The Rain Spell | Gerard Rodes

The Rain Spell

The blog post I couldn't write

2026-06-16

AI

There is one blog post I've had in the back of my mind for a long time, something I wanted to write. It is nothing special, just another entry for my terse tech blog. And, especially over these last 5 months, the blog post as a whole has totally lost its meaning for me, and I cannot convince myself to write it.

The entry was supposed to be about my Golang+SQLite setup. I have a very personal setup based on the following principles:

No database/sql, since it introduces issues with the in-process nature of SQLite. Instead, I maintain a fork of eatonphil/gosqlite with some tweaks (native time.Time, shopspring/decimal, and sqlite-vec).

A clean utility layer named skl with Conn, Pool, automatic prepared statements, migration primitives using PRAGMA user_version;, and sane default PRAGMAs for highly concurrent applications.

And a fork of sqlc to generate code using this skl utility layer.

But this post is not about my setup. It is about the fact that now, more than ever, I find it meaningless to share it with the world.

Five months ago

What happened 5 months ago was that I installed opencode and went down the rabbit hole of agentic programming. Embracing the speed and frustration of it to the fullest. Burning through personal and corporate token budgets, leaving my agents running, and checking their output at 23:30 just to give them one final long instruction so they can keep working all night. All while, in response to my wife's frown, I promise her that this is totally normal, and that it is the last time I am going to open my work laptop tonight.

I have done several projects in 2-3 days that would each have taken me at least 2 weeks of focused deep work (something that becomes very rare as time goes on, and your weekly calendar gets filled with meetings). At the same time, the work of LLMs is off in that special way that you already know: dumb mistakes, weird assumptions, you totally giving up on trying to understand the codebase, and being unable to make changes to it without constant prompting, or accepting that you need to fully rewrite it manually (or just embrace the slop).

I wrote skills, MCPs, and CLIs specifically to be used by the LLM, and skills that distilled, improved, and created new skills. I went all in. Doing in hours what before took me days. Doing in days what took me weeks.

But although it feels fun and exciting at times, it is not the same.<br>There is a scene in the AlphaGo documentary that always struck me: when the human gets beaten by the AI, there is a sequence about that man's pillars of reality falling apart. He starts to question everything about what it really means to be alive, if a machine can do what he thought of as human taste, human intuition. I think all the devs who took joy from improving and leveraging their technical abilities are kind of going through a similar phase. It is not that the machine can do everything we do (yet), or that it can think as we think (yet). But does it matter at all? It kind of feels worthless, helpless, it kind of feels like it doesn't have a point anymore.

The garden

I was thinking about how to convey this feeling/realization with an analogy:

I was a gardener, a gardener who enjoyed watering his flowerpots every day. I also took care of my watering can, and cleaned it, polished it, and tried to come up with new and better types of cans that could enhance and improve my experience of watering my flowers.

One day a snake appeared in my garden: "What are you doing wasting all this time watering these flowers one by one? Working and putting effort and time into a never-ending task. There is a better way, let me teach you a spell. You won't need to individually water your flowers anymore. Instead, you will be able to spawn beings that do the work for you, like the creator did when he created you." (and you will be like him).

The first time I cast that spell it felt magical. The sky filled with daemons that brought the clouds and watered my flowers. It was not perfect, the flowers weren't individually watered like I would have done it. But it was more than good enough.

As time went on, doing anything other than casting the spell felt like a waste of my time. The flowers were growing wild and in unpredictable, uncontrolled patterns, but hey, they were alive.

I stopped putting on my gardener clothes and getting dirty with the soil. My watering can started to rust, and I stopped thinking about new designs and ideas for future cans. I started to forget about the different kinds of flowers I had in my garden, and their individual needs and beauty.

One day I told the daemons to keep coming without waiting for my order. And I started to think about what my purpose was in my garden, or if it was even still mine at all.

What is left for us?

There is a final scene in the documentary where the man defeated by the AI recovers the spark in his life,...