i'm a hobbyist programmer and i made a hobbyist little app called acars-processor. it had a memory leak but i had enough memory to throw at it so it only restarted once a week or less. i spent some time learning how to trace memory leaks (pprof is dope as hell) and i fixed them. this app went from crashing out of memory using 1GB to using a steady 50MB only. the CPU usage no longer climbs over time for no reason as well.

i didn't use chatbots to make acars-processor. i had some features that explicitly catered to them but i removed them. i know some people feel pretty great using chatbots to make their own apps that they don't understand, or art that they told the stealing machine to make. i don't deny they feel that way. i bet it feels great for them.

but i feel great learning about pointers and memory and garbage collection and struggling with figuring out simple syntax and searching on the hollowed out shell of stackoverflow for tips. i am proud of what i did and i know deep down i really did it. even if there's probably only a dozen people worldwide running this thing, now they have a more efficient app too. this thing that probably would restart daily on a system with 512MB of ram should now run for months unattended.

i climbed the mountain and you hopped out of a helicopter at the top. we're both at the summit but i can tell you what the pine trees below smell like.

the image is a graph of memory usage as i fixed the leaks.