the sky is falling… again

I just got back from Easter break and opened my email inbox.

It looks like the “sky is falling”. Again.

War. Inflation. Layoffs.

AI is taking your developer job.

Well, guess what, the world has been “ending” even since it began! 

2000 -> Internet bubble bursts. Worse job market in 20 years. 

2001 -> Al Qaeda twin towers attack. War on terror. I saw it live on TV. I was 8 years old. 

2008 -> Housing bubble pops. World wide financial crisis. I remember graduating with 50% youth unemployment. An unpaid internship was a privilege.

2020 -> COVID. The virus will kill us all.

2025/2026 -> AI will make humans obsolete. War will escalate. Everything will double in price.

Every 5 years there’s a moment of “the world is ending”.

But life continues. 

(Note: I am not saying this to minimize the tragedy of war. Of conflict. Of living in constant danger. Watching your friends and family die. I can’t imagine such pain. I am saying this for us. The lucky souls who are thousands of miles away from the conflict. Sticked to our screens. Flooded with horrific headlines. Let’s hope this conflict will be over soon. And choose better world leaders next time.)

Believe it or not, the world was always a messy place.

For the ones of us who are lucky to live in the noble part of it, we have to focus on things we can control. 

You can’t control geopolitics, or the economy, or the job market. 

But you can control what you do. 

Don’t wait for headlines to get better. For the crisis to stop. Or for the economy to get fixed. 

Get better yourself.

LLM companies promising to automate your software engineering skills are massively unprofitable.

They are spending thousands of dollars on computers to replace hundreds of dollars in human time. And they are pretty bad at it. 

And the stock market is starting to notice. 

Don’t believe me? 

Here’s Blue Owl Capital stock:

(if you don’t know Blue Owl, they are the ones giving money to companies like CoreWeave who build the data centers for Open AI, Meta and the like. Nvidia is then the one filling those data centers with GPUs. Then Open AI, Anthropic and others rent the data centers.)

This boat is sinking. 

And is not sinking alone.

Open AI is next. Antrophic just after. And every big tech company that went bananas on AI without doing some simple math before.

Here’s Oracle stock too:

(Even after laying off 30ks people with a 6 a.m. email. The stock is not moving up! Oracle messed up big time. They invested billions on building data for Open AI. About $248 Billion as of 202). Open AI won’t probably be able to pay it back. Which is why Wallstreet is dumping the stock no matter how many people they lay off).

The AI bubble is already popping. 

What happens when token limits are hit? When AI slop code becomes unmaintainable? 

The world will scream for great software engineers.

And who’s going to answer the call? Vibe-coders? Agentic Engineers?

They can’t.

They don't know how.

I watched hundreds of hours of cartoons as a toddler. Could I work at Disney? 

Not in a million years.

The price of technical expertise is actually building stuff. And failing. And trying again. 

Over and over.

That’s what makes a Senior Dev. 

We can help you get there faster. Spots for April opening up. Check it out here.

Here’s the secret:

If you want to make the world a better place, make yourself a better person. 

Peace,

Dragos

P.S. Jenssen Junag says AI will take your job, but it can’t take his. Not even 100,000 agents can build Nvidia, he says. What an egocentric f**ing as**le. He should not be CEO of any company. Once the AI bubble pops, he will be back to selling Nvidia GPUs to basement gamers.)

P.S. I’ve been sending these newsletters for more than 5 years now. Way before AI and ChatGPT. I have hundreds, if not thousands of unfinished drafts. I wrote 12,000 words on our blog. Waking up at 6 am in the morning. Just to stare at blank pages and type stuff. Then wake up the next morning and do it again. And again. Does anybody care what I was talking about in Newsletter number 147? Probably not. Not even I do. What newsletter 147 did is to allow me to write number 148. And number 148 allowed me to write number 149. 

Without this effort I would be just another dude asking ChatGPT to write for me, and hope it gets some clicks. Then brag to my friends I used AI to make some $$. Disclaimer: People won’t pay you a dime for things they can Google, or ask GPT about. If you want their time, you have to write stuff that is worth reading. Code stuff that is worth using.

People use AI because they want the result. But without putting in the work. 

Here’s the bad news:

To be a chef, you need to cook. To be a painter, you need to paint. And to be a software engineer, you need to build software. There’s no other way. There is no silver bullet. See you in Newsletter 16, 2026.