New model fatigue and what programming was for
- YT :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVMM23kUVH8
- Original title :: Am I Alone
A short, deliberately vulnerable monologue. After a week where Fable 5.1, Gemini 3.8, Muse Spark 1.3 and Astra all shipped within days of each other, Prime noticed he felt nothing - and spends the video working out why, landing on the conclusion that what he actually lost was not excitement about models but the part of programming he enjoyed for its own sake.
The diagnosis
Nothing since Fable 5 has felt special. He could already build everything he wanted with Fable and Grok 4.6, so a better model only promises marginal gains - better bug spotting, less stupid behaviour - while leaving the hard part untouched. New models do not absolve him of the actual difficulty of programming, which is making something good.
The cost he names directly: "I've had to let part of myself die to be able to run this fast." He loved putting on a headset and programming for twelve or sixteen hours straight, jamming to music and crushing keys. That no longer looks like a viable way to work - the Omarchy automation behind him would have taken weeks by hand and took roughly two days by prompting. He admits the plain consequence: the thing he was best at, Neovim programming, is worth less now, and that is part of why the releases do not move him.
His term for what he misses is "code masturbation" - and he thinks the term is fair, because the enjoyment was in the typing and the thinking, and nobody has ever cared what the inside of a product looks like. What users care about is whether it is smooth, whether it feels good, whether it is a laggy piece of crap.
What he is keeping
The half of the work that survives is the half that was never selfish: building tools that make other developers' lives better, which is what he enjoyed at Netflix. The current project - client/server, actions and logs in PlanetScale, tickets and triggers in Linear, Sentry tracing why a session ran slow, cloud agents via Cursor - makes him genuinely happy because it removes work from real people and should surface real security issues. That goal is the same whether he hand-coded it or not.
The same standard is why AI game slop annoys him: the hard part of a game is never the demo, it is making something repeatable and fun, and the slop has none of it. Turned on himself, the question becomes - given infinite resources, can I build something actually good?
The reframe
He does not want to run a channel that is permanently upset at the state of technology. Mocking Google, Microsoft, Altman and Amodei stays; living angry at tech does not. The positive framing he is trying to adopt: it has never been easier to build the thing you always wanted to build, weekend projects now have near-infinite scope, and the open question is how to take the skills he already has and turbocharge them for this era. He expects the comments to say "we lost him," and answers that he is a technology enthusiast who wants to make tools that make developers' lives better - and calls the video a therapy session.