I lost an entire weekend because of an expired token
It was Friday evening. I was implementing refresh tokens in a .NET project and everything seemed to be going well. Saturday morning, in staging: 401 Unauthorized in a loop. I asked ChatGPT. It gave me a nice, clean answer, with well-formatted code. It didn’t work. I asked again, with more context. Another nice answer. Still didn’t work.
The problem was an edge case in the middleware order — something no language model could "see" because it wasn’t in its training set. It was in my stacktrace, at 2 AM, after three coffees.
That weekend gave me the idea for this article.
Everyone writes about AI. No one writes about what AI does poorly.
The internet is full of articles generated in 30 seconds about "how to use ChatGPT as a developer." They are nice, well-structured, and completely useless when you are in production with a bug that doesn’t follow the official documentation.
AI is essentially a prediction engine trained on what has already been written. That means it excels at common problems and fails exactly where you need help the most: unusual situations, library combinations, bugs that appear only in your specific context.
A technical blog written by a person who has lived the problem is exactly the opposite: useless for generic questions, but invaluable for someone facing the same edge case at 3 AM.
You don’t write for algorithms. You write for the person who will encounter the same bug in 6 months.
It could be a colleague. It could be a stranger from another country. Most likely, it’s you.
I have technical blogs in my bookmarks that I’ve read three times in three different years, every time I ran into the same problem and forgot how I solved it the first time. The author of that article didn’t know they were writing for me. But they documented exactly what they experienced, with their context, their errors, their opinionated solution — and that made it repeatedly useful.
This is a type of value that no automatically generated content can produce: lived experience, honestly documented.
"Personal branding" is an ugly term for something simple: proof that you know what you’re doing
When a client or employer looks you up online, they don’t want to see a polished LinkedIn profile. They want to see how you think. An article where you explain why you chose Event Sourcing instead of simple CRUD, with your arguments, with consciously accepted compromises — that says more about you than any CV.
Google has adjusted its algorithms precisely in this direction: E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. It no longer rewards volume, but the footprint left by someone who was there and solved the problem.
In a world where everyone can generate content in seconds, rarity is no longer information. Rarity is authentic perspective.
What a surviving article looks like
Not through SEO tricks. Through a few simple principles:
Document the failure, not just the solution. "I tried X, it didn’t work because of Y, then I tried Z and it worked" is infinitely more useful than "here’s how to do Z."
Have an opinion and state it directly. If a library has serious production issues, say it. AI can’t do that — it’s trained to be neutral. You are not obliged.
Write as if you’re explaining to a colleague, not as if you’re teaching a course. A conversational tone, with real context, is what distinguishes a read article from one that is scanned and closed.
Visualize what is hard to explain in text. A custom diagram of an authentication flow or a multi-tenant architecture communicates in 10 seconds what would take 3 paragraphs to describe.
Conclusion: Don’t keep a blog for Google. Keep it for yourself.
The process of writing a technical article forces you to truly understand what you implemented. You can’t explain an authorization flow if you haven’t fully digested it. The blog becomes an external library of your mind — documented solutions, argued decisions, failures you learned from.
That someone else will read it and bring you clients or opportunities — that’s the bonus. Not the starting point.
In an era where synthetic content is produced infinitely, a blog written by a person who has lived the problems they write about is not a nostalgic hobby. It’s a competitive advantage.
