Csikszentmihalyi's flow research[0] basically predicts the author's whole arc here. People are happiest during structured, challenging activities with clear goals and tight feedback loops. Coaching middle schoolers in a gym hits every condition on his list.

Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.

[0] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience if you haven't read it

Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in:

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Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C.

Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today.

Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper.

Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.

Isn‘t it ironic that we software devs laughed for decades when we automated other people‘s work with our code - „it‘s called progress, deal with it, dinosaur!“ But now we see that a meteor might have hit our planet too.

These blog posts are fascinating to read. I don't have a personal blog, but if I did I'm sure I would've written a very similar post as I've been wrestling with similar thoughts over the last few weeks. I have the distinct sense that I will look back on February 2026 as an inflection point, where AI crossed over from being an interesting parlor trick to something that fundamentally and irreversibly altered what I do day-to-day. It's bittersweet, for sure - it feels inevitable that the craft of software development that I've loved for years will be seen as an archaic relic at some point in the not too distant future. It may be several years yet before the impact is broadly felt (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years) but this train doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. This post was a helpful reminder that who I am is not defined by the code I write (or don't write) - there's so much more to life than code.

The moving tiny rectangles framing is interesting, it gets to the heart of why I find all the anti-AI takes so difficult to comprehend. If you never made any effort to connect what you do with what value is added in real life, then it's no wonder better tooling is leaving you lost. Programming (other than code golf) has always been an implementation detail for solving problems IRL.

The latest developments in digital culture are somehow more frustrating than anything I saw in the previous 26 years. Experience is replaced by prompts. Taste perfected over the years with defaults.

I'm not afraid of competition with AI-driven competitors — I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics.

Perhaps this is indeed a good moment to switch to offline.

Thank you for sharing your inspiring example.

OP might love tech, but he sure doesn’t sound like he loved the craft.

Describing it as sitting in front of a rectangle, moving all rectangles around is so reductive.

I coached sports for all 3 of my kids. Great times.

One year, I had a superior athlete on my youth football team. A foot shorter than everybody else and skinny as a stick, the boy had the gift of speed. He’d run like the wind, arms and legs flailing wildly. It looked like he’d cover distance twice as fast as the other kids.

I took full advantage of the situation. Every game, I started by getting wonder boy the ball until we’d racked up enough points to be comfortable. Then the others got turns. We went the regular season undefeated and I began to convince myself I really had coaching talent. Maybe I could help out at the high school, or the local college! The sky was the limit, I was a natural.

Then came the championship game, also against an undefeated team. Their team had a wonderboy, too. He was actually faster than my speedster!

Predictably, their coach played it just like I had. Through superior speed, they took a healthy lead early in the game and never let it go.

I enjoyed all my years of youth coaching, but that year was just magical. Right up ‘till the last game. It was a memorable year.

> For years, you’ve sat in front of a rectangle, moving tinier rectangles, only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better.

In response to this I would say that being in the industry comes with a lot of learned role-playing, and if you are no longer happy role-playing your job in one way, throw it entirely out and find a new path.

I just wrote my own blog post thinking about this. I guess alot of us feel kind of weird right now.