I used to feel a weird pride writing software. Requirements came in, I’d stub things out in comments, carve methods out, fight SonarQube, slowly tame the mess. Shipping something felt like finishing a piece of furniture I’d actually built. I was a craftsman, an artiste!
Now I talk to robots.
“Break this apart and write tests.”
Copilot thinks for a few seconds, spits out the code, and I click approve. What used to take an hour now takes minutes. This is objectively great. And honestly… I like it!
But it feels different in a way I can’t fully articulate yet.
Coding used to feel like detective work. Googling, reading docs, building little test projects. There were lots of tiny wins. With AI, the tiny wins disappear. The system jumps straight to “done,” and I just supervise.
The thing I notice most is authorship. I used to recognize my fingerprints in code, my jackass quirks. Now the code feels like it came from a very competent intern that tucks in their shirts and “doesn’t eat carbs”.
It’s like going from hand-planing a cherrywood desk to watching a CNC machine pump out perfect copies. The result might be better. The relationship is different.
I’m not planning to reject AI. That would be dumb. But I am thinking about constraints, like manual-first refactors, AI strictly after I’ve solved it once, teaching to force myself back into fundamentals. But then again I am lazy, and AI is a lazy man’s dream!
I don’t think I lost the joy of coding. My prompts are killer, and I get excited to see what AI is going to come up with.
I think I lost the tactile sense of craft, and I’m not sure yet what replaces that.