One lesson that could be applicable, is that your passion doesn't necessarily have to be your "job". You can perform music on the weekends, or be an active participant in your local indie dev gamer community while having a totally boring corporate job. I've seen a lot of people burned by trying to make their passion their actual career.

This is, in fact, what my kid is planning. They are artistically inclined - make beautiful art - but when looking at colleges focused on law.

Why? Because lawyers make bank, and they can fund their passion that way. Not the way I did it, but... who knows?

I think your ability to market will matter the most (which is also pretty much the same as ever).

I think their business model was sustainable, but depended on SEO. AI made it so people would either use the LLM generated tailwind syntax, or the "AI Overview" at the top of the Google search results and never land on the official tailwind documentation site. Less visits on the official docs meant less people would see the paid offerings, which means less people would buy.

It's possible they could have explored other marketing channels (youtube?), but it seems like the death of SEO for this sort of content lead to the main issues.

Probably “Alcoholics Anonymous”

Yes, alcoholic anonymous

You can imagine with more operations being available to be done more cheaply and quickly the LLM doesn't need to "one shot" a solution. It could try many solutions, test them, throw some away, wiggle some of the parameters like a genetic algorithm, see how that changes the result, and converge on an optimal solution (based on whatever the cost function is). Basically producing a good result could become like an optimization problem. That would be way too expensive and slow right now.

I think the scrapers have gotten pretty good and can imitate real traffic. And it isn’t just scraping for model training. A large amount would be LLM tool calls searching the web (and HN) for info about some prompt.

There is caching to consider. Switching models throws away the cached tokens.

This is basically what my life is like (going on 9 years now). I don't think it has necessarily led to burnout for me. Keep in mind that time spent with your children isn't all work. There is some fun and leisure in there as well (although it is a lot of work too).

When you work at an enterprise that depends on Github, frequent outages are actually a pretty big deal and begin to impact productivity in a real way.

It feels to me like this is a case of very rapid increase in load from AI pr's more than product quality degrading because of cruft or poor maintenance. It's annoying but I'm not confident that alternatives will do better in the long run vs GitHub (which I'm guessing will improve with time)

It's not only PRs, my personal projects which used github actions were seeing more builds in a single month than all of the previous year.

Yeah and if I was an enterprise I would definitely be self hosting with Forgejo or Gerrit or whatever. But I think for most hobbyists GitHub is still totally fine.

I use it quite a lot and the first time I actually witnessed downtime myself was yesterday.

There are nasty things we can do in software that can indeed make debugging difficult (for instance in the “make everything reactive” craze, some random subscriber could trigger from some piece of state changing that isn’t obvious at all and fully asynchronous and in a totally different part of the code).