Can’t We Just… Write Code?

— I know you are tired of all of this. You are unmotivated and feel like you are falling behind. Everything is moving too fast. Every single day there is a new AI tool, a new model, a new way to build applications. Even though we have just entered this new era, everyone is sharing strong opinions like they are experts. It's hard to focus on what you actually need to do and you don't enjoy your work anymore the way you used to. I felt the same. So, I stepped back and looked at the community once full of joy and people who just want to learn and build something meaningful. And I decided to take a break. I didn't share anything for months. I just observed. I observed the developers, companies, the news and social media. And now I want to show you what all this fuss is about and help you get out of this mess.

During those months of observation, I realized that three main problems bother developers the most. The first one is, of course, the AI chaos. And this chaos is not just about the fear of AI replacing jobs, but also about the unpredictable future of AI and not knowing exactly how we should use it in coding. The second one is the fast-changing technologies and the feeling of falling behind. Sure, AI is evolving fast and we see different AI tools every single day. But development tools are also changing too fast. New frameworks, libraries, cloud services, databases and constantly added experimental features. And now we have to follow every new technology just to avoid falling behind instead of focusing on the real job. We have to learn more, change more and choose the fastest and most efficient tools just to build an application for 100 users. And the last one is the social media pressure. Back in the day, we were mostly following the big names on social media, people who were really good at coding and technology. And we used to discuss things in developer communities. But now everyone has an opinion. Everyone is an influencer. People who have never written a single line of code are giving advice on how you should use the news AI tools and how you should write code. All these problems are making developers more and more depressed every day. I know because I was one of them. I kept thinking the good old days when we actually enjoyed seeing the result of what we built were already behind us. And now it feels like we have to think about the future all the time while constantly feeling like we are not good enough. So, I decided to start taking notes and really understand what was actually going on. During that time, I tried all the new technologies. I tried every AI IDE and CLI tool. I even tried live coding to see if it was a real thing. I watched tons of videos and read many articles about the future of AI. I followed discussions on social media and Reddit and it felt like a black hole, never-ending fights, fake success stories and tons of bots. Finally, I decided to talk to other developers who actually have real jobs, freelancers with plenty of gigs in their timelines and junior developers who were looking for work. And finally, this journey which started with so much frustration ended in a sense of relief. I finally understand what it's all about, why we feel tired, unmotivated and even depressed, what is real and what's the fake reality that's constantly being pushed on us. Now I feel so much better. I can focus on what really matters and I enjoy coding again without constantly thinking about the future. I hope that after watching this series, you'll feel the same. I'll be sharing all my experiences and thoughts over three videos. And I'll be realistic. I won't lie to you to just protect the future of my coding tutorial channel and pretend nothing has changed. But don't worry, things aren't that bad. I believe after each video, you'll shift your perspective and become happier and more productive. Let's actually start with the second problem because the others are even more challenging and deserve their own dedicated videos.

Developers today are frustrated because it feels like technology is changing too fast. You start following a tutorial and by the time you finish it, the new version comes out. Your social media timeline constantly highlights new things you haven't learned yet. You invest weeks learning a tool and then it gets abandoned or deprecated. Job postings require many technologies you haven't used yet. I'm not going to talk about the companies and job postings that have ridiculous, unrealistic expectations, but here is the thing. Changes might feel much faster today, but web development has always been evolving and there is a

pattern that keeps repeating itself. Years ago, teams were usually divided into several roles like designers, programmers, database administrators, testers and system administrators. A designer would usually create the layout in Photoshop and hand it over to a developer who would turn that design into HTML and CSS. At that time, layouts were often built using HTML tables because modern CSS layout systems didn't really exist yet. Later, web design tools improved and designers started using tools like Sketch and other interface-focused design tools. At the same time, CSS became much more powerful and easier to use. New layout techniques gradually replaced table-based layouts. Then something started happening. Designers who could also write HTML and CSS became more valuable. And those people started being called web designers. This is where you start to see a pattern that repeats itself over and over in the tech industry. People who already understood design or already knew HTML and CSS had no problem adapting. For them, it was just adding one more skill on top of something they already understood. Many of them even started their own web design agencies and became really successful. But many people who just jumped straight into making websites usually struggled because they didn't really understand what makes a good design or how websites actually work. Then another big shift happened. JavaScript started becoming much more important, but HTML and CSS became much easier thanks to improvements in semantics and flexbox layouts. So, some of the web designers started taking on browser logic, application state and interactive interfaces and became front-end developers. Many former web designers who learned JavaScript from scratch adopted successfully to this new role and others were expected to do more than just design. They also had to understand the user experience and they became UI/UX designers. At the same time, frameworks and new tools made it easier for programmers to also work with databases directly. So, the developers who focused on server logic and databases started being called back-end developers. Again, the same pattern. As things got easier, expectations increased. Developers with strong programming fundamentals adapted while others felt overwhelmed. Then infrastructure started becoming easier to manage. Tools like Puppet and platforms like Heroku made deploying and managing applications much simpler than before. Later, cloud computing became popular. Some operations engineers and system administrators evolved into cloud engineers or DevOps engineers. Another major shift happened when modern JavaScript frameworks appeared. Libraries and frameworks like React, Vue. js and Angular made it easier to build complex single-page applications. Developers who already understood JavaScript, browser behavior and DOM manipulation adopted quickly and became highly skilled with these frameworks. For beginners, however, the number of technologies often felt exhausting. Many of them skipped the JavaScript part and jumped straight into React. They started creating applications by watching tutorials without really understanding state, effects, rendering, and memory optimization. Front-end became much easier with component-based frameworks. REST APIs and GraphQL made talking to back-end cleaner and more straightforward. And as startups began growing rapidly, small teams needed people who could do everything. So, back-end developers started learning front-end technologies and front-end developers started learning APIs and server-side logic, and they became full-stack developers. This transition was often easy because front-end developers already knew what data they needed from the server, while back-end developers already understood how APIs and application logic worked. And finally, managed cloud services and databases simplified many operational tasks. Things like deployment, backups, rollbacks, and scaling are now handled automatically. Today, building a full-stack application is easier than ever before. Frameworks like React Native allow developers to create native mobile apps just using React. And again, the best React Native developers are usually the ones who were already good at React. And this is the pattern you see throughout the history of web development. Technology keeps evolving. New tools come out all the time, and things get easier. But as things get easier, you finish your work faster. And the hard truth is, the system never lets you spend less time on work. You have to learn more and do more to fill that time. Of course, back in the day, everything was evolving much more slowly, so the adaptation process was slower, too. But learning was much harder. There weren't enough resources, tutorials, well-prepared documentations, or AI assistants. Today, it's the opposite. There are a lot of resources, but also too many things to learn, and it can feel overwhelming. But here is

the reality. Developers who have strong core knowledge are always one step ahead, and this pattern has never changed and never will in this industry. People who have strong fundamentals adapt faster. People who chase tools without understanding the basics struggle. Now, everyone is using AI to code. People are sharing screenshots of how many tokens they used or how much code the AI generated for them, as if that's something to be proud of. But the real advantage is not in how much AI you use. The real advantage is how well you understand what the AI is doing. So, now the real competition in tech is not people who code versus people who use AI. The real competition is people who just prompt and hope it works versus people who understand the fundamentals and use AI strategically. And the second group will always be better, just like they always were in the past. That's exactly why I started creating the JavaScript core knowledge video series on my website. I've already prepared the first few lessons, and you can watch them completely free. You can also create a free account and take notes directly in each lesson. When you do that and review your own notes regularly, they'll slowly turn into core knowledge. You can find the link in the description or just visit llama. dev. So, the first thing we need to do is learning the fundamentals.

The second one is to accept that you can't learn or memorize everything. We are human. We can't know everything. Even senior devs don't know everything. The real skill is knowing how to find things, how to evaluate what you find, and how to apply it to a specific problem. That's basically what problem-solving is. Seniors aren't faster because they know more facts, and they are faster because they have seen enough problems to know where to look.

The third one is, you don't have to use the latest technology. You might feel like you have to use the latest, most hyped technology because it must be the best. But in reality, most companies, unless they are a brand new startup, build on the most reliable technology, not the newest, not the fastest, but most stable. The reason for that is that maintaining a system is much harder than creating it. That's why incredibly stable libraries like Express. js still get 7 million weekly downloads. That's why most of the applications are using APIs, while AI is telling you to use a hook that got renamed 2 months after it was released in your hyped Shazam-based component. I'm not saying you shouldn't learn them. There are plenty of great tools and new features. I'm just reminding you that if you only jump on the hype train and ignore the fundamentals, you might end up having to re-implement things from scratch.

scratch. Another one is, don't compare yourself with others. People on social media are in a race to show off how they use the latest technology to get views. Most of them don't actually build anything meaningful. They just create content. We'll cover this more in the last video of this series, but stop feeling bad looking at what everyone else is doing and thinking you have fallen behind. Compare yourself to who you were 6 months ago, not social media feeds. Do a 15-minutes weekly review. What did I create? What did I learn? What's next?

And the last one is, start your project instead of just consuming content. How many times have you wasted hours just searching for which tool is better and reading and watching other people's opinions? Instead of doing research to figure out what's best for your project, use that tool to see for yourself. Create small projects, compare frameworks and libraries, and try to find what actually fits your needs. Nobody knows what you actually need better than you.

I follow these five rules and never feel like I'm falling behind anymore. I see what happened in the past, understand that it's a never-ending loop. I believe that if you follow them, too, you'll feel the same. And after the next video, you'll feel even better because we are going to talk about something really important, the truth about AI in programming. What it can actually do, what it cannot do, what tools should you use. If you don't want to miss that, make sure to subscribe to the channel, and I'll see you in the next one.