Hi. My Name Is Rares.
And I Am Afraid.

I have been writing code for over twenty years. I used to print JDK documentation at a computer club because I didn't afford internet access. I remember when Google and Stack Overflow became revolutionary. I remember jQuery. I remember when "the cloud" was something your manager read about in a magazine and then asked you to explain.

Here is what twenty years gets you: intuition and taste. You know which solutions are clever traps dressed up as elegant solutions. You know that the code that ships on Friday will haunt you by Monday. You have a finely calibrated bullshit detector, built from two decades of outages, rewrites, bad architectural decisions made in conference rooms that smelled like cold pizza and energy drinks.

Here is what twenty years also gets you: a mortgage. A family. A lifestyle that requires a salary. And a creeping suspicion that the industry you gave your best years to is now actively looking for a way to run without you.

Recently I watched a junior ship a feature in two days that would have taken me a week. He was using Cursor and Claude. And I sat there (in my ergonomic chair that I bought because my back is now a document of all the bad decisions I made sitting at desks) and I thought: I don't know how to feel about this. Pride? Envy? Anger? Terror that I watched it happen and didn't understand half of what he did to make it work? All of the above. Simultaneously.

I've watched AI do amazing things. WTF.

For twenty years, knowing things was the job. Holding complexity in my head. Being the person who understood the system. The one who got pulled into the meeting when things broke at 2am because you were the only one who knew where the bodies were buried. That hard-won, scar-tissue expertise was the thing that made me valuable. Or so I believed.

All that won't help me survive in this age of AI. I might be made obsolete by a clanker. WTF.

So I'm building this thing.
Not because I believe the hype. Not because I think I should "embrace AI" or "level up my workflow" or any of the other shit that make me want to scream at the screen. I'm building this because I want to survive. I want to still have a job. I've been learning about all its strengths and weaknesses, all the ways it can be useful or fail miserably. Patiently, like a flagellation monk.

I'm not building this with love.

I'm hoping this will help me somehow. Maybe it will help you, I don't know.
I'm trying to find what is genuinely useful, day to day, for someone who writes code for a living and wants to keep writing code for a living. For now this is all I could come up with. Maybe I'll try something else. All I know is that I'm not going out without a good fight.

Oh, mamma mia, mamma mia
Mamma mia, let me go
Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me, for me
So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye?
So you think you can love me and leave me to die?
Oh, baby, can't do this to me, baby
Just gotta get out, just gotta get right outta here
Ooh
Ooh, yeah, ooh, yeah
Nothing really matters, anyone can see
Nothing really matters
Nothing really matters to me

- Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody"