Despite what many may think given my background, I’ve never been much of a coder.

I learned BASIC in 5th grade for all that’s worth. Since then it’s been a meandering path through C and C++, Perl, Scheme, Java, PHP, SQL, Python, JavaScript, and Rust—if you don’t count things like Bash. True to form, I dabbled in all of these when it was necessary to complete a project, but never really seized on any of them. It was just something I did at the time.

I turned 49 last week. Not quite 50, but it’s a looming figure that’s no longer quite so distant. I didn’t write about it last weekend because I was busy the whole time. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, with basically little opportunity to sit down for a few hours to ruminate. But now I’m in an airplane returning from a client trip to DC, and I have nothing but time, and I can finish it any time after I land.

There’s a kind of shift occurring beneath software development right now. It has now become almost trivial to spin up a project that I wouldn’t have had time for not so long ago. I wrote about the benefits of AI slop a couple weeks ago, and it turns out that I only really scratched the surface.

I’ve been “busy” fiddling around with agentic coding using the Pi agent. This time around, it’s to see what the real limits of a local agent and model truly are. Why? I ran out of Claude tokens on an unrelated project, and that made me wonder just how far I could get without using it in a pinch.

Last week I started working on a project, and this time I wanted to see what would happen if I did what all the “cool kids” are doing and “vibe coded” most of it. Let me just say it was an absolute disaster. I ended up with about 18k lines of iffy spaghetti code that only kind of does what I asked, is chock full of bugs, and isn’t anything I would ever willingly publish in my name. Just awful.