It started during one dark and lonely autumn nigh-

I’m Andrea Bruno, I was born in 1997 and for the past how many years I’ve been dealing with tech, playing with tech and trying to get into tech. That doesn’t mean that my path was clear from the start and in fact when I was younger I always thought I wanted to be a dentist. What the hell even is “tech”?

Is it the computers? The games? The programs? The joy of solving puzzles?

I really wanted to get into “tech” even though I couldn’t pinpoint what that really was, so after a terrible time in high school I decided to go get a bachelor’s degree in Informatics, which was a total slap in my face regarding what really goes on in University. You don’t get to do anything practical and I was bored out of my mind. It didn’t help that at the time Covid19 was rampaging and all of the lessons that were previously in class were now remote. I had no intention to keep going like that and it made everything much harder for me. So I quit and found a real job.

I love software. I love it to be simple, accessible, with clarity and vision. But a lot of software doesn’t follow any rules (and in fact some rules feel made up to begin with) but at the very least it tries to convey something.

One thing that AI has helped with is “I want to convey this and that” and BOOM you have a “sparkling” “shiny” website. You know exactly the kind of things that we’ve all seen and it’s just referred to as “AI Slop”. We all joke about it but there’s probably millions of websites right now that have been vibecoded completely looked at and just went “yeah this is fine by me.”

We were making slop before AI as well, don’t get me wrong. But at least there was an entry barrier. Now the entry barrier is basically 0, which is a good thing for learning a terrible thing for having things with style.

Slop is the lack of quality, of identity. I’ve felt that way about a few projects of mine that I haven’t made public but most of them I’m proud enough to show them, even if they’re “vibe-coded” I’ve looked at the code and chose everything that was presented to me. The architecture, the look, the flow, there’s nothing that wasn’t chosen by me, AI simply assisted me in making it.

I started working at a time where working with AI was just at its beginnings so I was just using it basically to learn and play with stuff. If I think back about what I was doing I feel like a troglodite. An actual cave-man.

Now I can’t even imagine going back.

But behind that there’s a feeling that I’m not actually learning anymore. That I’m letting myself go to pasture and that someday it will come back to bite me in the ass. I don’t want to be left behind so I’ve started this website (built with the help of AI) and this blog (built with my tiny brain that does not compare to our AI overlords).

I’m gonna work on skills that can translate beyond this new world of AI, learning how to use it optimally instead of just saying “well. you see this is broken. can you pleaaaase fix it?”.

We can do better!

Thanks as always,

Andrea