Bemoaning the Loss of the Journey
The opinions in this post are mine and do not reflect the views of my employer.
I have been writing code professionally for over twenty years. It is such a core part of my identity: it’s what I do for work, all the books I read are about it, it’s often what I think about when my mind has idle time.
I absolutely love the act of writing code.
I specifically worded that as “the act of writing code” and not creating software. The end result of the process can be satisfying, but I’ve always been in it for the journey, not the destination. I think this is why I spin up so many side-projects but rarely finish any of them. It’s not about getting a product at the other end, it’s about the process of creation.
Solving problems, creating solid architecture, learning new ways to improve my skills. Most especially, the actual act of writing the code too: I am typing this in an editor (neovim) that I’ve highly tuned for my liking and I’m using a keyboard I designed and soldered from scratch.
I have been fortunate that I get to do the thing I love as a function of my job. I work as a “Software Engineer” and, for the majority of my career, writing code has been a necessary part of the role. However, the destination is what the job cares about, not the journey.
At the end of the day, companies want the feature shipped and it just so happened that writing code was how you got there.
At least…that’s how it was, but that is no longer the case now. The industry has become so insufferably fixated on AI and companies are afraid of “being left behind” so they’re starting to mandate how the software gets created. Software engineers are being told they need to use AI to get to the destination (under the, potentially misguided, assumption that it will help them get there faster).
Over the last 6 - 12 months, I’ve seen the overlap of my passion (the craft of writing code) and my profession (software development) shrink more and more. My days are now spent reviewing AI-generated PRs and prompting LLMs to do the very thing I got into this profession to do. I hear people say “oh it’s the same thing, you just have a different tool”…but when the tool takes away the parts I care about, it’s not the same thing.
Now I know I can still “get my fix” in my (very limited) spare time, but going from 40+ hours a week down to late nights and occasional weekend stints is a real drag. It’s making me reconsider my profession and my relationship with how I spend my time.
There’s a word (in Portuguese) for this feeling I have: Saudade
an emotional state of melancholic or profoundly nostalgic longing for a beloved yet absent someone or something. […] It is often associated with a repressed understanding that one might never encounter the object of longing ever again. It is a recollection of feelings, experiences, places, or events, often elusive, that cause a sense of separation from the exciting, pleasant, or joyous sensations they once caused