My corner of the web was atwitter lately as a few prominent members of the Apple/iOS developer community decided to announce they were spending time on X again; people got mad. And it’s kind of bothering me how people seem to be talking past each other about it.
The people who rejoined X characterized it as a nice place to be, with enthusiastic users. (Maybe? For white guys I guess? Some brown folks on X have different experiences.) I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing that the users on X aren’t really enthusiastic about the community there, they’re enthusiastic about AI. The returners to X started posting about AI immediately, so, yeah I think there’s something to this draw to X based on interest in AI.
No one seems mad at the people who stayed on X, only at the ones who returned. We all see what we want to see. A lot of people (myself included) left Twitter to find a new online home for text-based social media. When a member of that new home departs, and tells us that the original place we all left is actually nice now, it can feel threatening. Especially since, you know, it’s obviously not true. Twitter is dead. The “Salad Days of Twitter” will never, ever return.
A lot of iOS developers left Twitter to join the fediverse. For context, I created mastodon.technology in 2017 and by the time I shut it down in 2022, it had grown to one of the top-ten largest Mastodon servers on the Fediverse. I still have a lot of friends there. But I hardly ever post about technology anymore because what I’m most excited about these days is agentic coding. And I know what the reaction would be if I tooted about it.
So. I’m guessing that the people who have rejoined X felt the same way. They didn’t feel able to discuss AI without naysayers so they left, to return to the place on the web where enthusiasm for AI is the norm. Where the people creating agentic coding tools hang out. Where the builders using agentic tools discuss their techniques.
X is LinkedIn for AI.
And I mean that derisively. LinkedIn is widely, correctly seen as a fake place. Somewhere to aura farm professional success points. “What getting divorced taught me about B2B sales.” There is technically community on LinkedIn, but, not in the sense that a lot of people are looking for. It’s inauthentic. I tried scrolling on X the other day, and I felt that inauthenticity. Not every post, not as uniformly. But it just feels… fake. In a similar way that LinkedIn feels fake.
…but LinkedIn can be useful. I post to LinkedIn and no one gets mad. If the people rejoining X had been upfront about joining to discuss AI then maybe everyone wouldn’t have gotten mad. Or, maybe they’ve have gotten even madder; people do hate AI.
And not for no reason, either.
This is complicated.
I have mixed feelings. Hoovering up all the internet’s data to train LLMs was not something anyone consented to. But I did release a lot of open source software under an MIT license, and this blog is licensed under the Creative Commons. So I did consent. People are mad at data centres using up water and electricity, but text-based inference is one of the least resource-intensive uses of AI. And I’m on the record that agentic coding tools can continue to improve without models getting better. Anthropic wants to keep spending resources on LLM training, to create the machine god. Okay? But I’m just trying to make apps. And that doesn’t use a lot of resources.
Some friends of mine would put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. If they could, they’d wave a magic wand and programmers would all go back to standup updates like “yesterday I renamed a variable, today I’m renaming it back.” I would not. At some point in 2026, I crossed the threshold where I’m more excited than I am nervous about agentic coding. That shift has let me to be more curious about the tooling, and want to learn more. I feel so powerful, able to leverage my deep expertise far more than I could without the tools.
I avoid X because it feels gross (even before but especially since Twitter’s acquisition). And because its owner sucks. However, I must admit that any time I’ve logged onto X over the past two years, one first recommended posts I see has had some tip or technique that significantly improved how I used agentic coding tools. Like, it’s not even funny. I’d log in to look at something a coworker sent me (you have to log in these days) and I’d inadvertently see the home screen, and I’d stop in my tracks. “Holy shit, that’s a good idea.”
The cost I pay to avoid X is having to seek out secondary sources for AI tips and tricks on Slack or YouTube. Doesn’t seem so bad right? Well, like I said, I’m excited about these tools. Everything I see has been filtered. I don’t get to see the ideas as they’re forming. I only see the ideas that get notoriety, never the weird experiments. Never the failures. Getting all my information second-hand means I don’t have as clear a picture of where the tools are going. That’s not the end of the world, but it is an opportunity cost.
Recently, someone shared the herdr Desktop app on Slack just after it was released. It looked so cool! So I tried it out right away. I’d been planning to build myself some custom tooling anyway and herdr turned out to be the perfect platform to start from. I was one of the first people at work to try it out and I shared what I learned. Other developers got excited by what I’d built with it so we got together to exchange workflows. It was the first time I felt ahead of the curve with agentic coding tools.
You can be excited for AI. I am. You can avoid X. I do. The more closely I follow the advancements in agentic coding, the more that choice costs me. I’ve had to find quality secondary sources. You don’t need a LinkedIn account, and you don’t need an X account either. Even for AI.