Blogs Are Dead. I'm Writing One.
Blogs are dead.
At least, that's what everyone says.
AI can generate articles in seconds. It can read official docs and spit out tutorials more current than anything I could maintain. Stack Overflow is bleeding out. If someone has a question, they ask a chatbot, and the chatbot answers with absolute joy and zero ego.
So who's going to read a blog? From me?
I kept thinking about this. And the more I thought, the worse it got. I could picture it clearly: I'd spend hours writing something, hit publish, and then... nothing. The post would just sit there. Decaying quietly, like a fruit no one picked up.
I knew, logically, that I shouldn't care. Write it. Put it out there. If someone likes it, great. If not, that's fine.
But emotionally? It felt meaningless.
So I did what any rational person would do. I asked strangers on Reddit.
I posted a question on r/ExperiencedDevs: "In 2026, should people still write blogs?"
I expected maybe a few replies. Some people telling me to just do it, some telling me not to bother.
71,000 people saw that post. Over a hundred left comments. And what they said rewired something in me.
The first thing that hit me was how many experienced engineers, people with 15, 20, 30 years in this industry, write blogs that almost nobody reads. And they're completely fine with it.
One person said they've been writing to 3 subscribers for 10 years. Not to build an audience. To aid their thinking and to look back on things they've forgotten.
Another said they've built entire websites that get zero traffic, and it doesn't make them worthless, because they liked making them.
A principal engineer told me they once googled a problem, and the #1 result was their own blog post from years ago. That's a kind of magic I want to experience.
Someone else, a contributor to O'Reilly books, gave advice I keep coming back to: don't enable analytics. Don't enable comments. Force yourself to write for your own benefit first. Develop your voice before you worry about who's listening.
That one stung a little, because I realized I was already optimizing for an audience I didn't have.
But the comment that really unlocked it for me was simpler than all of that.
Someone asked why I wanted to blog. And when I answered honestly, I realized the reason had nothing to do with readers.
I keep running into the same topics. In conversations, in code reviews, in my own head six months later when I've forgotten what I decided and why. I keep re-explaining the same things, re-typing the same reasoning.
A blog isn't a publishing machine. It's a reference. Next time someone asks me about a topic I've already thought through, I want to be able to drop a link and say: "Here, read this."
That's not content creation. That's just... not repeating myself.
Now, here's the part I almost didn't write, because it's the uncomfortable truth nobody in that thread avoided.
Blogging is not dead because of AI. Blogging was always hard.
Even 20 years ago, if you wrote something and put it on the internet, odds were no one would read it. A hundred years ago, if you wrote something and tried to get it published, same odds. Having people read your work was never the default. Discovery has always been work: sharing, reposting, building a network, being patient.
AI didn't kill blogging. It just killed the illusion that showing up was enough.
So what's left?
The stuff AI can't cheaply generate.
Not "how X works." AI does that better than me. But "why I picked X over Y under these constraints, and what broke when I was wrong" -- that's mine. That comes from scars, not documentation.
Not polished explainers. But the specific, weird, in-between insights that only come from doing the work. Engineering mixed with product thinking. System design mixed with human incentives. The stuff that lives between categories.
And honestly? Voice. Not quirky for quirky's sake, but the signal that a real person sat down and cared enough to think. One commenter said it perfectly: you can tell when a real person has put effort into a blog post within the first couple of paragraphs. Usually because of a unique or creative topic.
In a sea of AI slop, a human voice is a breath of fresh air. Multiple people in that thread said exactly that.
I want to be honest about what I'm not doing, too.
I'm not optimizing for reach. If I ever want that, I'll treat distribution as its own problem. For now, I'm building consistency without audience pressure.
I'm not trying to be complete or always correct. That kind of pressure kills writing habits before they start. My bar is simpler: small posts, clear claims, honest about what I don't know.
And I'm not publishing everything. Some writing belongs in private notes. Some belongs in docs. Some belongs nowhere. My rule: if I wouldn't want to link to it six months from now, it stays in the drafts.
Here's what surprised me most about that Reddit thread.
I went in looking for permission. I came out realizing I didn't need it.
Not because the answers were all "yes, do it." They were. But because the reasons were so much better than I expected. Writing sharpens thinking. It creates a record you can look back on. It helps in job interviews. It compounds quietly over years. It's a craft worth improving for its own sake. And in a world drowning in generated text, choosing to think and write as yourself is almost an act of defiance.
One person put it this way: improving a craft and yourself is pretty much the point of living. AI writing feels hollow because no one is working out what they really want to say.
I don't want to fling slop. I want to work out what I really want to say.
So here I am. Writing a blog about writing a blog.
If you're reading this, thanks. If no one reads this, it still did its job. It made my thinking durable. And next time someone asks me whether they should start a blog in 2026, I'll drop this link and say:
"Here, read this."
-- DHg