Impostor syndrome on steroids.

Over the last year, I’ve felt my insecurity as a programmer grow proportionally to my usage of generative AI when writing code and developing stuff. I’ve never built so many things and so quickly and yet… it did not feel right.

I kept telling myself that it was just stress or impostor syndrome ticking again but deep down I knew it was not it. I knew what this was about: overuse of AI. Not to just write code (although mainly), but to summarize videos, books, all types of content. I also felt that I couldn’t write documentation, commits, pull requests, slack messages without using AI anymore. I felt that I had to do something but I couldn’t, it was just too good to give up.

I could build anything I wanted basically with some prompts and some time to debug, but whenever I did, I wouldn’t have the same satisfaction that I would when I started coding. Solving those basics algorithm problems or even building a dumb website with vanilla js. I felt that I earned it, and AI striped me of that feeling.

Of course that AI can be extremely useful for boring, repetitive stuff (eg. css for me, which I really dislike and don’t feel bad at all when claude fixes my bad styling). It is also very good for making quick throwaway shell scripts or just asking claude code for a very specific ffmpeg command, and it excels (when properly configured) to teach new things and brainstorm and suggest ideas that I wouldn’t have thought on my own.

What changed then?

At the end of 2024, I decided to (partially) switch my main desktop from Windows to Linux. I had already tried Ubuntu, Mint and a few other distros, but this time I wanted to really learn about it, without much of the abstraction that these distros offer. Thus, I decided to install Arch Linux (btw) with a hyprland config that I thought was really cool at the time.

After quite some time of nuking my OS more than once, lots of troubleshooting, a bit of trial and error and lots of chats with claude, I reached a point where I can comfortably say that I know most of the things that are happening in my OS, and as a bonus I learned a LOT of (neo)vim in the process. Throughout 2025, my experience with Linux grew. I tried other distros, dotfiles, CLI tools and got kinda obsessed with productivity honestly, minmaxing whatever I could. I again felt that I knew what I was doing.

All of this made me remember that I can, if I really want to, learn something, but it takes time, consistency and most importantly, passion. I didn’t do any of this because I thought I would get a better job (even though that actually happened), I did it because I was curious and wanted to understand more about computers and operating systems.

I hate ( and love ) AI.

I am honestly very tired of AI. CEO’s promises of AGI, new gpt wrappers coming out every week, some revolutionary new agent that will for sure this time replace programmers, AI slop everywhere you go on the internet, AI music, AI books, AI art, AI bots and the list goes on. I don’t want an AI on every software I use.

However it is simply impossible to completely ditch AI at this point. In this industry, if you are not using you are objectively behind everyone else and will perform worse. That is just how things work now. Although AI is an incredible tool for productivity, it has (at least for me) ruined my coding experience. But I believe I can fix it.

Over the last few weeks I have been tweaking with my Claude rules to not explicitly return me code for problems unless I specify it to it, and, for now, it’s been working great. Still have to make some adjustments here and there but I feel that spark of fulfillment coming back. I also have been learning Rust and I am just using vim to code, no Cursor, Claude code, Antigravity, nothing. Just plain text editor experience. And yes, it has been slow, but I try to show up every day.

What is this all about anyway?

So, for this year, I want to re-sparkle what I believe I have lost. I don’t want to end the year with the same feeling I had. On this blog I will try to post every once and a while with some cool stuff I learned and something that I built that I can proudly say had no AI intervention.