I miss coding.
For about 20 years, I had the joy of problem-solving “by hand” with code. I regularly learned new things that made my code more expressive and easier for other humans to read. I got pretty fast at typing, ~100 WPM. I would come up with ideas for how to solve problems, and pitch these to my coworkers, but sometimes no one got around to the optimizations or improvements. Whenever I could, I would carve out a bit of time to prototype an idea for us to discuss, and sometimes I would harden those ideas into production code.
I lost countless hours quite happily (except when it was part of an incident) debugging code and systems. There were these mysteries where the code you were reading and thought should do A was actually doing B instead, and you would find ways to poke at it and track down the issue. I got better at this with time, too.
Agents have changed much of this.
It is no longer productive for me to write code by hand. I do it quite infrequently. I don’t use my IDE to edit code directly anymore. It’s still sometimes useful for reading it.
I miss coding. I miss being pretty good at it. The agents far outrun me.
I would get into “the zone” in a way that I have not managed to do with agents. (If you have, please let me know!)
I suppose I am nostalgic about the past in a similar way to others who saw their craft automated. As industrialization and automation have relegated many crafts (woodworking, sewing, etc.) into hobbies and cottage industries, so it is with my craft of coding.
I hope people will still take the time to learn to code by hand. It builds an understanding of how things work that is hard to get any other way.
I feel very fortunate to have had the joy of getting paid to write code by hand. It was a craft. It was fun in a different way than the new world. It was satisfying.
I felt like I should say a proper goodbye.