The summer of 2025 has been the most infuriating 3 months of my career. In the last 5 years, I’ve been on the butt end of title inflation, broken under-the-table promises, and lowball offers I had no choice but to take. Oh yeah, and the summer I graduated from college, I had to contend with race riots in my city and a once-in-a-century super virus. Almost forgot about that. It’s a very high bar, and the competition is strong, but the summer of 2025 takes home the gold.

The summer of 2025 is when Microsoft decided to hijack my tab key. I tried Copilot last year, it was stupid, and I shut it off. But then, one day in June I opened VS Code and Copilot was back, with a shiny new chat window and stuff. I really, really tried to engage with Copilot as a development tool. It has flashes of brilliance, but after several weeks spamming the escape key to get Copilot to shut up, I turned off its most prominent feature. On a related note, the summer of 2025 is also the summer when Microsoft decided to hijack my ctrl+i shortcut. Bastards.

The summer of 2025 is also when Samsung inserted an “AI” button into Android’s copy/paste dialog. This new button shifted the “copy” button to the right by about a quarter of an inch, which is enough that I nearly always hit the “AI” button when I mean to copy some text. When I press the AI button, a second dialog appears, touting Samsung’s ability to read my private messages and alter them. I have not accepted Samsung’s terms, so all I get is this advertisement. The button cannot be disabled. Why does this feature need to be placed exactly where the “copy” button was? Ask Samsung. I have no idea.

The summer of 2025 is when the GMail app became unusable for me. Half the time I try to select some text, it mistakenly detects that I have swiped on that text. It takes this as a sign that I would like my words to be altered by Gemini, and so an unwanted dialog appears on my screen, which I must dismiss before continuing to write my message. This feature is displayed in the UI with a rather presumptuous label: “Improve.”

For the hell of it, I let Google try “improving” my writing a few times. The resulting text was neither meaningfully better nor worse than the original message. But, any semblance of voice was erased from each “improved” message. The writing wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either, and it clearly wasn’t mine. I never sent a message containing any of Google’s “improved” text.

Enough about shitty UX, that’s boring. You know what isn’t boring? Fraud! The summer of 2025 is when I found a bunch of computer science students trying to scam money out of investors by peddling bogus AI embedded development tools. They build a shiny website in React, a login system, perhaps a rudimentary payment processing interface, and a “demo” video where they ask a slapped-together Gemini frontend to describe its own “features.” In the most recent incarnation of this scam I’ve seen, the kids running the project didn’t even put their full names on the website. They know what they’re doing is wrong. I’m grateful that I’ve been able to help some smart folks keep their money out of dumb places this summer. That’s a bright spot, I guess.

The summer of 2025 is when nobody could resist the pissing contest over development tools. If I hear one more word about Claude, I’m going to become feral. I’m not opposed to changing my tools; in fact, my workflow has changed substantially over the years. I welcome tools that meaningfully improve the quality and efficiency of my work. Claude doesn’t. If Copilot is pair programming with a slightly dull junior-year intern, Claude is like pair programming with a slightly dull senior-year intern who thinks he’s the next Wozniak. I know what I want to write. If you can predict a word or two to eliminate some keystrokes, then great, I’ll press tab. Otherwise, please, please go away.

The summer of 2025 is when I received a terrible pull request from an engineer who I respect and admire. This PR was needlessly complex. Comically complex, for the task the code performed. The quality of the code was below that engineer’s standards. For someone who possesses the remarkable capacity to limit complexity, everything about this PR was out of character. Claude saved 5 minutes of that engineer’s time, and cost 15 minutes of mine.

I’m taking some steps to make sure the fall of 2025 will shape up differently. VS Code’s UX crimes don’t appear to be going anywhere, so I’m trying out a different editor. So far, I like it (as always, no AI tools were involved in the creation of this post). I’ve replaced GMail with K-9 Mail. I don’t have much to say about K-9 Mail, it’s just a normal email client with no surprises, which is exactly what I want from my email client. One problem even solved itself: in the week since I started writing this post, Samsung removed the stupid AI button from my copy/paste dialog.

I can’t fix the pissing contests, half-assed pull requests, and scams on my own. I’ll continue to avoid engaging in those behaviors myself, but I worry I’ll be subjected to them anyway. And so, it seems the frustrations are likely to continue.