They’ve already “flocked”. The site and userbase is a shell of its former self and it’s hey day is long passed. The users aged out or just went to places like kiwi farms, random discord channels, etc.

I mean you’re on Lemmy, a good chunk of old 4chan users are here, so you’re amongst them.

nice of them to put everything in one place for easier access for the ruskies.

I think whomever is modding here today deserves a beer or three.

I charge them more than I would if I was just developing for them from scratch. I USED to actually build things, but now I’m making more money doing code reviews and telling them where they fucked up with the AI and then myself and my now small team fix it.

AI and Vibe coders have made me great money to the point where I’ve now hired 2 other developers who were unemployed for a long time due to being laid off from companies leveraging AI slop.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love for the bubble to burst (and it will VERY soon, if it hasn’t already) and I know that after it does I can retire and hope that the two people I’ve brought on will quickly find better employment.

majority of my clients use it, just makes them feel better.

yup, majority of clients use so just makes things easier on them. Dont’ get me wrong I hate it too but they like it so whatever, I adapt.

best decision I ever made years and years ago was to stop being a regular employee and instead do freelance/consulting work. No more interruptions. Emails can be ignored when need be, same with calls and texts, I don’t use whatsapp or any of that. My Jira is PURELY for bug tracking and if anyone that has been invited into it goes off rails on it for something OTHER than bug tracking they get removed.

If I go into an office I leave whenever I want. If someone starts bothering me I pack up and go.

use either Mullvad (yes, I know, the GUI sucks) or set up your own VPN.

the mullvad cli is very quick and easy. it’s a lot faster than what it was. OR set up your own wireguard VPN on your server, again very easy to set up.

I read the manuals for everything now. I think it’s because when I was a kid videogames used to come with great manuals and half the fun was just reading through those. One of my favourites was for the original Heavy Gear on PC. that thing was like a hybrid manual and lore bible. Or old Flight Sim games with manuals that were as thick as text books.

Now you don’t get shit.

“You’re Absolutely right!”

I think when you first get into Linux it’s a valid thing. you want to find the distro that you’re most comfortable with.

When I first started using linux I tried them all and eventually just settled on Arch because it felt right to me. That being said I don’t knock anyone who uses whatever. A good friend of mine online uses Slackware and he loves it, it works for him. There’s no “wrong” distro, it’s whatever works for you. you have to initially hop around though to find that though.

Also distro hopping is great when it comes to helping people, especially new linux users. I’ve made many friends within the community because for a solid year I just hopped all over the place and tried to learn it all.

/me a 42 year old that uses Arch

I take that personally.

/me adjusts my knee high socks.

They don’t. But the wealthy, the corporations, etc, they do.

Bingo. If you routinely use LLM’s/AI you’ve recently seen it first hand. ALL of them have become noticeably worse over the past few months. Even if simply using it as a basic tool, it’s worse. Claude for all the praise it receives has also gotten worse. I’ve noticed it starting to forget context or constantly contradicting itself. even Claude Code.

The release of GPT5 is proof in the pudding that a wall has been hit and the bubble is bursting. There’s nothing left to train on and all the LLM’s have been consuming each others waste as a result. I’ve talked about it on here several times already due to my work but companies are also seeing this. They’re scrambling to undo the fuck up of using AI to build their stuff, None of what they used it to build scales. None of it. And you go on Linkedin and see all the techbros desperately trying to hype the mounds of shit that remain.

I don’t know what’s next for AI but this current generation of it is dying. It didn’t work.

I’ve seen this episode before. something, something, WinXP.

Didn’t this clown literally say like lastweek that if you’re a dev and you’re not using AI to get out? well…he’s out and look what happens.

Move to Codeberg, donate to them, or self host your git repos.

I’ve been doing it for like 20+ years now so I have a very solid client base and very solid referrals. All my new clients now are referred to me by previous/existing clients so it gives me the luxury of booking well in advance.

you’re VERY justified in feeling skeptical, I’m seeing it first hand, you’re correct.

I’m a consultant/freelancer and I’m booked for the rest of the year and well into the new year with jobs that pretty much consist of me reviewing and cleaning up AI slop.

Most of my clients are startups and small companies that went full in on AI and vibe coding. Now they’re discovering that their attempts to save a few bucks by leveraging AI, cutting devs, etc is costing them more that what they envisioned on saving. The stuff they’ve built with AI doesn’t scale, is full of exploits, and breaks quickly. With the recent Tea App thing many of my clients are now in a panic because they essentially did the exact same thing. They don’t want their startup to be next in the news because some rando came across their house with the front door left open by AI.

the tech debt is massive, It’s costing many of these places more to fix their vibe coders/AI mistakes than what it would have originally cost if they just used a solid dev team. Make no mistake, I’m charging them a good amount also.

All if it could have been avoided though. They could have continued to use their LLM’s if they had all just kept a leash on it. if they dismissed the concept of vibe coding. A good chunk of it could have been avoided if the person feeding the prompts simply REVIEWED the code before hitting enter. I’m not kidding, IF they just LOOKED at what was being spat out things would be different. none of them did. they just trusted the AI to be smarter because they were lead to believe it was.

and then you go on linkedin and all the middle manager tech bros will hail it as the second coming.

If the recent Tea App crap is anything to go by doesn’t even require a hacker for someone to gain access to your info. Just takes more companies using AI to build shit without security and someone will just happen to find their open to the public firebase bucket.