For many years, software development offered me a cover against the parts of the job that were psychologically draining. Well-known code patterns took a predictable amount of time, offering shelter from the usual annoyance. “John can’t do the PM training this week, he has a very hard deliverable for XXX.” “I’ve been so busy this sprint, I didn’t have time to XXX.” There was always another hard technical problem to work on, and sometimes those problems really were hard. But they also gave me a convenient excuse to avoid the things I found more draining.
I’m an introvert, and coding offered me the solace of donning headphones, keeping my head down, and being undisturbable. I could spend hours on a complicated problem and end the day with something tangible to point to. The code was evidence that I had been productive. It was also camouflage.
That camouflage is getting harder to maintain.
With AI-assisted engineering, I’m finding myself with plenty of time on my hands. There is only so much gold-plating I can do before I have to throw up my hands and announce, “That feature was done in record time!” Recently, I used AI to create a full CRUD database integration, including a lookup control, in about two days. Without Copilot, that would have been a good week’s work for me.
The interesting part wasn’t that AI saved me five days. It was that I suddenly had five days that needed to be filled with something else.
So I researched chatbot platforms. I had to figure out whether they could deal with a client’s 500-page PDFs and very intricate, non-tabular Excel spreadsheets. This was important work, but I had a hard time really sinking into it. It wasn’t code.
That bothered me more than it had any right to.
For most of my career, I knew who I was at work. I was the guy who could take a complicated technical problem, disappear into it for a while, and come back with an answer. I could demonstrate my value through the thing I produced, and I could do it without being particularly social. If I was busy solving a hard problem, nobody questioned whether I was being productive.
That identity had real advantages for an introvert.
It also meant that some of the things I considered interruptions to the “real work” were actually parts of the job I had learned to avoid. Talking to the third-party developer about an integration. Finishing the documentation. Getting the testing done before the last minute. Sitting through another discussion about requirements. Admitting that I didn’t understand something yet. Coding was not always an excuse, but it was a very good one.
Now the ratio has flipped. What used to be ten percent of my job is becoming ninety percent of it. And from where I’m sitting, it feels like ninety percent interruptions.
That is probably the wrong way to describe it. The meetings aren’t interruptions. The collaboration isn’t an interruption. The research isn’t an interruption. The judgment isn’t an interruption. They are the job.
But psychologically, I spent a career learning to experience them as interruptions to my coding.
That is a much harder habit to unlearn than learning to prompt an AI.