Code speed or not, people talk about how coding agents have taken away their passion. I've been reflecting on that for quite some time now and quite honestly, I don't miss a single thing.
My passion has always been building something, but my building has always been hindered by a myriad of small paper cuts -- it's just what technology is and, if we are being honest, always has been. It's not being able to recall an exact syntax or a function name for something I know exists, it's frantically searching for whether something I need exists at all and if so, in anything I'm using alredy, it's a CI build not doing the simplest thing after working for months, it's a TypeScript error with a new library not wanting to compile until I change a dozen of things in tsconfig.json, it's my editor deciding not to update diagnostics today at any cost, it's deprecated syntax, it's documentation not describing what functions do and functions not working like the documentation describes them, it's hunting after weird bugs in fourth- and fifth-party code triggered exactly by four people in the world, one of them being me right now.
This list goes on and on and all of those things are great when I finally manage to solve the problems. However, in terms of building things, I find it extremely liberating to have a literal assistant capable of sorting this shit out in seconds or minutes instead of me banging my head against the wall the whole night. Code writing speed wasn't my problem, but I appreciate when I can think about the code as the whole and change it as a whole in an instant. My time spent on building something hasn't changed much in absolute terms, but in the same spent time I will have taken a dozen detours, experimented with alternatives and provided enough context to tell anyone who asks why something is built this way and not another.
My passion has always been building something, but my building has always been hindered by a myriad of small paper cuts -- it's just what technology is and, if we are being honest, always has been. It's not being able to recall an exact syntax or a function name for something I know exists, it's frantically searching for whether something I need exists at all and if so, in anything I'm using alredy, it's a CI build not doing the simplest thing after working for months, it's a TypeScript error with a new library not wanting to compile until I change a dozen of things in tsconfig.json, it's my editor deciding not to update diagnostics today at any cost, it's deprecated syntax, it's documentation not describing what functions do and functions not working like the documentation describes them, it's hunting after weird bugs in fourth- and fifth-party code triggered exactly by four people in the world, one of them being me right now.
This list goes on and on and all of those things are great when I finally manage to solve the problems. However, in terms of building things, I find it extremely liberating to have a literal assistant capable of sorting this shit out in seconds or minutes instead of me banging my head against the wall the whole night. Code writing speed wasn't my problem, but I appreciate when I can think about the code as the whole and change it as a whole in an instant. My time spent on building something hasn't changed much in absolute terms, but in the same spent time I will have taken a dozen detours, experimented with alternatives and provided enough context to tell anyone who asks why something is built this way and not another.