i miss coding :(

Every time there's a new feature to be made, a new sidequest to be undertaken, I used to find myself staring blankly at the new file I just created, be it feature1.tsx or server.js in case of a new project, and plan out everything before I started off with my import statements.

But there was something surreal, even if the LOC/day was probably 1/100th of what it is right now, but the feel of writing the return statements and the middlewares and feeling the ounce of productive dopamine that used to make days worth living are now replaced with staring at an agent screen wondering if I should spin up another one just to tackle something else or go grab something to eat while the current swarm of agents are done, 10s of thousands of LOC only to feel a fraction of the joy/dopamine I felt earlier with probably 300% more AI slop that I will be refactoring later tonight. Is this all really worth it?

The Rebellion

Fuck this shit, I said.

I'll code it out myself, I said.

The Reality

And I did actually, I tried, but it's the same as fighting against the current, you will be able to fight for a hot minute until you are blown miles away.

In my experience, the code feels better when I write more of it myself, and I definitely enjoy the job again. But can you fight against the deadline of 3 features in half a day, 5000 lines refactored within a lunch break or multi-week feature pushes being done over the weekend with jokes flying off in the Slack channels.

The Real Question

The question is no longer of how much bad code can u let the AI write, but how much slop till you no longer identify your own codebase and are forced to spend a night refactoring and stripping away so much tokens used to write those lines that you might as well just have hired 3 interns to do it better for you.

The question becomes is it worth spending 3 weeks polishing a feature or embracing the "ship fast, fix faster" mindset in all of its glory and giving in to it.

The Noise

I hear that it's over for my job, in my line of work more times than I hear birds chirping in the morning, yet here we are.

Some people say the job is now more about architecture and efficiently planning. Maybe that genuinely works for them. For me, nothing beats the dopamine hit from figuring out a bug that's been killing you, only to realize it's something silly rather than spamming "fix it" at an agent like cheap labour.

The Acceptance

This ain't a rant about something that we should bring back or something that's wrong with the society, it's just part of the change, something u can't fight but u can only embrace while missing what once used to be.

What Helps

Personally I have gotten used to it now, it's not as good but not as bad as it initially seemed, try to get involved in the code as much as u can or ig it's just a me thing, just get involved try to find the bugs before hitting send on another prompt, read out the plans before just hitting build, and probably learn about system designs and shi to guide the agent better.

Another tip: the more u hate agents and the more u realize how flawed they are, the better u work with them, the better u guide them, the better u find shit before it hits u with double your salary worth of prod bills.

Some skills are truly timeless, learn those, don't let the agent lead you into bankruptcy and happy coding, or whatever's left of it anymore. 3

If you want the more operational side of this rant, I wrote about what background agents are actually good and bad at, and furnace is where I keep poking at the coding-agent side directly.