AI Tension
I'm struggling a bit with AI and AI-driven development.
I've been a developer for well over 25 years. I love building software. I love designing things. I love knowing how things work. I have so many ideas. So many things I want to build. Not enough time. Never enough time.
Over the years, I've started so many side projects that I never finished. I'd get most of the way there and then fizzle out. Maybe it was the documentation, the website, the last bit of UI... who knows.
With Claude and other LLMs, I'm having so much fun. I can finally act on those ideas — design and build (I know, "build", ... kinda) the things I've had in my head for years. I'll admit it's weird not writing the code, and honestly, sometimes not even looking at it. But taking a vision and just talking it into a working thing is a blast.
Looking back, I've never been the kind of developer who fussed over *perfect* code. The optimal algorithm. The cleanest design. I've always been pragmatic — does it work? Is it good enough? These tools (often) get me there astonishingly fast: I can have an idea and bring it to life in an afternoon. Is it the best code? I doubt it. Does it have bugs? Probably... but what code doesn't? Can I maintain it? Maybe. But maybe I won't need to.
What's interesting to me is that at my previous job, I moved from Developer to Product Manager, and I had a really, really hard time letting go of the development. I knew that codebase intimately. There weren't many tasks I didn't already know how to knock out efficiently. Somewhere in the back of my head was always something like: "I know how to do this. I'll just do it myself, it's faster than handing it off, waiting for someone to get up to speed, and so on." So I pounded out functionality, but I struggled to hand things off, and I struggled to write specs for the other developers and do the design work.
Ironically, now that I'm at a new organization with a codebase I don't know by heart, I feel like I'm finally doing more of what I was supposed to be doing all along... setting the vision, designing, and letting the thing get built instead of building it myself. I still have to review the code, of course, but I'm relying on the robot to help me navigate the code-base and do much of the heavy lifting.
And yet.
There's a whole side of this I'm mostly choosing not to look at. The energy and water these models burn through. The jobs (including, probably, some version of my own) that this technology is going to reshape or erase. The junior devs who won't get to learn the way I learned, by struggling through it. I know. I know. And most days I just... change the subject in my own head and get back to building the fun thing. Real mature.
I don't have a tidy conclusion. I'm having the best creative run of my career and feeling a low hum of guilt about the thing making it possible, all at once. Maybe that's just what this era feels like from the inside.
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Viewed 144 times (last updated 2026-07-21 · r3)