There was a time when a green test suite could make my day.
I remember staring at the terminal, waiting, and then seeing it: all tests passing. Something in my chest would lift. It wasn't about the feature, it wasn't about the sprint. It was just that thing I built, working. That hit of satisfaction felt like something I earned.
I'm not sure I feel that anymore.
What changed
It happened gradually. AI coding tools got good, then great, then somehow indispensable. You type a thought into a black window and code appears. Then you read it, mostly. Maybe tweak it. Copy it into the editor. Watch the editor suggest more. Layer on layer.
The code still works. Probably better than what I would have written alone, if I'm honest. But when I push it, there's this quiet emptiness where the satisfaction used to be.
I think I know why. The dopamine was never really about the code. It was about the struggle.
The StackOverflow years
I spent hours on StackOverflow, not because I had to, but because I genuinely wanted to understand. I'd read the accepted answer, then read the comments, then click the link someone posted in the third comment, then land on a blog from 2013 where some developer explained the whole thing from first principles. I'd come back knowing something I didn't know before. That knowledge felt like mine.
Now I type the same question into a chat window and get a complete answer in four seconds. The answer is usually better. But I don't own it the same way. I can't always explain where it came from or why it works exactly like it does. Something that used to live in my head now lives in a conversation I'll scroll past tomorrow.
The 10x expectation
Here is the part nobody talks about enough. Productivity going up for one engineer means the company expects one engineer to do what five used to. The bar moved before anyone asked if the floor was stable.
It's a fair trade on paper. You get better tools, the company gets more output. But nobody asked what happens to the person running that math inside their head every day. What happens to the engineer who ships more code than ever but feels less sure about all of it? Who wonders, late on a Tuesday night, whether something in that AI-generated function is quietly wrong and whether they would even catch it?
The mental weight of that is real. Productivity went up. Certainty went down. And certainty is what used to make this feel safe.
The first time code actually ran
I remember staring at the screen the first time something I wrote actually ran. A small thing. Probably printed "Hello World" or something close to it. But I had made it happen. That was it. That moment was the whole reason.
I read this somewhere and it hasn't left me since. A person who works only with their hands is called a laborer. A person who works with their brain and their hands is called an artisan. A person who works with their heart, brain, and hands is called an artist.
So what do you call a person who works with only their heart and brain?
That's where I am right now. My hands used to be part of this. I used to type every line, feel every bug, trace every stack trace back to the place where I made a wrong decision. Now my hands mostly read and review. My heart and brain are still here, doing the directing, doing the caring. But something in that loop is different.
I don't have a clean word for what that makes me. I'm genuinely not sure.
But I'm still showing up
I keep coming back to this: I still care about the code. Even when the satisfaction is quieter, even when I can't fully trace every decision back to something I understood myself, I still want it to be good. I still read the output carefully. I still push back when something feels off. I still feel something when a really elegant solution appears, even if I didn't write every character of it.
Whatever this profession is becoming, I'll meet it with everything I have. Heart, brain, and whatever comes next.