State of Dev – Week of July 27, 2026
Or: How I Accidentally Became an AI Middle Manager
There are weeks where you ship a feature.
Then there are weeks where you accidentally redesign your entire career.
This was one of those.
Somewhere over the past few months, I quietly stopped being "a software developer."
I am now apparently:
- Product Owner.
- Systems Architect.
- Staff Engineer.
- QA.
- Technical Writer.
- DevOps.
- GitHub janitor.
- AI therapist.
- Professional context switcher.
- CEO of a company that currently consists of me yelling at three different LLMs.
I write surprisingly little code.
Which is funny, because I've probably never built this much software.
The workflow has evolved into something that would have sounded like satire six months ago.
Opus designs.
Sonnet implements.
Codex argues.
ChatGPT reviews.
Codo reviews the review.
GitHub complains.
I fix the complaint.
The AI apologizes.
CI still fails because I forgot a YAML space somewhere.
Progress.
My actual development process now resembles running a software consultancy where all the employees have ADHD and infinite confidence.
One AI is writing specifications.
Another is implementing them.
Another is reviewing them.
Meanwhile I'm standing in the middle pointing dramatically at diagrams like some deranged orchestra conductor.
Nobody is allowed to commit directly to main.
Not even me.
Speaking of specifications...
I've apparently become incapable of starting a project without first writing a specification that would make NASA uncomfortable.
Need a small script?
Thirty-page architecture.
Need to rename a variable?
Better discuss the long-term roadmap.
Need toast?
Phase 1.
The GitHub workflow is now almost entirely automated.
Repository setup.
Documentation.
Issue generation.
Branch creation.
Implementation.
Pull request.
Review.
Fix review.
Merge.
At some point I'm expecting GitHub to politely ask whether I still wish to be involved.
Then came the blog.
Which started as:
"I should probably write things down."
Naturally that escalated into:
"Let's build an AI-powered publishing pipeline that creates blog posts from conversations, validates front matter, fixes CI, opens pull requests, waits for reviews, resolves comments, merges everything automatically, and eventually mines years of ChatGPT exports looking for new article ideas."
You know.
Normal blogging.
That innocent little thought immediately turned into another project.
Export every ChatGPT conversation.
Feed everything into an LLM.
Extract:
- blog ideas
- cookbook recipes
- reusable code
- architectural decisions
- funny stories
- technical lessons
- unfinished projects
- future projects
Apparently my entire conversation history has become source code.
Which naturally led to another realization.
GitHub already knows every repository I've touched.
So why not write a plugin that scans every repository, indexes them, extracts metadata, generates JSON, tracks project health, and eventually lets AI understand my entire software history?
Because apparently "opening GitHub" is too much manual work.
Then there was the automation platform.
Originally it was supposed to be a helper.
Now it wants plugins.
Every idea somehow becomes:
"This should probably be another plugin."
GitHub?
Plugin.
Terraform?
Plugin.
Cloudflare?
Plugin.
Discord?
Plugin.
Cron jobs?
Plugin.
Eventually I'll need a plugin whose only responsibility is keeping track of all the plugins.
Infrastructure didn't escape either.
Instead of setting up development environments...
...why not create a reusable Docker development image?
Actually...
Why not create a base image.
Then derive project images.
Then host development remotely.
Then use VS Code remotely.
Then run Claude remotely.
Then run Codex locally.
Then synchronize through Dropbox because committing every ten minutes is annoying.
Entire development environment becomes portable.
Laptop catches fire?
Pull image.
Continue coding.
Of course that wasn't enough.
I also started planning a local AI stack.
Because apparently paying several hundred dollars every month to multiple AI companies wasn't ridiculous enough.
Maybe local models.
Maybe OpenRouter.
Maybe my own routing layer.
Maybe train one eventually.
I have become the exact person I promised myself I wouldn't become.
Then there is the game engine.
Remember when I thought I was making a game?
No.
I'm building a narrative engine.
Which now supports multiple game types.
Single-player.
Multiplayer.
Adventure games.
Future RPGs.
Interactive stories.
Dialogue.
Apparently everything except restraint.
Even Lucifer somehow escaped containment.
The cooking channel exists.
The absurd Bulgarian stories exist.
The philosophy exists.
The recipes exist.
Now they're all contaminating the game engine.
At first I thought this was mission creep.
Then I realized...
No.
This is gross cross-contamination.
Lucifer's Kitchen.
Lucifer's stories.
Ludus First Chronicles.
Indiana Jones...
...if Indiana spent half his time arguing with Bulgarian bureaucracy.
Speaking of absurdity...
The blog itself has already become part of the workflow.
I now use AI...
...to write about using AI...
...to automate writing blog posts...
...about using AI...
...that automate writing blog posts.
If this eventually loops back into itself and becomes self-aware, I refuse all responsibility.
The funniest realization this week came out of nowhere.
Everyone keeps saying AI is taking software jobs.
Maybe.
Mine certainly changed.
I spend less time writing code.
Instead I'm doing architecture.
Planning.
Automation.
Product management.
Quality assurance.
Documentation.
Business strategy.
Infrastructure.
Content creation.
Review.
Recruitment.
And somehow I'm still shipping more software than before.
One job quietly turned into five.
The biggest bottleneck is no longer technical.
It's credits.
I've managed to burn through Codex, Claude, Copilot and review quotas with impressive efficiency.
This is not a productivity problem.
It's a subscription management problem.
Looking back, the absurd thing isn't any individual project.
It's that they all connect.
The Docker images support the AI workflow.
The AI workflow supports the automation platform.
The automation platform supports the GitHub plugins.
The GitHub plugins support the blog.
The blog documents the workflow.
The workflow creates more projects.
Which require more automation.
Which creates more blog posts.
Which creates more ideas.
It's less of a roadmap and more of a perpetual motion machine fueled by curiosity and questionable decision making.
So what's next?
Probably Terraform automation.
Cloudflare management.
Repository indexing.
Conversation mining.
AI-generated cookbook entries.
Automatic project extraction.
Remote development containers.
A local routing layer for models.
And at some point...
I should probably write some software.
Although, judging by recent history, I'll probably automate that first.