The Joy Was Never in the Typing

A lot of people are mourning the craft right now. AI made building boring, they say - the agent does the typing, and the joy drained out of it. I keep reading this, and I feel the exact opposite. I enjoy building more than I ever have.

Here's the thing I only understood recently. It was never about the typing. I genuinely enjoyed writing the code by hand for twenty-five years - but I had nothing to compare it to. I'd never tasted the alternative. Then the best models made not-typing real, and I finally felt the difference. The joy I thought lived in the keystrokes was somewhere else the whole time. The typing was just the toll I paid to get there.

Every builder knows a particular small happiness: you're about to hand-write some gnarly bit of logic, and instead you find the package that already does it - the right npm or nuget, clean and tested - and you drop it in, and your project gets better and smaller at the same time. Nobody has ever called that a loss of craft. It's a gift. Now picture an infinite tap of that. A perfect, bespoke package poured out for exactly the problem in front of you, the moment you need it. That is what this is.

AI isn't the end of building. It's an infinite tap of perfect packages, poured out the moment you need them.

And none of this is new - it's the oldest move in software. We have always stood on shoulders. Someone wrote the compiler so I'd never touch assembly. Someone wrote the language, the runtime, the libraries I lean on without a second thought. Linus Torvalds put it perfectly when people started bragging that AI writes most of their code: he gets angry, because by that logic 100% of their code has always been written by compilers. Nobody says that, because everyone understands a compiler is a tool, not the author.

A compiler builds for you. A library builds for you. AI builds for you. It's the same move, one more layer up. The strong builders won't lose a thing - they'll point this multiplier at bigger problems and make things that simply weren't buildable before.

Which is the part I can't stop thinking about. The compilers and languages we stand on were somebody's frontier once - hard, unglamorous work that became invisible the moment it worked. Right now we're standing at that frontier, building the next set of shoulders: the tools, the patterns, the groundwork the coming generation will stand on without ever thinking about it. Imagine what they'll build, starting from where we leave off.

A paradigm shift can be frightening, and I understand the people who feel something slipping away. I just feel the opposite of that. I've never been more excited to build than I am now.