You know that kind of commit, the one you push with no ticket linked, no changelog entry, no applause coming. Just a cleaner function name. A useless else removed. A comment rewritten to actually make sense. You close the tab and move on, but something about it feels… good. Not proud-good, not “look what I did” good. Just quietly right. Like putting the knife back in the right drawer. Like sweeping the floor even if no one’s visiting. You do it because it should be done. ...
Most people assume I’m joking when I say I code on a 14-inch laptop with no external monitor. Then they see my setup, one screen, a split terminal, and Vim, and they ask how I survive. Truth is, I didn’t always. I used to have the whole cockpit: dual 24s, browser open wide, logs on one side, docs on the other, Slack buzzing in the corner. It felt productive. Like sitting in front of a control panel, everything glowing. ...
The first time it worked, it felt like magic. I typed half a sentence, and the AI filled in the rest, tests, edge cases, even doc comments. Like a dream you didn’t know you had until it showed up in your IDE. But two weeks in, the cracks appeared. The AI rewrote a query using a non-existent ORM method. It silently introduced a regression in a caching layer. It suggested mocking the wrong dependency, and no one caught it, because the PR still “looked fine.” What started as magic began to feel more like auto-pilot without a destination. ...
Wasn’t even a code review, just a regular sync. He was maybe six months in, fresh out of a bootcamp, still a little nervous when talking. But he looked at the logic I had written and asked, “Why do we do it this way?” And I froze. Because I didn’t have an answer I liked. The truth was, I didn’t remember. It had always been done that way. I had absorbed it, carried it forward, optimized around it. But I had stopped asking why. ...
You wouldn’t expect a dot-four release to shift how you think. But PHP 8.4 did something subtle, it made domain models feel more honest. I didn’t notice it at first. The headlines were quiet: property hooks, asymmetric visibility, a few nice bugfixes. No splashy new syntax, no game-changing JIT leap. Just a couple of tools that looked like sugar for edge cases. Then I tried refactoring a class that had always annoyed me, a UserProfile, bloated with validations, protected properties, getters, and conditional setters. The usual dance: guard invariants, expose safely, override when needed but not always. You know the type. ...
I opened the integration guide to fix a minor typo and realized the steps didn’t work anymore. Nothing dramatic, just drift. A renamed flag here, a new default there, a missing permission no one remembered to mention. The words were still pretty. The reality had moved on. That’s the quiet failure of static docs, they age in place while the system keeps walking. So we tried something obvious we had somehow avoided: make the docs run. ...