"You Surely Must Hate AI"

I got a strange remark from a former client recently: "You surely must hate AI."

I had to read it twice. No, on the contrary - I love it. Possibly more than anyone that client has ever met. But I understand where the question comes from, because the opinions out there say developers will be replaced by AI altogether. WRONG. Let me explain what I actually think, in October 2026, twenty-five-odd years into building software.

What AI actually gives me

The new abilities are extraordinary. I can translate a vision straight from my head to implementation without spending the hours typing every line myself - yet still oversee all the minute detail myself. That last part is the one people skip. The value was never in the typing. The value was in knowing what to type, why, and what breaks when you get it wrong.

AI removed the drudgery and kept the judgement. That is a completely new way of working, and I embrace it fully. I said in January that AI gave me my spark back; eighteen months later, the spark is still there. I wake up wanting to build things the way I did in the late nineties.

Competence is back

Here is the shift I did not see coming at the beginning of this revolution: competence is celebrated again.

For a while there, the vibe coders had the microphone. The narrative was that a seasoned expert developer was now a legacy cost - that prompt fluency could replace twenty-five years of scar tissue. That time is over. Slopware is recognised everywhere now: the plausible-looking code that falls over under real load, the dependency chain nobody can audit, the system that works beautifully until the second user arrives. Boards and clients have learned, the expensive way, to tell the difference.

This is unambiguously good news for people who actually know what they are doing. AI is a force multiplier, and force multiplication of zero is still zero. True expert developers have never had more leverage - or more value.

Old hardware gets a second life

Which brings me to hardware, because the ground shifted there too.

Old machines with custom operating systems are suddenly valuable again. That is fortunate, because in a time of exploding RAM prices - DDR5 kits roughly quadrupled in the last twelve months, and the serious forecasts say no normalisation before 2028 - we need to reuse the hardware we already have for a good while yet.

Case in point: I bought my kids two Chromebooks for eight euros each. Eight. I will wipe ChromeOS and put a custom Debian on them - Claude will do the setup for me, naturally - and for a truly silly price they become perfectly usable little machines. A decade ago that was a weekend project with a high chance of a bricked device. Now it is an afternoon, and the expensive part is my attention, not the hardware. I've installed a custom openwrt on a decades-old wifi router and it is scripted into my firewall to come up and provide a backup link to the internet, start up its radios, connect, build a vpn and then change the default route of the firewall to 'it' until the primary ISP comes back online. INSANE! On hardware that cost me 40€ ten years ago!

Omarchy, and my first non-Apple desktop in decades

The same logic, one level up: I have taken the plunge with Omarchy, DHH's opinionated Arch-based desktop Linux distro, on the small desktop machine I'm having built for my Monaco office.

Full disclosure, because regular readers expect it from me: I have grown to dislike DHH's extremist personal views. I am not going to pretend otherwise just because I like his software. And I do like his software - Omarchy is a thing of beauty. Opinionated is the right word: it decides things, aggressively, and the decisions are good. The whole machine feels coherent in a way that desktop Linux hasn't managed in the twenty years I have been occasionally trying it.

And that is the quiet milestone in this post: for the first time in decades, I am purchasing non-Apple hardware to run on my desktop. Not as a server, not as a test bench - as the machine I will actually sit in front of. If you had told me that six months ago, I would have laughed.

So, do I hate AI?

No. I love what it does for my craft, I am thrilled the hype cycle has re-priced real competence, and I am delighted it can resurrect eight-euro hardware into something my kids will use daily. What I dislike is slop, and the idea that judgement is optional. That has been the consistent position all along. It just needed saying plainly to someone who assumed otherwise.