I don’t know if you’re aware, but software engineering has changed a bit recently. And well, not just the software engineering. If you look closely, it feels like a lot of things around us currently come with a weird aftertaste of slop, something humans spent very little time doing. Images, blog articles (not this one), copywriting, and designs — all of that has became bland, tasteless and boring. Feels like even companies like Apple, previously known for their attention to detail, have embraced the slop and started using ChatGPT for copywriting.

Socially, things are disastrous as well. I’m surrounded by software engineers and very few of them talk about software engineering these days. We talk about agents, prompts, loops, harnesses and other concepts that are more primitive by their nature than what we used to discuss. It turns out people don’t really want to know more. AI dissolves communities. The blind leading the blind toward the ultimate AGI.

When I look back at my professional experience, I realize I’ve always loved the process, probably more than the end result.

That made it hard for me to build my own profitable SaaS, even though the idea of a self-sustaining business has always mildly obsessed me. I love building, I love solving technical challenges, and I love when things work the way I want them to work. But, as stupid as it sounds, finishing working on something is not something I really enjoy. I remember occasions when I was finishing building something (be it Telescope, my projector controller replacement, or my Home Assistant setup) with that sad feeling of “what should I do?”. For product people, the obvious next step would be marketing, but for me it was always something new.

Building something is the most fun game of all.

Except that with software, it’s not fun anymore. Yes, you can iterate quickly and you can do so much more. But the sense of purpose is gone. Knowledge sharing is disappearing, too. Getting anyone to notice your work becomes impossible. Now you’re on your own, and your software will probably only ever be used by you. Plenty of people, like Fernando Boretti or Cory Doctorow, are openly discussing the alarming implications of all this, but my question is much simpler:

What am I planning to do with all that?

I’m gonna stop working on any new SaaS products, mainly since it makes no sense anymore. I’ll gradually shut them all down and keep only Telescope, simply because I personally enjoy using it. I still want to experiment a bit by explicitly banning AI-generated content on Telescope and using existing tools to detect AI articles and ban those who create them. Feels like shooting myself in the foot, especially since about 95% of the content on Telescope seems to be AI-generated these days, but I still want to do it.

And I still want to build Untitled Plane Game. I feel like gamedev is still fun because it’s more about creativity than anything else in the industry. And I do enjoy planing it, writing formulas, and figuring out how the simulation should work. Great gameplay doesn’t seem like something AI can handle, and that’s what excites me about this idea.

And yes, Bellymaloe is still on my list.

29/10/2026