Ask HN: Why aren't you coding?

I'm stroking my beard and thinking hard about a problem, trying to sink back into some kind of productivity about being interrupted 3 times in the last 10 mins. Probably stretching my back, feeling the tiredness in my shoulders, noticing my coffee has gone cold, thinking about the next cup; with an added sense of regrets for the wasted time and gut wrenching sadness about how fast I used to be at programming.

But honestly the fact is the sheer complexity of the problems I'm looking at requires so much thinking. That complexity wasn't there in the older days. There were also a lot less people involved in a project and that causes added complexity, in fact, exponential complexity to most changes in code, since code has become product.

Code is now of biblical importance. In the olden days, it was about getting things done. Today, you write code that could make or break the company. People judge you on 5 lines you've written 6 months ago within thousands of other lines; the more experienced you are, the more ways you can implement something, with many consequences compounded by who's going to use it and how within the next 5 years.

I was in a similar spot, except with the addition that I gave up on installing a Linux VM/WSL because my gaming laptop came with Windows 10 Home (which doesn't support Hyper-V) and I didn't want to shell out $100. However, recently I gave it another shot, as WSL2 apparently works just fine on Windows 10 Home, and I was surprised how easy it was to set up. Took me less than an hour to get WSL2 set up and hooked into VSCode with all my preferred settings. I recommend giving it a shot next time you have some inspiration.

I take you'd better read an honest answer about what makes people avoid positions where there's much coding in favor of others rather than some joke or anecdote about why I'm not coding right now.

Coding has the seed of burnout. Not everybody ends up burning. Most people control it. Some people build barriers to contain it. Some people develop intrincate kinds of neurosis. Some people use drugs. Some blows up.

Dealing with machines is frustrating. Dealing with humans too, but machines are more difficult to hate. The printer scene in Office Space is hillarious just because that.

Because I'm designing

It's possible the question is meant as "in the context of wanting to code and having something to code, what is impeding your desire and goal to code at the moment?".