepreneur” thanking me effusively for the book.

If you ever wondered why I stopped covering specific organisational and work-related issues caused by “AI” – the flaws specific to the tech and how they interacted with work – now you know.

If you wondered why I published a second edition despite the risks being fundamentally unchanged and most of the research continuing to come to the same conclusions, this is why. I wanted to reposition the book to make it untenable to the consultancy crowd.

This worked, I think. At least I don’t get emails from management consultants or VCs any more.

My writing here shifted mostly to three topics:

• Tech scepticism. That is, advocating the idea that you should be careful about trusting the tech industry and its products.
• The personal impact of “AI”.
• Web development.

(Also photography, but that’s just for fun. Nothing practical about it.)

My tech scepticism netted me what you could describe as a “backbencher” position in the online tech scepticism community. Not one of the frontbencher who gets called on for interviews and the like, but I occasionally get to write a polemic that rouses and motivates other backbenchers.

There isn’t much more to it than that at the moment, and that’s fine.

But when I turned back to writing about web development, I discovered that the field was gone. Web dev training, specifically, has been wiped out by “AI”.

Where did everybody go?

While I was busy pushing the “AI” book I’d failed to notice that all my training and education projects had dropped off one by one. Most of my peers who had been selling courses and training were shutting down their businesses. The demand for web dev ebooks had cratered.

So, my attempt to shift away from the “AI” book back to web dev training was a bit like exiting a bunker with a hot dog cart in tow and try to sell a nice juicy hot dog in a blasted post-apocalyptic landscape full of ash and radiation.

Software developers haven’t all switched to using agents for their coding, but they do seem to have all switched to error-prone, backwards-facing, nondeterministic chatbots for what now passes as web dev “education”.

Every time I thought to myself “maybe it isn’t that bad, those two are still selling their courses and ebooks so there obviously continues to be a market for this” I’d find out a while later that their business had indeed collapsed and that they had been coasting on fumes. Then they would give up as well and quit the industry.

Moreover, the field of web development has regressed overall. React and framework-oriented development is back in full force. Novelty and research now focuses exclusively on some variation of getting a Large Language Model to regurgitate some old thing into the gutted, hollowed-out skinsuit of some other old thing. “Let’s use an agent to port it to Rust! Let’s make a WordPress replacement in JavaScript! Let’s port this project to a more convenient license!”

Dependencies are getting less and less reliable as everybody’s toolchain gets rotted open with insecure coding agents and bad practices are automated into petrification.

Design is nonexistent.

User research is nonexistent.

Product development is nonexistent.

I don’t enjoy my field any more because the field is gone. Assuming that there’s still something there is a mistake. That feeling you have isn’t a frustration with changes to your chosen field. It’s nostalgia for a field that disappeared overnight. What passes as web dev today at large bears no resemblance to the field we built over the years. Everything we learned has been abandoned because companies assume it’s all been encoded into their chosen Large Language Model.

I’m still doing web development work, but navigating the flood of misguided pull requests and nonsense “documentation” is getting harder, not easier. I love the work when I get to do it without dealing with nonsense, but I don’t think finding those opportunities is going to get any easier from now on.

It’s frustrating and depressing and the more I experience the “new world order” of web development the less I want to have to do with any of it.

Employment in tech seems done. All the major employers have revealed their hand and that hand is just one “fire more; hire less” card after another.

You could stay and fight for your survival, but it would be foolish to expect those who remain to have a glorious career. You’re basically in the same position as a non-union factory worker in a post-outsourcing, deindustrialised economy. You might be one of the few who gets to keep your job but what little bargaining power you had against your employers is gone. That never ends well for the worker.

With web dev gone and tech scepticism not being anything that resembles a career path – you’re a Patreon- and book-subsidised commentator at best, not nothing, but still not a long-term career – it’s hard to figure out where I should position myself.

This blog has been a personal journal, a venue for hashing out my thoughts and ideas. It’s also played a big role in developing my career.

Software development and tech have been where I positioned myself, for most of the past decade or so. Everything else has fallen into the “personal” category. Stuff that I cover because I needed a venue for the thoughts, but never represented the brunt of this site.

Outside and downplayed

A necessary part of surviving having an online presence is artful omission. Parts of your life get to be visible online. Other parts are downplayed. The rest is offline.

The part of my life I’ve constantly downplayed online is my work, education, and experience in media and publishing.

I’ve worked in radio, TV (vision mixer), did a short stint in Iceland’s then brand-new film school, wrote and self-published novellas, and helped a number of people publish their books both digitally and in print. I’ve helped artists put together their art books and assisted with their installations. My first degree was in comparative literature. The rest were at an Art, Media, and Design faculty. For years, I worked just as much in After Effects and Premiere as I did in Director, Flash, or web dev. I taught both at an art, media, and design faculty in Bristol and design and photography students at a junior college level here in Iceland. I published a graphic novel a few months ago.

It’s the part of my career that I’ve enjoyed the most and, for a while, spent the most time on.

But it came with two problems:

1. It generally doesn’t pay. At least not compared to web dev work.
2. I always felt like an outsider in those fields.

As I’ve grown older I’ve come to realise just how much the second issue affected me.

For example, one memory that still sits with me and played a big role in driving me away from fiction writing was as I sat listening to a friend of mine struggle to say something positive about a novella I had written. He settled on “the typography is excellent.”

The typography of an ebook. This, coming from a British publishing professional, if you know what they’re like you know what that means, felt devastating.

I completely gave up on writing fiction shortly afterwards, and I’m only now coming to terms with how much of that came from how rejected I felt by my friends and acquaintances in the publishing and media industries. At the time it felt like the people who I thought would cheer me on unprompted just all fell silent. I always assumed it was because they couldn’t think of anything nice to say.

That I worked at the crossroads between tech and publishing – ebooks, content management systems, reading systems, and the like – also seemed to mark me as an outsider.

Another defining memory from that period was sitting in the Unbound offices (this is before we all found out what was going on there) and chatting with others around the lunch table about our jobs. As you do. When I mentioned something I was working on, one of my coworkers turned to me and said something along the lines of “I’ve never read an ebook and never will” and that was the end of that. In the end, the only topic of conversation that seemed tenable for me to the rank and file of Unbound was to answer questions about Iceland and tourism in Iceland.

On more than one occasion, I had people at publishing conferences immediately turn away and leave the conversation as soon as I mentioned that I was working on the tech side of things.

Seeking approval from people who were never going to approve of you is never healthy.

Some people were great – still are – but those also tended to be treated like outsiders by the rest of the industry.

Over the past decade I’ve actively downplayed the scope of my media and publishing career because I’ve always assumed that your average person in tech would be at least as big a dick as the average publishing person and would be just as dismissive of anybody with a hybrid skill set.

I don’t think I was wrong about that – “we’re major dicks!” seems to be a point of pride for many in tech – but I do think I underestimated the potential of connecting with other outsiders. People with hybrid skill sets, expertise and experience in both print or media and in tech – or even just experience in one and a dream of another – and who feel alienated from both sides of the crossroads they work at.

I think I underestimated how many of us there are and, now that the “AI” Bubble has managed to alienate big swathes of society, I think there are more of us than ever before.

So, more than a topic, I have a feeling I want to capture. A spark of an emotion I want to keep alive:

I don’t want any of us who stand at the crossroads between fields to feel like outsiders any more. With the world heading where it’s heading, us outsiders need to band together.

The actual topics, I think, should be more defined by what this ad hoc group of people – wherever I find them – need solving than anything predefined, but I think there might be a few broad areas I could tackle.

• Creative processes. Specifically coming from one process to another and how you adapt your thinking and approach when transitioning to a new venue or field.
• Getting over the hurdles of doubt and worries about the ugliness of your work.
• Getting things done and productivity are not the same thing. In fact, I’d say they were close to opposites.
• Discovering yourself is a key requirement for sustainable achievements in any creative field.
• Appreciating the ugliness of both creative and tech work.
• Understanding the context of media and how tech affects it.
• How to deal with the way tech affects our work and media.
• Understanding how the grammar and structure of social media affects what you can say and how you can say it.
• Working with the hybrid media landscape we live in.

The topics are endless, but the feeling defines the worldview and angle of approach.

I think I can figure out a way to be useful for this audience.

And the next step is pretty much just to go ahead and try it.

At least, that’s the theory. We’ll have to see how it turns out in practice.