There was a time you put your phone down, opened your laptop, picked up your headset, and you walked into a different world, just like Alice in Wonderland. You drowned in code, hours and hours away from all the noises outside. It was your happy place; it was where you could distract yourself from life.
Today
Today things are a little different from the past. Now you have a coding agent on your laptop. Whatever you want to do, even a simple email, you just tell him what you want, and with a little correction he does it, and he does it well, even way better than you. But what’s the problem?
The Problem
Well, the problem is not something people can see; it’s inside your mind. You used to feel valuable. You used to trick your mind, even for a few hours, away from your problems, and now what? What you do all day is to click Enter for your AI agent to continue working. It’s like your role has changed, and you never wanted this. No more distraction, no more fun.
I don’t know, maybe I was enjoying coding the wrong way. The more I go, the less I enjoy doing the job that I love.
How about you? How are your days coding? How do you escape from the real world now?
Top comments (19)
I’d take issue with the idea that you can "just write an email"—I have to admit, I’ve never been able to get comfortable with emails. To me, it’s an overly complicated and almost completely opaque communication channel. Corporate email is the worst; since I’m outsourced to another company as a developer, I end up with two separate corporate email addresses. On top of that, my primary email account is only accessible through an Outlook-like interface running inside a virtual Linux environment within a web browser. Getting to it is so painfully slow that I’m lucky if I check it once a month—and even then, I need two coffees just to muster the energy to get there.
So, by separating email from the source of our happiness—which, for me, is programming—I’ve found a space that is so fundamentally clean and uncluttered that it allows us to truly tune out real-world problems. I still love programming; and while it’s true that AI models—which are getting more powerful by the month—are handling these tasks with increasing confidence, I still view programming as a vital component of human knowledge. So, if a major collapse were to happen, it would be worth preserving not just the skills needed for survival, but also the ability to program—starting from the very basics, where, given a processor, we could build up a programming language from scratch. Or consider simple matters, such as the desire to further develop our existing programming languages—not to make them easier for AI to understand, but to refine our own skills and pass that knowledge on to future generations.
My related articles:
mordorjs the 1D programming language
TS+|> ----> JS/TS/TSX terminal where you get a help with coding
This 2 post also try to lead on this road!
Thank you so much for your words and suggestions🙏🏻
@highflyer910 I just pinged you. Please do not say anything. I just pinged you, to show you what is said in the comment I'm replying to. Just that. It is quite on the spot!
As someone who just started learning a few years ago, I sometimes feel defeated in my ventures. I started learning networking and security to keep my mind sharp! Lots of challenges there! Ai hasn't quite taken that over yet. 😅
Yeah, same as you I am learning different things now but just missed the days I was drowning in code🙂
I can really relate to this, even though I genuinely enjoy using AI in my development workflow. I think there's something we've lost a little bit of along the way, and it's not necessarily the coding itself. It's that feeling of getting completely absorbed in a problem, losing track of time, and finally figuring something out on your own.
I use AI coding tools quite often, and I have realized that in some cases I manage to implement a whole feature, and I feel less satisfied from doing that than I would if I had spent two hours struggling with something much smaller. The work is done, and yet the whole experience is quite different.
Actually, I have been reflecting on that topic a little bit myself lately, especially on how convenient the use of AI is when it comes to ignoring the part of development process in which the most interesting and useful learning takes place.
But I don't think that feeling has to be gone for good. I have been trying to become more deliberate about choosing the moments for using AI versus the moments for sitting down, experimenting, and solving issues by myself. And I realized that problems do not always have to be solved as soon as possible and every little thing does not have to be delegated to an agent.
I think sometimes we forget that the problem-solving was a huge part of why we fell in love with coding in the first place. And I don't want to lose that part of it either.
Really thoughtful post.
Exactly! Thank you so much.
"You used to feel valuable." That's the real line in this post, more than the AI part. Your subconscious decides what you notice through a filter called the RAS. For years coding was the one room where it stopped scanning for problems, so your calm and your sense of worth both got wired to the act of writing code. Take the writing away and the filter does what it was trained to do. It flags the change as a loss and tells you you're worth less now. You weren't enjoying coding the wrong way. You just had one room doing all the work.
On your question, I'd rethink the escape itself. If code was the only place your brain went quiet, the quiet was always yours, and code was just the room where you allowed it. So practice finding it in rooms that aren't a screen. Genuine compliment to a stranger. When that is easy, add a bit of conversation. Does not matter how it lands. The action is the win. Honest question, and I think a lot of people feel it.
Wow, every word of yours was amazing, thanks!
Glad it landed, Ali. Try the compliment rep once this week and just notice what your brain does with it afterward.
I want achievement and honor, but I also want to help others.
Perhaps it’s because we’ll starve if we don’t work—or frozen to death, selfless joy has faded a long time ago. Every day is a rush.
I’m still trying to figure out how to find happiness by doing things that can help, just like when I was a kid.
AI is strange—we’re supposed to boost productivity, but when you need a tool to help, you still end up searching for ages.
So true. We’re all rushing, but helping others might still be our way back to that childhood joy. Thanks for sharing this.
I still write most of my code by hand. I only go to AI if I'm stuck or I want to quickly generate a part of my code that will save me some time. I am trying to not lose my coding skills by having AI do it all for me.
The 'click Enter to continue' detail sounds like a change in attention as much as a change in who writes the code. A task can finish faster while the session feels worse if it becomes a series of waits and approval prompts. I'd be curious whether giving the agent one bounded task and leaving it alone feels different from supervising every step. That could help separate missing the act of coding from missing an uninterrupted stretch of concentration.
Exactly, thank you!
Yip, I hit that existential crisis yesterday, when I ran the numbers and realized that developer as a career just isnt feasible anymore. Software in general isnt feasible anymore. When you go into a career, you want to have some sort of job security right? Well that's what VHS thought till DVD came along... We're replaced, simple as that. 32gb of ram, 8gb vram gpu, you load Qwen 3.6 35b A3B and it does anything and everything better than you can, it costs as much as your dev rig costs to run, except without you sitting at it. That's how cheap we've become, because a business owner doesnt need us anymore to implement for them, they just need a weekend and a PC, or $20 subscription and a laptop...
That's really sad, I totally agree with you.
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