Well today was a BIT OF A DAY. I handed in my notice on one contract (been in it almost 2 years!) and my other contract decided to terminate...SO...at the end of May I'll be officially unemployed.

It's an odd one...at the moment my body is filled with nervous energy...the panic, 'I just bought a...' thoughts. But this time...I think it'll be good for me.

I was becoming increasingly unhappy building stuff for other people ALL THE TIME - and what I'm building not being what I really want it to be like.

SO...now the INTENTION is (eating, not being homeless dependent) to build my OWN products and release them directly.

I have a LITTLE runway now to to it & StyloBot is CLOSE to being ready however there's a HUGE ISSUE

The Code LLM Problem

Code LLMs are enablers (for people like me they're accelerators causing explosive productivity) BUT they also enable everyone to sketch out an app to solve a business problem (POORLY...but free)...

AN AVALANCHE OF VIBE CODED SHIT

There it is, that's the problem. I don't deny MY stuff is coded using Code LLMs (my frameworks are SPECIFICALLY designed for this use) but man is it hard to convince peiople that the one errant em-dash in tour Readme.md DOESN'T mean this was some piece of crap vibe coded in a weekend. Even if it WERE...it was vibe coded by someone who's been doing this for 30 YEARS.

So that's my dilemma; every company who WOULD hire me thinks they can do it themselves - and in many cases they're right, their OWN people who know their business processes probably COULD do it better than me...but don't make it public! And the big AI companies? We'll I'm in the WRONG language for them, .NET.

Prompt Stuffers

So I've written about this a LOT...this is a class of applications this is the naieve version of an 'AI powered app'. It's also the class you hear about howling failures as people ask LLMs to do things they really don't excel at.

However it's also now my competition. If you're willing to spend 10p / request and wait a second you CAN beat my stuff.

So my products need to appeal to frugal people...a TRICKY market to survive based on.

The Plan

So this is where I describe how I solve all these problems, right?

I can't...sorry. I really DON'T know if these two contracts from today will be my last EVER as a freelancer.

The fact is that businesses found a cheaper (crappier) way to get code written. It's TERRIBLE code but it's better than they could afford before.

MY approach is to make intelligent systems which differentiate themselves by that very factor; the intelligence is in the system not just the LLM.

I SUSPECT no matter how much of a go I make at making my systems sell I'll fail under the vibe-coded-shit-avalanche as people think they can solve it themselves.

Fine. In that case it'll be the end of my 30 year career. Dunno what I'll do then...

Changes

So the first change will be that I'll get back to blogging. I build stuff, I write about it. NOW it will also publicise them. I have a TON of projects saved up, from how to do an intelligent adaptive mapper, an interactive in-broewser ai support agent and of course my Free Anti-Fraud platform StyloBot

LOTS to write about...well as long as I can keep paying the hosting bill.