In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is.
You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.
Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.
Also, I think for a good number of people, their first job out of college is oftentimes one they will look fondly back on because they've just finished ~17 years of school, have financial independence with a salary, and are still bright-eyed about all the possibilities.
There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like
a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.
Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in:
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
To get a square on the screen. And then I was slightly older boy destroying my dad's precious slides for his presentation by formatting the entire disk accidentally while installing Red Hat Linux 8 Psyche from CDs my dad got at the bazaar. I was so excited for Shrike to come out the next year.
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.
Learning the lower layer felt like earning access to the next level of reality. You had to understand the constraints to make anything happen at all. Now it increasingly feels like you can just describe the intent and skip straight to the outcome.
We're retiring later and later, working more per week, purchasing power is going down, quality of goods is going down, life expectancy is decreasing, child mortality is increasing, teenage suicide is increasing, illiteracy is increasing, &c.
But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!
Right, and a nice thing about software is that retirement doesn’t mean you have to stop doing what you used to do.
I’m retired (I know, I’m very lucky), and I’ve done as much or more coding since retirement than I did in my job. But to be fair, AI has really changed how I’m going about things, and I’m not sure what the future is going to bring. I really worry about my adult children and their careers.
And simultaneously we built this huge machine that gives us everything we need to survive on software we don't understand, ready to have it abducted by people who have never done a (positively) productive thing in their lives seemingly any moment now. Monkeys with computers.
I thought for a moment you were serious, but the line about us doing wonderful things with tech gave it away as satire. Yeah no. Best we can do is technofascism and surveillance state. Glad you happy though!
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
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.
One part of me tries to resist and tell you that our craft is not becoming an archaic relic, the other half already knows you‘re right. We just can‘t put the ghost back into the bottle and now‘s a good time to re-calibrate your passion.
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 programming itself is the reward for people who love doing it. It attracts the sort of detail-oriented thinkers who enjoy the doing and don't frame everything in terms of "value added."
AI is attractive to the sorts of people who have their secretary write their Christmas cards.
I think there's a middle ground. I like coming up with solutions to problems (mostly technical problems, may even be very low level ones). But I always found writing the code generally tedious. Basically, once I had a good detailed idea of what the implementation would look like, actually executing the plan would bore me.
AI is still not competent enough to come up with good solutions in many things I work on. So, at least so far, AI has made me happier.
If you've never made any effort to connect what you do to the underlying mathematics, then no wonder you think it's all an "automatible" implementation detail, despite three decades of the industry trying and failing.
My new goals are: Seek beauty, Seek happiness and Don't make people sad.
With a lot of effort, it's working. However, I soon discovered the last goal was the most difficult. Long story short, I keep my mouth shut a lot more. I feared, at first, that this would make me feel I was compromising myself somehow. But I also discovered that sometimes when I shared my opinion, knowing it was correct, I would later regret how I made that person feel. Conclusion on their feelings: There's nothing to be gained by hurting their feelings when they weren't ready to hear the message. Double success, I'm still happy and I didn't cause them any sadness.
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.
There is a whole lot of crap out there. But I think the Internet HAS been a game changer in lifting people out of poverty and increasing standards of living. Communication is awesome. And although there is a lot of propaganda (which there has always been) there is now also a lot of truth and counter claims. It’s no longer just the rich that have access to information (think of farmers guessing at what their crop was worth). I _hope_ AI will do similarly, but I have my doubts on that one.
The irony of the moment is that a billionaire in a Michelin-star restaurant and a homeless person on the street are scrolling through the same Instagram feed.
Do w hat we did in corporate/banking/other sociopathic envs did decades ago - find another source of fulfillment and happiness. For me its adventures and sports and kids, could be something else for the next joe.
Or just code as you want as a hobby, unrestrained, for whatever you need or makes you happy.
> But improving each kid’s skill and confidence was the real mission. Instead of my desk job, I’d be asking Clayton how we could make Corey¹ use his body for rebounding. Or how Monte’s soccer skills could be best leveraged. Or how Evan, our best player, could become an on-court leader.
I wonder how software development would be like if we had coaches like this.
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.
I certainly wasn't laughing, plight of a fellow man is nothing positive. But this is usually so abstracted and distant from one's work that unless you have somebody close who gets literally hit themselves is just abstract movement beyond horizon due to myriad forces and random events.
I don’t even know what he’s referring to. What are the rectangles he’s “moving around”? And couldn’t you say the same thing about all writers, for example?
The one downside to the Internet and social media is that truly useless takes can get much more traction than they deserve.
Personally I want to have my cake and eat it here. Tech has amazing potential to make the world a better place to live in and genuinely bring people together. The crowning achievement of AI so far to me is not Claude Code, it’s AlphaFold. I find the documentary DM released about developing it inspiring both as a technology story but also a team achieving things together that make the world better. I want to see more of that and hope I can steer my career in that direction.
I honestly don’t understand how anyone has the time and energy to be a coach while working a full-time job. My kids practice three times a week, and usually have games on both Saturday and Sunday - sometimes several hours away. Just getting them to practices and games often feels exhausting to me - I can’t imagine all the planning and scheduling that goes on behind the scenes, or having to show up and actually run things all the time.
Hats off to youth coaches - you make a huge difference in kids’ lives.
My boss is a technologist. Adding computers to problems makes him happy. Getting people out of the way makes him happy.
I’m an IC (no direct reports) and I’m a “humanist”. Helping people become better and more skilled makes me happy, in the same way the coach here got joy from the goofball making a great play.
On paper we should probably switch jobs. I have way more technical depth, but the crucial difference is that he is more goal-driven, better at managing upward, and more in tune with political trends.
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.
> only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better
Teams are already using AI to scout opponents and plan game strategy. IDK how much that will ever happen at the youth level because they generally don't keep detailed stats at that age but it will be coming to high school sports for sure, if it isn't already being used.
Yeah, I decided to become a "professional" musician a few months ago after quitting my last tech job. I'm not amazing, but I've got some places to play, and I'm starting to give lessons, etc.
It's not an easy job, but I feel something I haven't felt in a long time as a software developer: fulfillment and contentment. Best of luck to anyone on a similar journey.
In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is.
You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.
Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.
Also, I think for a good number of people, their first job out of college is oftentimes one they will look fondly back on because they've just finished ~17 years of school, have financial independence with a salary, and are still bright-eyed about all the possibilities.
There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.
Similar for me. Happiest I've ever been was when I was an assistant guide for birthright Israel.
My job was to make sure the 40 kids that came were having a good time. When your job is to make others happy, you become happy.
Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in:
To get a square on the screen. And then I was slightly older boy destroying my dad's precious slides for his presentation by formatting the entire disk accidentally while installing Red Hat Linux 8 Psyche from CDs my dad got at the bazaar. I was so excited for Shrike to come out the next year.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.
Learning the lower layer felt like earning access to the next level of reality. You had to understand the constraints to make anything happen at all. Now it increasingly feels like you can just describe the intent and skip straight to the outcome.
We're retiring later and later, working more per week, purchasing power is going down, quality of goods is going down, life expectancy is decreasing, child mortality is increasing, teenage suicide is increasing, illiteracy is increasing, &c.
But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!
Excuse me, but can you please explain this whole concept of 'retirement'?
It is some point where you just shut down your brain and feed yourself to the fishes?
Not being an US person I'm struggling with this. How? Unless one loses congnitive capability due to organic brain damage how is this even possible?
Retirement is the withdrawal from active working life, i.e. having a job. It is not a US concept.
Right, and a nice thing about software is that retirement doesn’t mean you have to stop doing what you used to do.
I’m retired (I know, I’m very lucky), and I’ve done as much or more coding since retirement than I did in my job. But to be fair, AI has really changed how I’m going about things, and I’m not sure what the future is going to bring. I really worry about my adult children and their careers.
And simultaneously we built this huge machine that gives us everything we need to survive on software we don't understand, ready to have it abducted by people who have never done a (positively) productive thing in their lives seemingly any moment now. Monkeys with computers.
I thought for a moment you were serious, but the line about us doing wonderful things with tech gave it away as satire. Yeah no. Best we can do is technofascism and surveillance state. Glad you happy though!
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
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.
One part of me tries to resist and tell you that our craft is not becoming an archaic relic, the other half already knows you‘re right. We just can‘t put the ghost back into the bottle and now‘s a good time to re-calibrate your passion.
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 programming itself is the reward for people who love doing it. It attracts the sort of detail-oriented thinkers who enjoy the doing and don't frame everything in terms of "value added."
AI is attractive to the sorts of people who have their secretary write their Christmas cards.
I think there's a middle ground. I like coming up with solutions to problems (mostly technical problems, may even be very low level ones). But I always found writing the code generally tedious. Basically, once I had a good detailed idea of what the implementation would look like, actually executing the plan would bore me.
AI is still not competent enough to come up with good solutions in many things I work on. So, at least so far, AI has made me happier.
If you've never made any effort to connect what you do to the underlying mathematics, then no wonder you think it's all an "automatible" implementation detail, despite three decades of the industry trying and failing.
What about mathematics means coding isn't automatible?
Also, hasen't coding gone through many waves of automation now?
My new goals are: Seek beauty, Seek happiness and Don't make people sad.
With a lot of effort, it's working. However, I soon discovered the last goal was the most difficult. Long story short, I keep my mouth shut a lot more. I feared, at first, that this would make me feel I was compromising myself somehow. But I also discovered that sometimes when I shared my opinion, knowing it was correct, I would later regret how I made that person feel. Conclusion on their feelings: There's nothing to be gained by hurting their feelings when they weren't ready to hear the message. Double success, I'm still happy and I didn't cause them any sadness.
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.
I started programming when I was eleven years old and I’m now in my 40s. I have no idea what to do with the rest of my life.
Same here. I've long had the feeling that the internet could somehow help the world, but honestly, I don't feel that's the case anymore.
There is a whole lot of crap out there. But I think the Internet HAS been a game changer in lifting people out of poverty and increasing standards of living. Communication is awesome. And although there is a lot of propaganda (which there has always been) there is now also a lot of truth and counter claims. It’s no longer just the rich that have access to information (think of farmers guessing at what their crop was worth). I _hope_ AI will do similarly, but I have my doubts on that one.
The irony of the moment is that a billionaire in a Michelin-star restaurant and a homeless person on the street are scrolling through the same Instagram feed.
jnovek, don't listen to him! Piracy is never the way.
https://youtu.be/9fUjwV4j-H0 (The Offspring - Have You Ever)
What if the the alternatives are worse?
“Have you ever considered piracy? You’d make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts”
https://youtu.be/IIbeFgaYTNs
There's a whole lot of us out there. I don't know if there's still a future in the thing that I love, which is where all the malaise comes from.
Do w hat we did in corporate/banking/other sociopathic envs did decades ago - find another source of fulfillment and happiness. For me its adventures and sports and kids, could be something else for the next joe.
Or just code as you want as a hobby, unrestrained, for whatever you need or makes you happy.
> But improving each kid’s skill and confidence was the real mission. Instead of my desk job, I’d be asking Clayton how we could make Corey¹ use his body for rebounding. Or how Monte’s soccer skills could be best leveraged. Or how Evan, our best player, could become an on-court leader.
I wonder how software development would be like if we had coaches like this.
I have had managers like this and it was fantastic. I’ve tried to be a mentor like this and enjoyed it too.
It feels like since 2022 the industry has been too rushed to run this way though.
I suspect a lot of people don't actually dislike software development, they dislike developing without anyone invested in their development
I miss mentoring junior engineers in-person
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.
I certainly wasn't laughing, plight of a fellow man is nothing positive. But this is usually so abstracted and distant from one's work that unless you have somebody close who gets literally hit themselves is just abstract movement beyond horizon due to myriad forces and random events.
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.
Exactly, basically then every desk or office job means sitting next to a box?
I don’t even know what he’s referring to. What are the rectangles he’s “moving around”? And couldn’t you say the same thing about all writers, for example?
The one downside to the Internet and social media is that truly useless takes can get much more traction than they deserve.
CSS boxes!
Honestly the one thing that I'm really looking forward to is no longer having to touch CSS.
Personally I want to have my cake and eat it here. Tech has amazing potential to make the world a better place to live in and genuinely bring people together. The crowning achievement of AI so far to me is not Claude Code, it’s AlphaFold. I find the documentary DM released about developing it inspiring both as a technology story but also a team achieving things together that make the world better. I want to see more of that and hope I can steer my career in that direction.
A lot of people aren't actually chasing leisure or money as much as they're chasing irreplaceability
I honestly don’t understand how anyone has the time and energy to be a coach while working a full-time job. My kids practice three times a week, and usually have games on both Saturday and Sunday - sometimes several hours away. Just getting them to practices and games often feels exhausting to me - I can’t imagine all the planning and scheduling that goes on behind the scenes, or having to show up and actually run things all the time.
Hats off to youth coaches - you make a huge difference in kids’ lives.
My boss is a technologist. Adding computers to problems makes him happy. Getting people out of the way makes him happy.
I’m an IC (no direct reports) and I’m a “humanist”. Helping people become better and more skilled makes me happy, in the same way the coach here got joy from the goofball making a great play.
On paper we should probably switch jobs. I have way more technical depth, but the crucial difference is that he is more goal-driven, better at managing upward, and more in tune with political trends.
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.
> only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better
Teams are already using AI to scout opponents and plan game strategy. IDK how much that will ever happen at the youth level because they generally don't keep detailed stats at that age but it will be coming to high school sports for sure, if it isn't already being used.
I "move rectangles on screen" to pay for Kids and House. That's what makes me happy, and jobs I enjoy don't. There's no wake up call necessary.
I just wrote my own blog post thinking about this. I guess alot of us feel kind of weird right now.
Yeah, I decided to become a "professional" musician a few months ago after quitting my last tech job. I'm not amazing, but I've got some places to play, and I'm starting to give lessons, etc.
It's not an easy job, but I feel something I haven't felt in a long time as a software developer: fulfillment and contentment. Best of luck to anyone on a similar journey.
If I didn't have a mortgage and family that would work!