I Don't Write Code Anymore. I Have It Written.← Go Back

I Don't Write Code Anymore. I Have It Written.<br>Jun 20, 2026<br>#ai#personal#web-development#coding

When I started this blog, I promised myself I’d write here regularly. I even said so in<br>my first post, in public, where everyone could see it. You can probably guess how that went.

That was a while ago, and I haven’t published a single thing since. The easy explanation is that I got busy and lost the<br>motivation. That’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. The honest version is that the thing I wanted to write about is<br>the same thing that made it hard to write at all. So let me finally try.

I’ve been writing code since 2006, first as a hobby and then for a living since 2016. The hobby years matter, because by<br>the time it became my job I already had a running start. I went from junior to mid in about a year.

But the part I actually miss is the junior part. Back then, every day taught me something that rearranged how I saw the<br>whole craft. I would write code line by line. While I was typing one line I was already thinking about the next, and<br>then I would scroll back up and rewrite something from ten minutes ago because I suddenly saw a cleaner way. Write, look<br>back, improve. That loop had been second nature for years. And when I shipped something, I would look at it and think: I<br>made this. That feeling was the whole reason I did the job.

Then AI showed up, and it crept in so gradually that I never noticed the line I crossed.

First it was just a better search. Instead of digging through three pages of Google or a Stack Overflow thread from<br>2014, I would paste a broken function and ask where the bug was. Faster. Obviously better. No regrets. Then I went a<br>step further and started pasting working code and asking for a better version, more readable, more performant. That was<br>great too. Then the assistants got good. They climbed out of the browser tab and became agents running in my terminal,<br>on my machine, touching my files. And somewhere in there I lost the thread without realizing it.

Today I don’t really write code. I have it written. I describe what I want, and it appears.

For a while I thought this just made me faster. It took me longer to admit what it actually changed: I’m not the author<br>anymore. I’m the approver.

If I’m honest about the split, it’s something like 70-30. 70% of the time, I read what the model produced, it looks<br>right, the thing runs, and I approve it. The other 30%, I actually push back and steer. And here’s the uncomfortable<br>part: approving is not the same as evaluating. Most of the time, approving is just trusting.

People will tell you that prompt engineering is the new craft, that knowing how to describe what you want is a skill of<br>its own. Maybe. But a good prompt only makes the request mine. Knowing what to ask for isn’t the same as understanding<br>what comes back, and understanding what comes back used to be the part of the job that needed me.

And these days, that part is often beyond me anyway. The model regularly writes code I couldn’t have written myself, not<br>just faster but genuinely better. Every now and then it solves something in a way that stops me cold: I would never have<br>thought of that.

Here’s what that does. If I had built the same product by hand, it would probably look identical from the outside, and a<br>normal person would be just as impressed either way. But the foundation underneath, the actual code, would have been<br>maybe a 6/10. Functional, gets the job done, skips half the edge cases. What ships now is closer to a 10/10, as long as<br>the model knows the spec. Someone who doesn’t write code can’t see that difference. Another developer can. They open the<br>code and read, right there on the page, that what’s in front of them is better than what I could produce alone. It’s a<br>bit like putting your name on a book a ghostwriter wrote: the cover says you, but anyone who can read the prose knows<br>you didn’t write it. That’s why this feels different depending on who’s looking. And it’s why I hesitate to open-source<br>some of the things I’m supposed to be proud of.

The second thing is worse, because it doesn’t need an audience. It happens when no one is looking. I’ve started to feel<br>like a stranger in my own code. I will come back to something weeks later to add a feature or change a behavior, and I<br>don’t know where anything is or why it’s shaped the way it is. The worst version is when a teammate runs git blame,<br>lands on my name, and asks why we did it this way here, and I have nothing. I can’t defend a decision that, on paper,<br>was mine. That’s a specific kind of embarrassment, and it’s new.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy, and a little dishonest, to pin all of this on AI.

Some of it was coming anyway. The pure joy I keep describing belonged to my early years, and a lot of it was the joy of<br>learning, not the joy of coding. When you’re new, almost everything you touch opens a door, and that constant...