For the final quarter century, I’ve skilled the “pastime of programming” because the present of a four-way win. That means that practising the artwork of programming created concord throughout 4 main features of my life: work, residence, group, and self. This has been nothing lower than miraculous with regard to my high quality of life. However this window of unfettered pleasure is closing within the age of AI (particularly with agentic programming). And it has been troublesome for me to reorient myself to this new actuality.
I do not need hand-coding to go away as a result of I take pleasure in it. I like the issue fixing of it. I like taking a look at code and seeing its form and the best way it reads and the best way it performs properly — or rudely — with a broader structure. I like to strive new syntax kinds to see how they make me really feel. I like to strive one thing “too intelligent”; after which I like to spend the subsequent 3 days hating myself for being too intelligent earlier than I refactor again to one thing extra “apparent”. I like to really feel the ache of a poor selection for days or months or years earlier than I lastly — lastly — work out the best way to salve that ache with a brand new technique or sample.
I like each side of coding. None of it looks like “grunt work” to me as a result of each line of code that must be written is a selection; and each line of code that will get written is a lesson to be realized — an funding in my future understanding of how functions match collectively.
And as a lot pleasure as this “pastime” has introduced me personally, it is also been an enormous win skilled as a result of there’s — or, a minimum of, there was — a lot direct transference to my each day work. All of the little experiments that I did would finally pay again dividends. Generally instantly. Generally in just a few years. However by no means did any of it ever really feel wasteful.
That is now not true. In a world the place AI generates the code, my syntax explorations merely do not matter. My digging into the sting instances of a language or a framework have develop into irrelevant. My want to develop “style” round code methodologies and organizational methods has develop into vestigial.
Not less than it has professionally.
However not personally. When it comes to exercising my mind and giving myself a second of zen and a supply of pleasure, coding continues to be a high-value exercise. Simply in a a lot narrower sense. Coding is now not the four-way win that it as soon as was — it is now develop into my model of gardening. Or of meditating. Or of doing the crossword puzzle. Or of portray. It’s a self-care luxurious that I can indulge when I’ve some free time.
Which isn’t to say that I will not use agentic programming inside my hobbyist endeavors — it is solely that I am going to use such strategies in a capability that also brings me pleasure. It is my pastime and I get to make the principles.
And who is aware of, possibly there’ll nonetheless be some cross-over professionally. However it is going to be a contented accident now and never an expectation.
It has been difficult for me to reach at this realization. For the previous 8 months, I’ve puzzled how I can nonetheless justify my hand-writing code. However now that it is my pastime, not my occupation, I haven’t got to justify any of it to anybody however myself. And I am hoping that this readability will carry me a brand new kind of pleasure.
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