I’ve been thinking about programming lately.
Not because I hate it. Not because AI is ruining it. Actually, pretty much the opposite.
Programming has never been easier. I can have an idea, open an AI, explain what I want, and a few minutes later something is running on my screen.
That’s still insane to me.
And I like it.
I don’t want to go back to spending three hours on some boring API integration just because that’s what programmers used to do. Let the machine write the boring stuff. Seriously. Why wouldn’t I?
But I’ve been thinking about something else.
When did programming stop being something we did for fun?
I remember when I could get some completely useless idea and just start building it. No deadline. No stress. No one waiting for it. No real reason to care if anyone ever used it.
I might spend an entire day trying to make some shitty little game work. The character jump felt wrong. Too floaty, or too stiff, or the timing was off. Or maybe I wanted to build some ridiculous tool that solved a problem nobody had.
And I’d just sit there messing with it. Get stuck. Google things. Try something. Break something else. Fix that. Somehow, eventually, the thing would work.
And I’d sit there thinking:
Holy shit. I made this.
Not because it was useful. Not because it was going to make money. Just because I wanted to see if I could.
I think that’s the part I miss.
Not the syntax. Not writing code for the sake of it. The messing around. The figuring shit out. Having an idea in your head and slowly turning it into something that actually exists.
AI hasn’t taken that away. If anything, it makes it easier. I can build more things now. I can get unstuck faster. I can try an idea in an afternoon that used to take me a week.
So why doesn’t it feel like I’m having more fun?
Maybe because a lot of programming these days is just about getting things done. How fast can you ship? How many tickets can you close? How much can you get done with AI? How much time did you save?
Which makes sense when it’s your job. Deadlines are real. Nobody is paying you to spend six hours making a useless game because the jump feels slightly wrong.
But not everything has to be work.
You can just make shit.
Build something nobody asked for. Spend four hours solving a problem that could have been solved in thirty seconds. Write terrible code. Make a game nobody plays. Write your own shitty version of something that already has a perfectly good library. Make a website for no reason.
And that’s okay.
Actually, that’s kind of the point.
When you’re doing it for fun, the inefficiency doesn’t matter. If you spent four hours on something and enjoyed those four hours, what exactly did you waste?
I’m not saying you shouldn’t use AI. Please use it. Use autocomplete. Ask it to write the boring stuff. Paste the stupid error message into it. Let it save your time.
But maybe sometimes... don’t.
Open a blank file. Don’t have a plan. Don’t worry about whether the code is good. Don’t worry about whether anyone will ever see it. Just start building something.
And when you get stuck, try to figure it out yourself for a bit. Not because that’s how you’re supposed to program. Not because using AI makes you less of a programmer. Just because figuring things out is still fun.
There’s a particular feeling you get when you’ve been staring at a problem for an hour and something suddenly clicks. You change one line. You run the program. And it works.
That tiny “ohhhhh.”
For a second you understand something you didn’t understand before.
I don’t think we should give that up just because we now have machines that can give us the answer immediately.
We don’t have to choose. We can use AI to make our jobs easier. And we can still program like idiots at midnight because we had a stupid idea.
Use the machine when you want to get something done. Close it when you just want to see if you can figure something out yourself.
Programming doesn’t need to become harder again. It doesn’t need to become more pure. It doesn’t need to go back to the way it was.
Maybe we just need to make it fun again.
Not productive. Not impressive. Not useful.
Just fun.
Build something stupid. Break it. Fix it. Get stuck. Spend way too long on it.
And when it finally works, sit there for a second and think:
Fuck yeah. I made that.