I Like Writing Code

Developing with AI tools has been an interesting learning experience. For me, it has it has been eerily similar to grief, going through the stages. First, denial, fed by all of the evidence provided by the results of non-developers "vibe coding" piles of trash; they could do it quickly, but it was still garbage. Because writing code was never the hard part.

The problem with learning to utilizing this new tool is that it is a rapidly-changing arena of LLMs, methodologies, tooling and trend-chasing. What should I put in my .md files this week, and where should I put them? When I eventually got to the stage of acceptance, I began to learn how to utilize this tool to build things faster, and am now trying to learn the best way to wrestle with the AI so it only writes the code I want it to, in the way I want it, faster than I could write it. Writing code was never the hard part.

The results of this expensive, glorified Markov Chain can be very amusing, aggravating, and —sometimes— actually usable code. I feel like I am finally getting familiar enough with it to speed up certain tasks. At the same time I think I am becoming less of a perfectionist.

Writing code was never the hard part.

But it was a part I enjoyed.

I like to write code. I enjoy typing out the arcane symbols that can make a computer do incredible things, like render "Hello, world" to the screen. For me, the act is art, prose, mental puzzle and catharsis all-in-one.

AI lets me do some things faster, but it has removed some joy from my job and hobby.