i used to stay up till late at night debugging things nobody asked me to fix and i do not do that anymore.
i had a computer at home from class one and it was kind of magical even though i had no clue what i was doing and i would just open things and click around and break random stuff for no reason. sometimes after exams i would take the question paper and type the whole thing out again in word and print it and just sit there playing with it and it made zero sense and i loved it.
i got on the internet pretty early too and joined twitter when i was around ten and back then it felt lighter and people were just posting things. now everything feels like it is trying to get something out of you and half of it is so manufactured that everyone is optimizing for views instead of saying anything real and it is a different vibe entirely.
by class four i had started messing with games and nothing serious just poking around trying to change things sometimes for more coins or diamonds and sometimes just to see if i could break something and i tried to get into networks i definitely should not have been trying to access and it was not deep thinking it was just curiosity and a bit of mischief.
the first time i actually tried to build something was in class eight when a friend spammed my whatsapp at midnight on my birthday and i wanted to do the same to someone else but i could not stay up till midnight so i thought okay maybe i can automate this and i had no idea how and my english was not great so even reading technical stuff was rough and i would read something and not fully get it and try anyway and fail and go again. when it finally worked and the messages went out exactly the way i planned that feeling was insane and felt like god and i am not even joking and it sounds small now but it felt massive then.
after that i drifted away from programming for a while because class twelve and exams and all the chaos that came with it and things were not great for a bit and then college and i picked it back up and the fun was still there and it changed sure but it never really went away.
then somewhere in the last year something shifted and nothing dramatic just a slow change you only notice after it has already happened and programming stopped feeling like mine.
the engine that quietly dies
there is this thing in psychology called intrinsic motivation where you do something because the doing itself feels good and not because of what you get out of it and there is research that says the moment you start rewarding someone for the thing they already loved the love quietly dies because you have replaced the internal engine with an external one and the internal one just shuts off and i think that is part of what is happening to me.
programming used to have this texture and that is the only word i can think of for it because you would sit with a problem and it would push back against you and you had to actually think and not perform thinking but actually sit there confused and uncomfortable and slowly work your way toward something and when you got there it felt like something like your brain had actually done a thing. there is also this thing called flow which is the state where you are completely absorbed in something that is just hard enough to be interesting and surgeons get it and rock climbers get it and chess players get it and programmers used to have it constantly. now i hit a problem and before i can even understand what the problem actually is claude has already spit out a solution and sometimes it is right and often it is close enough and i accept it and move on and there is this weird hollow feeling where the satisfaction should be sitting.
when i bring this up with other people the response is always split where half of them get exactly what i am saying and the other half think i am being nostalgic and dumb like complaining that power steering made driving less fun and look they are not entirely wrong because a lot of what i am calling the fun of programming was also just suffering and yak shaving and chasing your own tail for hours because you missed a semicolon and nobody should pine for that but there is something in the middle that we are losing and we do not have great language for it yet.
the friction was the point
heidegger of all people said something useful here when he talked about two ways of engaging with a tool. ready-to-hand is when the tool is so natural it just disappears so you are not thinking about the hammer you are thinking about the nail and present-at-hand is when the tool breaks or resists you and suddenly you are aware of it as a thing separate from you and the weird thing is that the second mode is where understanding actually lives because when a tool resists you you learn something about the tool and about the problem and about yourself. ai has made everything too ready-to-hand too fast and the friction is gone and with it a lot of the learning.
a few months ago i was building a rate limiter and it was not trivial but not rocket science either and old me would have sat with it for a bit and sketched something out and hit a wall with token bucket versus sliding window and read some stuff and made a wrong choice and backed up and eventually landed somewhere with a real sense of why. instead i described the problem to an ai and got a working implementation in two minutes and reviewed it and it looked fine and i shipped it and if you ask me today to explain every decision in that code i would be way slower than i should be because i did not earn it i received it. there is a book called shop class as soulcraft by matthew crawford about why working with your hands matters and his whole point is that manual work forces you into a real relationship with reality where things either work or they do not and the world pushes back and the pushing back is not annoying it is the whole point because it is what makes you competent and what makes you feel like a person who can actually do things and i think he was describing programming too and just did not know it.
people also value things more when they have built them even if what they built is objectively worse than what they could have bought because the effort went in and the effort becomes part of the thing and your struggle is baked into it. when ai writes your code that whole thing inverts because you did not build it you watched someone build it and said yeah sure looks fine and it works but it does not feel like yours because it is not and the emotional ownership is gone and that ownership was doing a lot of quiet work nobody ever acknowledged.
the new class system
i am not trying to write a back in my day post here because ai tools are genuinely useful and i use them and i will keep using them for boilerplate and for writing tests i would otherwise skip and for looking up that one api parameter i can never remember and that stuff is real value. but i notice i reach for them now even when i do not need to even when the problem is small and interesting and i could figure it out myself in twenty minutes and i reach because it is faster and because there is always something else to do and i am trading the experience of thinking for the output of thinking and those are not the same trade. the fast food thing is overused but it fits because if you eat fast food every meal your palate atrophies and you forget what food is even supposed to feel like.
there is also this thing nobody likes to say out loud which is that ai is creating a new kind of discrimination in software engineering and it is not really about skill anymore it is about access because an average dev with frontier models can run circles around a skilled engineer who does not have them and i have seen it happen and i have been on both sides of it. the kid with claude max and cursor and a fast laptop is shipping faster than someone twice as good who is stuck on a free tier and a bad connection and ai is not amplifying talent it is amplifying who already had resources to begin with and the thing they sold as a great equalizer is quietly turning into a paywall and the gap gets wider every month and we just keep pretending it is meritocracy.
and there is a thing happening at the community level that bothers me even more than any of this individual stuff because a lot of the best learning in programming used to happen through struggle that was semi-public on stack overflow before it became a bureaucracy and on irc channels and on forum threads where someone posted a problem and people actually dug in and the shared difficulty was also shared growth and you would watch someone wrestle with something and understand the problem better just from watching them fight it. now everyone just asks the ai privately and the struggle is invisible and the insight disappears and nobody learns from watching someone else figure it out because nobody sees the figuring out anymore and we are losing the apprenticeship layer of the craft and i do not think we have reckoned with what that actually costs yet.
a loss worth naming
i still love programming and that is the thing because it is not that i hate what it has become it is that i miss what it was and i am not sure the new version has an equivalent of that late night feeling where the problem finally cracked open and you understood it and the world was quiet and you were the only person awake and it all just made sense.
maybe that feeling was never the point and maybe shipping working software was always the point and maybe i was just romanticizing the suffering but i do not think so because i think the struggle was load-bearing and we removed it thinking it was just friction and we ended up removing something else along with it and now we are slowly noticing the gap.
i do not have a solution and i am not even sure this is a problem that has one and it might just be a loss and a real one and the kind you name and sit with rather than fix because the craft changed and some of what made it a craft is gone now and that is worth saying out loud even if it does not go anywhere.