The good old days...

Remember the good old days when you'd sit down, open your editor, put on some music and write code?

Maybe you'd copy from StackOverflow every now and then, but for the most part, it was you, hands on keyboard, writing every line of code.

I miss those days. Being able to play some rock music, lock in and spend hours working on whatever I was building, only to look at the clock later and realise that hours had passed without me noticing.

That was a good day! That was the sort of day where I felt I had put in a good effort and earnt my money.

But today, things look different.

Instead of being hands on keyboard writing code, I'm hands on keyboard (or mouth to mic) talking to AI.

I'll give it some instructions, wait for it to do its thing, review its output, provide feedback, and repeat... tens of times a day. Sometimes it'll take ten seconds to come back, other times, ten minutes.

I've found these gaps are awful for my concentration. Just today I watched a 22-minute YouTube video while waiting on my agents to finish their tasks. I probably opened Twitter 10/15 times today as well.

I'll get so caught up in a video or looking through my feed that I don't even realise my agents have finished what they're doing and are waiting on me for next steps.

Sure, I might be more productive overall, but I'm certainly nowhere near as focused as I used to be.

I've noticed I can't listen to music while working with AI.

When I was writing code by hand, I had things mostly mapped out in my head, it was go time.

But with AI, I'm constantly reading its output, thinking/checking, then writing my next prompt. It's a different kind of concentration. I can't listen to music at the same time.

I haven't looked, but if you were to check my Last.fm profile, you'd probably find that I've listened to way less music this year vs last. (yes, I track my music listening habits. Why don't you?)

I think that's the part I miss the most. Not necessarily the act of typing out code, but being able to lock in and get in "the zone" without constant context-switching or the need to occupy myself between tasks.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against AI. I'm far from it.

It's incredibly useful, particularly for small teams and solo developers (both categories I fall into myself).

It allows me to ship much faster than before, and build side projects I wouldn't have dreamed of tackling a few years ago. There's no denying it has massive benefits.

Even today, I shipped several PRs touching hundreds of files, in the process of refactoring a large codebase. PRs I started and finished in a single day.

There's legitimately no way I could have done this pre-AI. It would have probably taken me two or three days at a minimum, which is insane to think about.

I certainly don't want to give that up.

But on the other hand, am I actually enjoying the process as much as I used to? I don't think I am.

There's a huge difference between enjoying the result of building something and enjoying the process of building it.

I still love seeing things I've built come together but increasingly I feel like I'm a manager, not someone who's in the weeds - the part that got me hooked in the first place.

Sure, I guess I could go back to writing code by hand. No one's actually forcing me to use AI, but it's hard when you know an agent could do the same thing in a fraction of the time. It becomes hard to justify.

There's a small part of me that hopes this whole AI thing turns out to be one big fad. Maybe the labs run out of money or everyone gets priced out.

I think that's incredibly unlikely though and probably a stupid thing for me to even say given how much I benefit from AI day-to-day.

It just makes me sad that the way I used to enjoy programming might be gone for good.

I'm only 23. I've been programming professionally for just over six years. I got into it because it was fun. I enjoyed building things, figuring stuff out and tinkering away on projects. That hobby turned into my career and I'm fortunate enough to do something I enjoy.

I never expected to be thinking the "good old days" were behind me so soon.