Is it just me, or is the 'Dead Internet Theory' hitting our dev feeds?

Source: Dev.to

Introduction

I love this community, but I’m only five minutes away from deleting my bookmarks. Lately, about 80 % of the “technical” articles feel like they were spat out by a prompt engineer who doesn’t even have VS Code installed.

The Problem with AI‑Generated Content

• Repetitive structure – Articles such as “The Future of Rust in 2026” or “Why You Should Stop Using Promises” all follow the same template, use a uniformly polite AI tone, and end with a generic “In conclusion, it’s important to remember…”
• Noise overload – The internet is becoming saturated with mid‑tier content that adds little value. Bots scrape bots, training more bots to produce endless “Top 10” lists for other bots to read. It feels like an Ouroboros of autogenerated material.
• Loss of “soul” – The human quirks, mistakes, and messy code snippets that make learning authentic are disappearing.

Where Real Human Voice Still Exists

Reddit remains the last place where a human will call your architecture “garbage” with specific, angry detail that an LLM would be too polite to generate. For now, I only trust a dev if they’re slightly rude to me—at least I know they’re real.

The Cost of Automation

Many developers spend days writing Python scripts to automate a task that takes a couple of minutes and only needs to be done once a week. We end up spending 48 hours avoiding 120 seconds of manual work, adding more fluff to the content pile.

Now the “manual work” we’re avoiding is thinking. Everyone is building a “personal brand agent” to churn out multiple rants and articles every day, effectively burying the community under generated sludge.

What We Want

• Real stories – Tales of breaking a build at 5 pm on a Friday.
• Messy, non‑optimized code – Snippets that “shouldn’t work but do.”
• Grit and bugs – The actual mistakes that teach us the most.

If an article reads like it was written by someone who thinks “touching grass” is a new Linux command, skip it. Give me the gritty details, not the same AI‑generated list for the millionth time.

Conclusion

If we keep automating the “soul” out of dev blogs, who is all this content even for?

Believe me, I am not an AI—though I did use a little AI to format this rant. The frustration is 100 % organic.