I don’t miss not writing code

Five years ago, I was so burnt out, I didn’t think I had a future being a software engineer.

Five years ago, I thought I couldn’t cut it. I didn’t have the chops. I couldn’t keep up. Coding was not fun. I began to wonder if it ever was fun.

One of the arguments against using AI to write your code is that it takes the fun out of coding. But the fun part for me wasn’t the coding part. And as I continue to build new stuff with the help of Claude Code it’s become more clear to me that it was the building part that was the fun part.

This isn’t a new idea. A recent TechDirt post shares this sentiment. Hell, I said basically same thing as that post a year ago when I was talking about making the web weird again. The web (and software) can be very weird when we’re all building little bespoke mini-apps or tools for ourselves to solve our own problems. That’s basically what I’ve been doing with WordPress plugins for 20 years.

Being the one that actually types the functions with my fingers, for me, wasn’t the rewarding part. Using — or watching other people use — the stuff I built was. Claude can write code faster, and arguably better, than I can. A year ago, that was not true. But it is true today. That doesn’t have to be a death knell. Because what I find myself doing is still all the planning, direction, testing, and roadmapping that would still have been part of the development process without actually banging my head on my keyboard trying to figure out how to get stuff to work.

I realize that this is not everyone’s experience. And that’s okay. I truly admire folks who take a craftsperson’s approach to software development. But that’s not me, and I don’t think it was ever me. I’ve always been developer-by-proxy. Clever enough to get into the guts of stuff and understand how it works, product- and user-focused enough to think about user experience and how stuff gets used, but maybe not savvy enough to always build the best implementation of the thing. I benefited from mentors and team members and knew what I was good at and what I was not good at.

I’m not sad about not writing code. I would be more sad if it meant I couldn’t build stuff. On the contrary, I have been building a lot of stuff since the beginning of the year, and it’s a lot more polished than the majority of what I’ve written in the past. I still worry about what the next generation of coders actually learns and how they need to operate, but I think the skills that need to be developed are going to increasingly be curiosity and prompt engineering as we move toward a future where the interaction between human and software is separated by a layer of LLMs and coding agents.