We're about a month away from another .Net release, which is the underlying software that much of my junk is built on. These releases often have new features, language tweaks, better performance and security updates. They've been on a yearly cadence of updates for quite some time, and so I've followed along with my own, especially on POP Forums.
Someone once asked me why I keep at it, when stuff is apparently working. Obviously I enjoy doing it, but the more practical reason is that when stuff gets out of date, it eventually requires radical changes to keep going. I've been at this for almost three decades, so there has been a ton of change. PointBuzz (then Guide to The Point) is literally older than Google. My watch has more computing power than the servers the site ran on back then. If I keep up with incremental changes, it's a lot easier to keep going.
The other thing is that there are sometimes security problems with the various open source libraries that I use. Heck, there have been a few security problems that I wrote. So that's another reason I need to stay on it. Kind of related, I'm reworking a ton of stuff right now because the server-side library I use to resize images has vulnerabilities, and their fix now requires license files to keep working. Hard pass there. This happened once before for a testing library that I previously used. It happens.
This next forum release will have around 30 changes, which is a ton more than in previous years. That's because of the agentic coding, as you might guess. AI doesn't make things better without an experienced person telling it what to do, but it does make it faster to deliver the code. I often find ways to make it more efficient, require less code or otherwise not do stupid things. LLM's are fundamentally word guessers, and without wisdom or judgment, they don't know what's right or wrong. That seems to be missing from the headlines.
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