I'm Done

[music] What's up everybody? My name is Jeffrey Wei. So, I've been thinking about this uh for a while now and [music] I've come to the conclusion that I'm done. [music] And I didn't come to this conclusion lightly. It took a while, but I'm done. Uh if you've been tracking Larcast at all the last handful of months, you may have noticed that simultaneously things have been very very good, but also very very bad. [music] Uh so on the good side, we have released more content and courses and education in the last 3 months than [music] we ever have in any 3 month span in the history of Larass. It's really cool. On the other hand, I had to [music] announce that we were cutting 40% of our staff and that was excruciating. Uh I knew it was coming uh throughout most of December and I just had to live with it knowing that I was going to um wreck some people and there just simply was no way around [music] it. Uh it is what it is. If if the money's not there, the job's [music] not there. Uh it was horrible uh for everybody involved, but of course most of all for for the people affected. So yeah, on one hand, like we're doing better than ever. I think the quality of our content is better than ever. And on the other hand, because of the realities of AI, we're [music] having to cut our team. This is a tricky one, right? Uh AI is uh itself um very [clears throat] much a mixed bag [music] for me. Again, on one hand, um I I'm positive it's it's responsible for our layoffs. [music] Um, have you ever seen that stack overflow graph where it's showing their traffic over time? And of course, you know, through 2008, [music] 2010, 200, it's just going up up up. And then especially in the last year, it is tanked to the point that now their traffic uh is equal to the traffic that they received in the first month of their existence. They [music] are back to the first month of their existence in terms of traffic. Uh, now I think they're still fine financially. They've worked out deals. They're probably doing better than [music] ever on that front. But still, in terms of traffic, they're kind of dead in the water, right? Uh, and I get it, right? [music] You get it. When was the last time you went to Stack Overflow to answer your programming question, right? More than a year, right? Same. You use AI for these things [music] now. Um, just even the the notion that you're going to ask a question and then I'll check back tomorrow for the answer. It seems so u antiquated, right? people still do that. Uh yeah, and actually on the lyricus fronts um the forum is still kicking but of course I think even the contributors would admit it's not like they need other humans to answer their question but they would like the interaction with other humans and of course that still [music] is very much valuable. So yeah, like AI has been devastating for my like think about it. My business model is teaching you how to write code and AI and agentic coding. [music] Uh kind of cringeworthy to say that, but that's the term agentic coding um says you don't need to write line by line anymore. So yes, very much devastating to my business [music] model and we're going to do our best to adapt, but it is what it is. But yet on the other hand, just personally, [music] I am having more fun programming than I ever have in my lifetime. Ain't that weird, right? Uh for all of the talk about like I don't I never open my code editor anymore. [music] Everything happens through the command line. Um I get it, but that's not me. My my code editor PHPs is open all day long. I'm constantly within there. But of course, I'm also using agents. I'm using Juny. Um I'll reach for cloud sometimes. [music] Um, I'm I'm doing both at the same time and I've never I've genuinely I've never had more fun than [music] I'm having right now because I found that I'm no longer drained at the end of the day. And this was a this might be a me thing, might be an age thing, but I I felt it. Uh, and it's not even like I'm working on anything overly ambitious. Not not at all. It's quite [music] it's quite primitive really. Uh, but still at the end of the day, I'd just be mentally exhausted to the point that sometimes I just didn't even have [music] energy for my children, which was its own problem. And then think about like you're trying to solve some bug. [music] I ran into so many issues with Stripe and web hooks and things coming out of sequence. It was always a nightmare. Uh, and [music] I just spend the entire day trying to figure it out. And then, like, I know you've experienced this. At the end of the day, you literally have a screen headache and maybe you didn't even make progress on the issue. Or maybe you did. Either way, you still have that headache. I don't have that [music] anymore because now I have this little pair programmer buddy next to me that will help me out. And so I found that it's true. I'm not writing if statements [music] line by line anymore. That is true. But I'm still programming. I'm still monitoring. I'm still um interacting [music] with every line of code, but I may not be writing it by hand the way I used to. And this was a problem, especially in mid 2025. I think I I've even tweeted about this where I mentioned I don't like this. This isn't why I got into programming. I didn't get into programming to ask [music] a computer to write code for me. I did it because I liked problem solving. And if if I look back on my life, so many of the things I'm interested in is problem solving. I like chess. That is a that's something you're trying to solve. How can I do here? How can I anticipate what they're going to do? If they do that, then what am I going to do? Right? If then, right? Even I like video games. Video games is problem solving, right? You have a riddle. You have a puzzle. [music] I like puzzles and coding is a puzzle. But suddenly an agent can do all of the coding for you. H there's no puzzle to solve, right? Well, that's how I felt in mid 2025. And then [music] I think December 2025, we will look back on as a pivotal moment in the web development world. Um [music] I saw it. I saw it in real time. I was there. And you could see people had time off and they thought, "Okay, I'm going to I'm going to play around with this. I don't have anything else going. Let's see. Let's see what it's capable of." And it was like universally at the same time like a harmony. Everyone was like, "Oh, okay. Okay, this is just a little bit better than maybe I thought it was." And maybe it's related to Opus 4.5. I don't know. Maybe it's just related to people have more time and less responsibilities, so they're able to play around with it. Either [music] way, um, I saw it. It's like people people realized how good it had truly become. This Larcast snippet was brought to you by the incredible folks at PHP Storm and Jet Brains. We recently launched our first AI course at Larcast. It's called Leveraging AI for Laravel Development and they helped make it happen. I recorded [music] this series myself and we cover so so much. You'll learn about PHP storm AI workflows, prompting agents like Juny and Claude skills, Ralph Wickham, and quite a bit more actually. And now normally we might include a note. We might say act now before the introductory price goes up, but no, there is no note. And that's because again, thanks to the PHP Storm team, this entire thing is free to watch. Oh, and by the way, not free as in sign up, give us your email so we can market and sell to you in perpetuity. Nope, just flat out plain old free to [music] watch. All right, so the course is leveraging AI for Laravel development. It's only on Larcast. Give it a watch. And again, thanks so much to PHP Storm for sponsoring the course. So it is what it is. I mean, is there value in lamenting the fact that you love [music] code and you like writing it line by line and you like crafting the code and that is your identity. Is there is there value in it? Yes. But also I keep coming back to this phrase like look it is what it is. Those days are numbered and you got to get on board. Like or you can choose not to get on board, but you're gonna watch so many other people get on board and [music] I promise you they're going to they're going to fly right by you. Uh I'm seeing it myself. I'm just I'm so much more productive than I was [music] a few months ago. All think about it. All of those little bugs I would run into that chopped out half of my day, [music] they now chop out 5 minutes of my day, right? I can just naturally get so much more done. I have so much more energy to get things done. [music] And I don't want to contribute to the cacophony. Is that [music] the right word? I'm hoping it's the right word. We're going to look it up in a minute. I think it's right. I don't want to contribute to it [music] and I certainly don't want to profit from it and I won't. And at the same time, I feel it right. I I see it. I experience it. We're [music] launching like two quite big features uh for Larcast this week, each of which would have taken me two [music] to three weeks individually just to figure out and architect and then refactor and make look pretty. And I was able to do it in a [music] day. And actually, let's be honest, I was actually able to do it in 20 minutes. But here's what I will say. You can vibe code all you want, but when I try it, it will it will work. But then when I actually dig into the code, there's so many issues. So [music] I'm presented with code that technically works, but is in no way how I would approach it. It might follow the conventions, but it's just not [music] how I would do it. And that leads me to my next point. How much longer [music] does that matter? Because right now I'm I'm in this stage of what I would call like developer driven AI. I make a plan, work on it quite a bit. I interact with the agent to harness the [music] plan and then the agent executes the plan, right? Um I even have it interview me. [music] So, if you use Claw, there's an ask user question um skill or tool uh where [music] it will figure out the things you didn't think about and interview you, which is really helpful. But anyways, once it's done, I'm going over every single file. Um, and maybe this isn't necessary. Like, I'm happy enough to admit that. [music] Maybe we are reaching a stage where it's no longer necessary, but right now my gut tells me it is necessary. So, I will go over every line. I will go over every file and just kind of do like a proof of it like you know what this seems wildly this is one thing I run into especially with JavaScript stuff the way it will handle something like when the user scrolls to the page then I want to display this the way it will do that is like 200 lines and wildly over complicated because it didn't know about some kind of um [music] uh API that it could reach for instead right so I don't want that and my gut is if I ignore that then it's going to compound and stack [music] and stack and stack to the point where in the future it just can't do anything because there's so much junk. I'm not going to allow that, at least right [music] now. So, I will have it work on a feature and it will be done in 20 minutes, let's say, [music] and then I'm going to spend the rest of the day just going over it, figuring out like, could we do this cuz this seems too complicated. What if we instead used a registry pattern instead? And you know what? Did did we even need this file at all? We This could all be a single file. It doesn't need to be five files, right? So, I'm just doing that over and over. And sometimes I will write some code myself, but often I'm [music] interacting directly with the agent providing a proof. And you know what? Again, I just lamented the fact that I had to do that in early 2025. But now I'm [music] done. I'm over it. I'm over being sad that things have changed. They have changed and [music] I've migrated. And that's it. We have to adapt. That's that's the only that's the only pathway we can take. We have to go through. You can fight it all you want, but this is not a trend. People want to call this a trend. It is it is not a trend. This is clearly the way things are going to be done going forward. [music] So, um it's sort of a get on board moment for all of us. Um I get it. I get the feeling that maybe you spent the last 5 or 10 or 20 years, however old you are, learning these things and now maybe you feel like [music] to some extent all of that education was for not. Um, but I don't think it was for not though that knowledge you acquired you're going to be using every day. It's just in a different form. It's just going to take a different shape and that's okay. And maybe that's the way it's always been and this is simply the next iteration. [music] But um, I can't help it. This is something I think about all the time. Maybe I talk about it too much. Um, but again, it is what it is. [music] So, here's what I'm interested in. How are you feeling about this right now? We last talked 6 months ago. Has that changed? How are you feeling now? [music] Are you bitter? Are you angry? Are you ignoring it? Or are you more excited [music] than ever? I'm really curious. Tell me what you think.