Why Developers Are Saying Coding Is Fun Again

Happy New Year, builders! 🎉

Welcome to 2026 and the first HelloBuilder of the year. We're now 92 strong — not massive, but you're the ones who actually open this thing daily, and that means something.

Quick personal update: I fully vibe-coded Careerkit over the past few months. No traditional dev background, just AI tools, stubbornness, and way too many late nights. It's live, people are using it, and it still surprises me that this is possible now. If you're on the fence about building something, just start. The tools are absurdly good.

Anyway, let's get into what's trending.

"2024: Where 'it works on my machine' evolved into 'it works but I'm not sure which AI wrote this part.'"

Web development is fun again is sparking a 521-comment brawl on HN, and honestly? The timing couldn't be better.

The piece argues we've hit an inflection point where AI tools have made building for the web actually enjoyable instead of drowning in webpack configs and dependency hell. Ship features in hours, not sprints. The controversial bit? Some devs are pissed, claiming this dumbs down "real engineering."

But here's the thing: the builders winning right now aren't the ones gatekeeping complexity. They're the ones shipping. When you can prototype an idea over lunch and have users by dinner, the entire game changes.

Boris's Claude Code Setup - The creator of Claude Code shows his surprisingly vanilla workflow that actually ships features fast.

Full-Stack Developer Roadmap 2026 - Complete learning path from frontend to backend with actual technologies worth your time this year.

Kindly MCP Powers AI Coding - Web search and content retrieval server for Claude, Cursor, and Copilot that actually understands what developers are looking for.

HumanMark Detects AI Content - Open source detector for AI-generated text, images, audio, and video that runs offline with zero dependencies, perfect for the privacy-conscious.

Weekend Form Backend Rebels - Dev builds his own form backend after realizing contact form SaaS pricing is absolutely bonkers for what amounts to POST requests and email forwarding.

Swift Lands on Android - Full native Android app development now possible with Swift, because apparently we didn't have enough cross-platform options already.

27-Year Vet Tests Vibe Coding - Senior game dev plays dumb with AI tools to see what's actually possible versus what's marketing fluff.

300K Lines, Zero Experience - Two non-coders burned through 10 billion tokens building an automotive platform with Cursor and lived to tell the tale.

API Key Speedrun Record - Security review finds hardcoded OpenAI key in 30 seconds, proving vibe-coded apps ship with predictable amateur mistakes.

Dev Market Reality Check - Blunt take on how AI went from helpful assistant to writing 100% of code and what that means for jobs.

Every Coding Agent Roasted - Year-end therapy session where a dev apologizes to their repos for every AI tool they inflicted on them.

Best Intern, Worst Shipper - How-To Geek captures the vibe: AI excels at grunt work but can't be trusted with production deployments.

MCP and AI Coding Predictions - Rizèl Scarlett's take on where Model Context Protocol and AI-assisted development are headed beyond the hype.

Stack Overflow Traffic Craters - Turns out developers would rather chat with Claude than copy-paste decade-old jQuery answers from 2013.

Meta Acquires Manus VR - Grabbing haptic glove tech as they position Meta AI for a serious consumer push in 2026.

Gemini 3 Flash Does ETL - Google demos their model turning manual data pipeline hell into near real-time workflows with automatic schema matching.

Gemini Gets Visual Reasoning - New multimodal capabilities let it analyze complex images and generate interactive UI layers on the fly.

AI Writing Co-Author - Finally, an AI writing tool that matches your style and has actual taste instead of generating corporate slop.

Hike-to-3D Scene Generator - World Labs' Marble stitches four photos (front, back, left, right) into a full 3D recreation of any scene.

Wild that we're talking about web dev being fun again in the same newsletter where Stack Overflow traffic is tanking. Turns out when Claude Code can explain things in context, you don't need to dig through 47 passive-aggressive SO threads from 2013.

What are you shipping this week with your new AI coding setup?

Keep shipping,

P.S. If you haven't tried ai-selector yet, stop juggling API keys in .env files like a caveman. Your future self will thank you.