The loss of coding

I never code by hand anymore. It's something I started learning when I was 11 and did for the rest of my life, until now.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not sad about it. Or maybe I am?

I remember sitting in my room with an old, underpowered gaming laptop, watching YouTube tutorials on how to make Minecraft in Java. It took me 13 episodes of the tutorial I was following to even see a cube world and be able to walk around in it. I barely understood how the code worked, but I had tons of fun anyway.

Games were a frequent pastime as a kid: StarCraft, Borderlands, Zelda and more. But somewhere along the way, programming games had become as fun as playing them, and I felt like I was actually productive doing it.

So I continued programming, wanting to be a game developer, until I watched Iron Man. That's the truth. That was the coolest shit I had ever seen. I ordered motors, breadboards and more, and started building stuff. But hardware never stuck with me. The AI and science part did, though.

I kept learning programming: C, C++, Java, Python, JavaScript, even a bit of Smalltalk. I still remember reading Fluent Python, a book that deep dives into the depths of Python, on a three-hour car ride to my grandparents.

I loved programming. Loved? When did I stop loving it? It stopped soon after Cursor came along. We were early users of Cursor at Incredible (then known as Norditech), and it made you so much faster. It was literally doing what we had been doing by hand with ChatGPT, and with that early version of Claude Opus that was only available through Anthropic's legacy Workbench: copy-pasting code into it, getting it to fix stuff, and copying it back.

That didn't make me stop loving it, but it did make me think less about the line-by-line code. I was the guy at the company who loved to write great code, and it only helped me do that. I wrote better code than ever before.

AI models kept getting stronger and stronger, and eventually I was not the one writing most of the code; AI was. I was more of a conductor, deciding where the pieces should go, and that was the beginning of me forgetting about my love of coding. I didn't do it anymore. We now had the capability to build much more than ever before, so I started looking only at the product and business side.

Today I don't write any of the code. AI has gotten to the point where it even tests the software autonomously, and I'm all for it. I love how productive we have become and what is now possible. But I did forget about coding.

Truth be told, I opened up VS Code one weekend to play around with writing Python again. That was dreadful. I stopped almost immediately. You have to think through every single line of code, when I could just open Cursor and tab my way through basic functions, not to mention Claude Code or Codex, which write massive programs fully on their own and test them as well.

But I don't think I lost my love for coding. Instead, I realized that what I had was a love for building, and that will never disappear.