2026-01-07
One evening, over 13 years ago, I took some trivial CLI program the professor showed us that day and built an Android app out of it. I remember the lighting in the room when I saw it working on the emulator. I remember the feeling of creating something I could interact with, seemingly out of thin air.
I spent way too much time during those years in front of a laptop (at least now I get paid). I built a twitter client for Android. For some reason a couple of people even downloaded it, so I could see it would crash sometimes scrolling the timeline. I couldn't reproduce the problem, so I wrote a python script to keep sending scroll events to my twitter feed in the hope I would finally hit a post that would trigger the bug and I could fix it. It worked. I remember coming from the kitchen to my room and seeing the red logs in my dark themed Android Studio from a far.
I remember telling my girlfriend at the time that “once I start working, I will code all day so in the evenings you will be my only focus!”.
I always loved programming and I always loved the code itself. The code must be beautiful. Every line must be carefully considered. It must be perfect, symmetric, elegant, tasteful. I have opinions on the definition of beautiful and I fight so hard to keep them to myself when reviewing other people's work.
I still remember snippets of code from previous companies. Around 10 years ago, I incorrectly used cheerio to parse some HTML. It still worked, but I understood how best to use that API years later, on another project, in another company. I still think about that code sometimes. So disgusting.
LLMs are sucking the life out of coding.
It's not even that I'm worried about my job or the social ramifications for the entire profession (though I probably should be). I'm just really sad one of the very, very, very few things I used to enjoy is now so cheap, fast, and easy that I get no pleasure out of it anymore.
In the past few months I built a WASM runtime in Go. I've never even used WASM (nor Go, for that matter) before. Are you impressed? You shouldn't be. There are spec tests available, just point your favorite agent at them and wait.
Turns out I only like to build something if it's hard. I don't care about the final product. I'm not an entrepreneur. I just need it to be hard to feel something.
I don't think I feel it anymore.