What I wonder is: where will people get that adrenaline rush from?
The rush that came when you had everything mapped out in your mind — the classes you would create, the files you would write, the architecture slowly taking shape. The excitement of opening an empty file and filling it, letter by letter, until an idea became reality.
Compared to today, it was a laborious process. It demanded effort, patience, and persistence. But that was the soul of it.
There was a unique satisfaction in wrestling with a problem for hours, sometimes days. You would sketch ideas on paper, discard approaches that seemed promising, and slowly work your way toward something that finally clicked. The reward wasn’t just the finished software. It was the understanding you gained along the way.
Today, you type what you need in plain English, and it arrives complete, correct, sometimes even elegant. The thing that once took you a day, built carefully and with effort, now takes seconds. I should feel relieved. Instead, I feel like something has been quietly taken from me and nobody is talking about it.
Writing code sometimes feels strangely pointless now, knowing there is something that can produce in seconds what would have taken me hours, and most likely do it better than I ever could.
Yet perhaps that feeling is not really about code.
Perhaps it’s about losing the joy of building something with your own hands.
It’s like riding a bicycle and feeling the rush of air against your face. You never cared how hard you had to pedal because the journey itself was enjoyable. You were always in control. Every turn, every climb, every burst of effort belonged to you.
Now it’s as if you’re sitting inside an airplane.
You can travel 1,400 kilometers in two hours, but you can’t feel the wind. You’re simply sitting there. The destination arrives faster, but the ride itself is gone.
Of course, you will have to adapt. Maybe, over time, you’ll learn to enjoy flying because it gets you where you want to go faster. Maybe efficiency will become its own reward.
Many people already feel that way. They see AI as a tool that removes tedious work and lets them focus on bigger problems. They may be right.
But I will always miss the journey.
I will miss the quiet hours spent wrestling with a problem. The satisfaction of seeing an idea slowly take shape. The feeling that every line written brought me a little closer to something I had imagined.
The satisfaction wasn’t in having the software at the end.
It was in becoming the person capable of building it.
Perhaps coding is simply no longer the point.
Or perhaps coding was never the point at all.
Perhaps the point was curiosity. The challenge. The process of turning confusion into understanding and ideas into reality.
The destination mattered, but it was never the whole reason I started riding.
And maybe that’s what I’ll always struggle with. Not that the airplane is faster, safer, and more efficient — it undoubtedly is.
It’s that somewhere along the way, we stopped feeling the wind on our faces.