Yes! And the designs themselves are being constrained to aesthetics that can look pretty good in light or dark mode.

> Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the state of the art is not public knowledge. Power users are keeping their techniques to themselves —

Um, so in other words, there’s no evidence to support this?

> At the drafting stage, it can help with organization, coherence, syntax, semantics, and grammar

Wait, but organizing and expressing your thoughts IS writing. If you don’t make them do the work why bother sending them to school at all.

AI has a great niche place in schools: searching the library. The rest of this seems dumb.

I agree. The output is entirely beside the point. There is no market for gradeschool book reports.

There’s one more thing.

Customers on the receiving end of vapid robot support rapidly lose all confidence in you.

They start describing your company as “falling apart” “useless” “a sinking ship.”

Their ability to ignore this is very impressive.

True, but I think the point of that story is it’s really hard to predict what’s crap and what’s just too early.

It doesn’t guarantee the skeptics are wrong all the time.

Yeah this is what 2008 was like. It is not your fault.

Here's what you do:

1. Quit doomscrolling. Quit all social media. It's like anti-therapy where it just makes everything worse. Timebox your job-hunting every day, there's diminishing marginal returns on time spent here.

2. Your instincts are good! Volunteering and side projects are great. I did a ton of side projects and freelance work. This means you'll be able to account for your time unemployed and gives you something cool to show in interviews. I had a nice little portfolio to run with.

3. Go outside. Read a book in a park. Clear your head. Shit like "the longer I go without work, the worse it gets in the eyes of employers" isn't useful. You will solve that by having a good story to tell via #2, and everyone knows this is a terrible market.

4. Apply to weird stuff involving technology but not "in tech." IT for schools, web stuff for nonprofits, museums, tiny businesses that can't afford market rate. A lot of these are really fun.

I can tell you from 2008-2011, this era passed. Even my most desperate, lost-seeming friends, some of which had prestigious degrees etc etc, found something to do. Many of them wound up quite well off in the end. The hard part isn't even interviewing, its keeping yourself sane in the meantime.

Similar around 2000-2001 or so. It sucked, a lot.

I'd add that there really wasn't much detail from OP in terms if the types of study/work or social aspects that may be at play. For better or worse, things like "nose ring theory" exists and depending on a given environment may or may not be an issue even if it isn't mentioned.

As to specific technology, as others have suggested, side projects, freelance, personal projects and even volunteer work can help.

I had to deal with community service for a ticket about a decade ago, since I'm not really phyxically able to do a lot of what was available, I spent a fair amount of time just searching/asking different orgs if they needed any software developed... I found one, did the project they needed and it was all good.... Of course with the search, I only had a week to do the project in, on top of my regular job I worked 90+ hours that week (that sucked, a lot).

The point is, it doesn't hurt to ask/volunteer. Even on your own, make something cool if you're able to do so.

> Similar around 2000-2001 or so. It sucked, a lot.

Was in the industry then and in 2008 and can confirm the suckage.

That said, I'd probably be a lot more concerned about the current situation than those previous times if I were an entry-level tech worker now, like the OP is.

While I don't think "AI" is likely to replace us all in the next couple of years, I do think it is playing a significant part in the near universal industry hiring freeze among employees with limited/no experience and I think its very difficult to try to predict when and if this might change regardless of other economic factors.

And to be clear, I don't think this situation is a rational long-term collective decision for companies (especially the many who are sitting on piles of cash) to make. Eventually a lack of hiring at the entry level will cause problems for everyone, but considering we now live in a world where market caps are pretty divorced from rationality and we have a labor market (in the US anyway) where both sides expect jobs to be relatively short term arrangements its easy to understand how we could have arrived here.

Absolutely, and I didn't mean to even imply that this circumstance isn't worse than then. Even being employed is kind of crappy, at least for me... beyond seeing positions expired and literally opening the same jobs at half the pay, to a lot of low-balling all around, I wound up taking a roughly 40% pay cut just to keep working... though making ends meet is much more difficult right now.

With the AI uncertainties, it's even harder still. I finally broke down and got a claude code account this past weekend to give it a try... On a few of my personal TODO items, I'd managed to do in a couple days what would have taken me literally weeks to accomplish, and I'm babysitting and reviewing everything far more than a vibe coder. There were issues, most of which I expected... but it was a far better experience than a couple years ago, and I can't even imagine how things will shake out in the end. It's still a tool, and even more so, I think you absolutely need to have experienced devs/architects at the helm of these things...

For better or worse, the org I work for has verboden AI, which is fine, but being able to scaffold something out in an hour after a couple hours of planning is pretty damned nice. ex: 2.5 hours into planning template (CLAUDE.md planning phase), then a first pass in about an hour, then 3 revisions over 2 hours with some manual tweaks. But overall a lot done in a short amount of time.

Of course, I also ran against something else that was library specific where AI didn't quite "get" what I wanted to do, implementing with a specific library/framework and kept doing goofy things. Hence comments on babysitting and experienced handlers.

For submitter, I sympathize hugely even though I've never gone through it myself. I know myself, and I know if I was unemployed, I'd spend all of my waking minutes either applying for jobs, fretting about applying for jobs, and counting my savings as they dwindle. I would have an extremely hard time enjoying unemployment. I'm sure your situation is much harder, mentally, because you'd have existing successful work history to fall back on.

But +1 to all of these points. Learning to time-box your job hunting and recognizing the declining marginal utility of each extra minute is a useful job skill in and of itself.

Any time you can redirect away from doomscrolling to productive/fun/values-based activities (hobbies, volunteer work (especially if job-relevant, but even if not) is time well-spent. Importantly, it has to matter to you and be enjoyable. If you're timeboxing 3 hours per day job-hunting, and then the remaining hours of your day are grinding away on personal projects because you hope they'll pay off in the job hunt, you're really spending all day on the job hunt.

I feel lucky that in 2008 I could go into the Military Industrial Complex and work in places where I could be confident the results wouldn't be things I'd find objectionable. That seems like a much tougher prospect in 2026.

It’s worse than that. The author thinks you can generate working software from a changelog that will work consistently from build to build.

Anyone want to try and lmk how far you get?

Also alternatives to Office, browsers, and pretty much anyone who can come along and say "we make tools that do what you want them to do."

All of these are longshots, but it really feels like we've hit a historic level of discontent.

I would argue the stricter rules did take off, most people always close <p>, it's pretty common to see <img/> over <img>—especially from people who write a lot of React.

But.

The future of HTML will forever contain content that was first handtyped in Notepad++ in 2001 or created in Wordpress in 2008. It's the right move for the browser to stay forgiving, even if you have rules in your personal styleguide.

Seriously. If only he had a professional comms team who could help him craft a message that didn't read like... that.

I got the impression that he might be trying to imitate Trump's communication style as part of his appeal to the US administration throwing its weight behind him here. Particularly given the image attachment at the end. It's difficult to imagine that nobody qualified double checked this before he posted it.