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I'm not sure I understand... why not simply ignore AI and keep coding the way you always have? It's a bit like saying motorboats killed your passion for rowing.
i can continue to row as a hobby, but i've been very lucky in that my work has always been something i genuinely enjoyed. now that it's become something that's actively burning me out, it's far harder to find time for hobbies and interests.
I’ve made the choice to not go full bore into AI as a result. I still use it to aid search or ask questions, but full on agentic coding isn’t for me, at least not for the projects I actually care about and want/need to support long-term.
> it depends on what you enjoy: the journey or the destination This has been 100% my experience. I enjoy the puzzle solving and the general joy of organizing and pulling things together. I could really care less about the end result to meet some business need. The fun part is in the building, it's in the understanding, the growth of me . I have coworkers who get itchy when they don't see their work on production, and…
> This has been 100% my experience. I enjoy the puzzle solving and the general joy of organizing and pulling things together. I could really care less about the end result to meet some business need. The fun part is in the building, it's in the understanding, the growth of me. Quite a few of the projects I always wanted to do have components or dependencies I really don't want to do. And as a result, I never did them…
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The problem is that since AI employers now expect developers to write code faster. Similar to when IDEs and autocomplete became common.
It's not hard to pick holes in this approach by showing the code being generated is flawed. Also, code quality is different from code velocity, better to write 10 lines that more accurately describes functionality than 50.
That is hard if you are working in Notepad and have to write your own class import statements and write your own Maven POM or Gradle file. It’s a lot quicker in an IDE with autocomplete and auto-generated Maven POMs. And with AI it’s even faster but at the risk of lower code maintainability.
I'm not sure I understand... why not simply ignore AI and keep coding the way you always have? It's a bit like saying motorboats killed your passion for rowing.
But to push the analogy a bit. If you are rowing on a lake with motorboats, it is a totally different experience. Noisy, constant wake. We are part of an ecosystem, not isolated. Growing up, the lakes in New England were filled with sailboats. There were sailing races. Now, its entirely pontoon boats. Not a sailboat to be found.
14 years ago hearing Dan Pink talk on motivation ( https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc ) catalyzed the decision to change jobs. One of the three motivators he mentions is mastery. And cites examples of why people waste hours with no pay learning to play instruments and other hobbies in their discretionary time. This has been very true for me as a coder. That said, I enjoy the pursuit of mastery as a programmer less than I u…
> mastering the agentic process It would have been worth it if the frontier models were open weight. Right now, if you invest time in mastering tools like Claude Code or Google’s Antigravity, there is no guarantee that you won’t be removed from their ecosystems for any reason, which would make your efforts and skills useless.
IME, the tools are largely interchangeable. They are all slightly different, but the basics of prompting and the jaggedness of the frontier is more or less the same across all of them.
Switching from codex to claude code is orders of magnitude simpler than switching from c# to java or emacs to vim.
I'm not sure I understand... why not simply ignore AI and keep coding the way you always have? It's a bit like saying motorboats killed your passion for rowing.
I am a bit, but not much, younger than 60 and have been coding since Apple II days.
These tools are pretty close to HAL 9000 so of course GIGO as always has been the case with computer tech.
Almost everything is in Go except an image fingerprinting api server written in Swift. The most USEFUL thing I’ve written is a Go based APFS monitor that will help you not overfill your SSD and get pained into corner by Time Machine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not hard to pick holes in this approach by showing the code being generated is flawed. Also, code quality is different from code velocity, better to write 10 lines that more accurately describes functionality than 50.
PMs now expect that you can create a Java micro service that does basic REST/CRUD from a database and get it into production in a total of two days. That is hard if you are working in Notepad and have to write your own class import statements and write your own Maven POM or Gradle file. It’s a lot quicker in an IDE with autocomplete and auto-generated Maven POMs. And with AI it’s even faster but at the risk of lower…
Have you heard of malicious compliance? Give the PMs what they ask for, then show them how what they've asked for is flawed. Your job as an engineer is not to just take orders blindly, it's to push for a better engineered solution. It's really not hard to show that what these PMs are asking for is stupid.