The 2025 Playground: Why I Built a Website in a 'Ghost Town'

It is late 2025, and looking at the developer landscape feels a lot lonelier than it did when I started in 2022.

Back then, I had a feed full of bookmarked dev sites and followed dozens of senior engineers who posted deep-dives every week. There was an energy to it—a feeling that we were all building a giant library of human knowledge together.

Today, the playground has changed. Most of those seniors have stopped posting. My favorite blogger, someone who did this full-time, just quit. Why? Because the reality of 2025 is brutal AI scrapers take years of a human’s experience, summarize it into a five-sentence chat response, and never send a single person back to the original site.

The Cold Hard Data

If you think the “death of the blog” is just a feeling, look at the numbers. Recent data shows that 60% of Google searches now end without a single click because AI Overviews give people the answer immediately. Stack Overflow has seen a 70% drop in new questions since I started in 2022 as the community is replaced by private chat windows. Even sites like Medium and LinkedIn are drowning in AI slop that is 100% copy-pasted from AI.

As a fresher, it’s easy to feel like there’s no hope. If the pros are leaving because there’s no revenue and no traffic, why should I even start?

Why I Chose a Boring Stack

I see the data, and I still chose to launch my site. But I did it differently. I didn’t spend $20 a month on a database or $100 on a fancy pro template. By using Astro and Markdown, my site is just a collection of text files. If it gets zero hits for six months, I don’t lose money. It can sit there for years without a single maintenance task.

Everyone expects a Web App now, but I realized I don’t need a complex backend to share a thought. A static site is faster, cleaner, and more honest. I don’t think about the past or future of the industry too much—I just do my work for today.

A Journal for the Human Developer

In 2022, we blogged for validation like clicks and jobs. In 2025, I am blogging for continuity. I’m treating this site as a black box recorder for my career. Even if the search traffic is zero, the value is real. If I only get answers from AI, I never learn how to think. When I write a post about a bug, I’m forcing my brain to own that knowledge.

In a world of AI noise, an unperfect site with real mistakes is becoming a rare asset. If a recruiter actually wants to find a human developer who can think through a problem, my messy manual blog is better proof than a polished AI-written LinkedIn post. By keeping mine simple and free, I ensure it survives. I don’t want my career to exist only inside someone else’s AI model.

Real Dev Struggles and Inconsistency

Let’s be honest—I’m not a writing machine. Some weeks, the code doesn’t work, the caffeine doesn’t kick in, and the publish button feels a thousand miles away. One day, I might stop writing too. I’ll get inconsistent. I’ll get stuck in a three-month loop of tutorial hell or burnt out by a project that refused to deploy.

This isn’t a polished newsletter; it’s a record of the grind. It’s about the days I wanted to throw my laptop out the window because of a missing semicolon or a breaking dependency change. That inconsistency is part of the human experience that AI can’t simulate.

Moving On Without Disappearing

The era of the celebrity dev blogger might be over. The playground is noisier and more crowded with bots than ever. But we can’t stop living or building just because the tools changed. I launched my site not to win a game, but to keep myself from disappearing into the automation. My website isn’t a finished product; it’s a living timeline of my learning.

Positive Opportunities Ahead

Even in this automated world, new opportunities are popping up for those of us who stay human. Companies are getting desperate for people who actually understand the why behind the code, not just the how of a prompt. By documenting my messy journey, I’m positioning myself for the roles where critical thinking is the only thing that matters.

The industry will keep changing, and by 2028, things will look even crazier. But I’ll still have my folder of Markdown files—a record of how I grew, one day at a time. We have to move on, but we don’t have to disappear.

Happy Coding!