I feel like giving up on coding
I started coding about 20 years, about 14 years old, learning HTML & CSS on W3Schools to customize my MySpace.
Since then, I've done Android and iOS development, frontend web development (including Javascript), and a hell of a lot of backend web development (with PHP). I've also done some BASH scripting and made several developer tools written in PHP.
I've loved programming for a long time. It has felt like a thing that I need to do. Its part passion, part obsession, part I want to make actually useful things.
It may just be a slump I'm in, but I feel that fire dying within me.
I was working on a tool recently that would help me scrape websites. I have two use-cases in mind. one is to scrape Trackmania track records so that I can see when my Author Times are beaten on maps that I've made, and also to watch for when a streamer plays one of my maps (so I can go watch them discover it). The other use-case is to scrape local news websites to build a search database of just local news.
I started this Scraper-tool a week or two ago (or a month? idr), and I was fairly excited by it. Then I got on to work on it yesterday. I made notes about the direction the project should go ... and I made twice as many notes about how its probably just not worth my time.
First of all, there are already free & open source tools for scraping websites. But I like building my own things! Especially since I have specific use-cases in mind and am not sure how much shopping I need to do to a find a tool that I can finegle to do exactly what I want.
Second of all, I'm mentally disabled. I can work on my projects for 1-2 hours at a time ... every once in awhile. If I could work 8 hour days, or even 4 hour days, this project would be finished and excellent within a week, maybe two. But because of my limitation, this project could take literal months to complete. I have other more important projects that call for my attention, since my ability to work is so limited.
Third, mother fucking Generative AI.
Much of the software I've built over the last 7 years has been ... stuff to make it easier to developer software in-general (tool to generate documentation, tool to manage databases, etc) & stuff to make it easier to develop websites.
I've made some really great things. I've made some shitty things. And I have some projects that are getting close to being amazing, though they aren't quite there YET.
I've always had the concern of ... well ... there's already competing products that do things almost as well as my software will do them. I could use the off-the-shelf software to build my websites. But frankly, that just doesn't satisfy my passions, an I'm all-in on the sunk-cost fallacy. I'm also just really proud of my work and I want to see where it goes.
But now with AI. Just what's the fucking point? I always wanted these tools to be used by others to make it easier for people to develop software they care about. But in the age of AI, especially as it gets better at generating code, the utility of my potentially-better-software just ... isn't there.
I've had many bouts before with "What's the point?" But its feeling different this time.
I think if not for my disability, I would feel quite differently.
And maybe its my mood. I'm a little burnt out right now. Something I'm struggling to address because if I really take a day to rest, I just get bored and antsy and then feel like I need to do stuff. And then doing stuff is exhausting.
But maybe I'll feel differently when my mood has leveled back out. Maybe.