Alex Hyett

alexhyett.com · English

Alex Hyett is a Software Developer, YouTuber and Writer focussed on helping people transform their lives by learning how to code.

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Last post: Nov 13, 2026
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Is this Software Development now?
Nov 13, 2026 · original
I must admit I used to be an AI sceptic. I used AI a lot when Claude Code first came out, and it struggled with even simple bash scripts introducing a lot of mistakes that I would have to check and correct. There was so much back and forth just to get something working that it was questionable how anyone was saving time with this. Now with the latest models, it is truly impressive what can be achieved. YouTube seems to be full at the moment with people vibe coding whole games. I have seen copies of Splatoon , Mario Kart , Minecraft , GTA , Spiderman and even Godzilla. Someone even made a lawn mowing game . As you probably saw on the news a few weeks ago someone used AI to clone the whole Adobe and Microsoft Office suite and put it up for free on GitHub. Yes undoubtedly this code is riddled with bugs and is nowhere near production ready, but it is usable and completely free. If before AI,
Don't let your skills atrophy
Nov 8, 2026 · original
It is an uncertain time for software development at the moment. A lot of companies are no longer hiring junior developers while those still employed are spending all their time prompting AI instead of writing code by hand. Even with AI writing most of the code these days, that shouldn't mean you stop learning and understanding what your code is doing. The less time you spend in your codebase the more distant you become from it. The speed that you gain from not having to write the code is soon lost when a critical bug comes in, and you don't understand the code or know where to look. In the past, I could see a stacktrace from a bug in production and know exactly where the problem was and how to fix it. I have had cases where the time between a critical error occurring on production and a fix being released is a low as 20 mins. That is only possible when you truly understand the code, and
Software is dead and my private key is "4"
Oct 25, 2026 · original
The internet seems to be back on the “software is dead” bandwagon again. Most of this has come from a huge wave of cloned apps and recompilations of software which has been made possible due to Claude Opus 5.5 and the other frontier models. If you keep up with tech news you have probably heard of ArtCraft which has spent the last month creating open source alternatives to the Adobe suite and the Microsoft Office suite of apps. These are marked as early alpha, which basically means they are full of bugs and not ready for production use yet. Even though there are bugs they are being rapidly developed and for some use cases they are definitely usable and at a price that everyone likes, free! The argument is that anyone can now vibe code a clone of your application and therefore software is dead. Everyone will just create their own personal applications for tasks and that no one will pay for
Why is software not getting better?
Oct 11, 2026 · original
People have complained for years about buggy software. To be honest I think the internet and the ability to update software quickly is partly to blame. When I first started my career in software engineering, part of my job was to create releases. This involved putting together installers for new versions and burning them onto CDs ready to be sent out to customers. There was no download mechanism to get updates for the software. The software had to be bug free first time round. The company also produced software for other companies mostly in embedded devices which were hard to update. To get to this level of quality, we were required to use things like cyclomatic complexity and other static analysis tools as well as MCDC unit tests. Which apart from regulated industries like aviation and military, no one bothers doing any more. If you shipped software with a critical bug in it, then you e
Self-host your own GitHub alternative
Oct 9, 2026 · original
GitHub used to be the place where developers would go to store their code and find new repositories. I have had a GitHub account for 11 years now, back then I had a lot less grey in my beard and the world was a lot simpler. For many, GitHub is still the only place where people store their code, but that is slowly changing. Thanks to AI, everyone and their gran, can now build software by simply prompting it. This has resulted in a massive amount of code being produced, mainly because some people think lines of code is a meaningful metric again and naturally all this code is being uploaded to GitHub. You might be thinking, “it can't be that bad, surely not everyone is addicted to the slop machine”. However, in GitHub's August blog post going over their 7-hour outage, they say that the number of commits per month has gone from 1.4 billion in April to 2.9 billion in August . It is definitely
The one skill every developer needs right now
Sep 27, 2026 · original
Don't worry I am not talking about agentic skills. This is one skill that doesn't come in a markdown file. If you are “lucky” enough to work as a software developer right now, chances are you are looking at LLM output on a daily basis. It might be you have to (or choose to) use AI tools to help with your programming. Maybe the project manager has decided to offload all ticket writing to an LLM or the documentation is now all LLM generated. Even if you abstain from using AI for doing your work, you can't get away from other people sending you AI generated content that you have to interact with. AI writing is generally overly verbose, and it just has an overall vibe that is easy to spot if you have read enough of it, or read enough actual writing to notice the difference. For example, as I am writing this newsletter I am actually voicing what I want to say in my head (or sometimes out loud
The death of SaaS and reverting to offline software
Sep 13, 2026 · original
This week I was reading this article, " we have a year to fix security everywhere ". The TL;DR, is that GLM-5.3 flash can be run locally on $5-15k hardware and is apparently good at hacking, especially when using an "abliterated" version which doesn't adhere to any safety checks. In other words, anyone with a bit of money can run an agent 24/7 to find vulnerabilities and exploit them across the web. At least that is what it claims. In the past, ethical hackers used to find vulnerabilities in a companies code and then email them to give them time to fix it, usually with the expectation of receiving a bounty. There are many cases of these vulnerabilities taking months to fix and it only getting resolved when the hacker decides to go public. With hackers using agents to find and exploit vulnerabilities, companies no longer have months to fix these vulnerabilities, they may not even have hou
Becoming more nostalgic in my old age
Aug 30, 2026 · original
I say "old age" in the title of this post, I am still in my 30s, and I don't turn 40 until next year, but I have grey in my beard and I have definitely paraphrased "back in my day" more than once. Admittedly it is mostly to my children, so they can learn a little bit about what it was like growing up in the "late 1900s" not being surrounded by technology and the internet every second of the day. My daughter asked me whether it was better growing up as a kid when I was younger vs now. Obviously I am biased, but I think we did have it better as kids. Yes there was less choice when it came to entertainment and toys but abundant choice isn't always a good thing. Certainly in the UK where we only had 4 TV channels, with kids shows limited to a few hours each day, everyone watched the same thing. We were all exposed to the same adverts and ended up playing the same games and getting the same t
But At What Cost?
Aug 16, 2026 · original
As a race, humans are really bad at doing cost benefit analysis. We might try and weigh up the pros and cons but we all have a tendency to exaggerate the pros if they are beneficial to us and downplay the cons that we can't directly see. This is also the case if the downsides are not immediate but will affect us at some point in the future. We see this pattern throughout history. We find something useful or pleasurable and later discover that it is harmful or unethical, and then continue doing it for another 50 years. Asbestos # Take asbestos for example. It has been used for hundreds of years, it is dirt cheap, strong and fire resistant. So we used it everywhere in tiles, in furniture and even in clothing. The first documented death from asbestos was in 1906. In 1918 insurers stopped covering asbestos workers due to the known health risks. It took until 1999 to completely ban it in the
Uniqueness is the key to standing out
Aug 2, 2026 · original
The other day I saw this post about "Stolen Buttons". It is a browser extension that "steals" a button from every website that you visit. You can see the creators collection of "stolen" buttons here: Stolen Buttons | Anatoly Zenkov If you scroll through the list there will likely be a few that catch your eye, as they are a little bit different. It might be the shape, the colour, or the font used that makes them stand out. The majority of the buttons though are flat and pill shaped. They are usually blue or purple. A lot of this is due to the prevalence of CSS and UI frameworks like Tailwind and Bootstrap over the last decade. These frameworks have made it a lot easier for developers to put together websites and UI designs but without additional customisation everything starts looking the same. I must admit I am guilty of this as well. Over the years, a lot of the personality and uniquene
Reducing my screen time with another device...
Jul 19, 2026 · original
In an attempt to reduce the amount of time I spend staring at my phone, I have bought myself another device. At least that is the lie I told myself for buying yet another gadget because it looked cool. After seeing Max Glenister and Neil Brown speak so highly of this device I just had to buy the XTEINK X4 e-reader . Note, this is not sponsored in any way I just wanted to share it with you! This is the 3rd e-reader that I own, so I definitely didn't need this device. I also have an old Kindle which I use exclusively for reading Kindle Unlimited books and a Kobo Clara Colour which is my main reading device. This device though is different to the others. Its dimensions are 114 x 69 x 5.9mm which is just a little bit bigger than a credit card. It doesn't have a touchscreen but has physical buttons on the bottom and the side. There is also no backlight. The device comes with a 32 GB SD card,
I Tried Building a Real App With AI. It Took a Year.
Jul 17, 2026 · original
My wife and I have been looking for an app to track things like habits, hobbies, and when we last did certain chores. To be honest there are probably hundreds of different habit trackers on the App Store. Next to todo list apps they are supposed to be the easiest apps to create so it is not really that surprising there are so many options. But we must have tried dozens of different apps but none of them quite fit what we were looking for. Of course now we have AI, so this sort of thing should be easy to create. You just right a couple of prompts and AI will build it for you, while you sleep, or sip cocktails on the beach. As we shall see it didn't quite turn out that way. Requirements and Existing Apps # So for this app I had a few requirements: We wanted to have the habits in a long list and not have to go through multiple pages to find them. We didn't want any data be stored in the clo

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