Is the Dip Still Out?

It’s 2026. I’m making a blog. Take a moment.

From about 2003 to 2012, I made real, actual money — sometimes good money — building WordPress sites for other people. Bands. Small businesses. A guy who I swear to god needed a “web presence” for his artisanal dog treat company. I was the blog guy. I could theme, plugin, contact-form, and invoice you before the coffee got cold. I was a content management mercenary. A digital sharecropper. I built probably a hundred of these things.

Never made one for myself. Not once. Twenty-two years. The cobbler’s kids, barefoot in the snow, etc.

And now here I am. Forty-something years old. Astro project open in one terminal. Claude open in another. Building my own website like it’s some kind of achievement. It’s not. It’s actually kind of pathetic. A retired plumber finally fixing his own toilet and expecting a standing ovation.

I don’t like it. It feels fraudulent. It feels like showing up to a party two decades late and asking if there’s still dip. There is no dip. The dip left in 2009. Everyone moved to Twitter, then Twitter became whatever the hell it is now, and the dip is long gone. But I brought chips anyway because I am nothing if not committed to bad timing.

Here we are. 2026 baybee.

The AI Thing

Let’s do this part now so we don’t have to do it later.

Yes, I use AI to write code. This site was built with AI assistance. My Roku tools were built with AI assistance. I will continue to build things with AI assistance. This is not a confession. I’m not in a support group. It’s a statement of fact, like “I use a dishwasher” or “I drive an automatic.”

I’ve been writing code professionally for over 25 years. A quarter century. I have mass in this chair. The architecture, the domain expertise, the decade of shipping streaming apps to every piece of shit set-top box with a WiFi chip — that part is me. The AI turns it into working code faster. End of transaction.

If you’re not using AI tools in 2026, you’re not taking some noble stand against the machines. You’re just slower than the person next to you who is. I didn’t make the rules. I don’t even like the rules. But pretending the rules don’t exist is a weird flex for someone who writes software for a living.

What This Actually Is

This is where I’ll dump thoughts about whatever I’m building — OTT stuff, Roku tooling, MCP servers, AI dev workflows, the general chaos of caring about a platform that still runs BrightScript in the year of our lord 2026. Nobody asked for any of this. I’m posting it anyway.

Twenty-two years to get here. Don’t say I rush into things.