Back then I was the senior guy fumbling with new tools, wondering if I should already know how to do this. I kept building anyway.
It worked. I’ve been building with Claude for months now. Websites. Tools. And lately, a fun little social app I’ve been dreaming up.
I love the flow. I think about what I want. I plan it. I write it down. Then I watch it come to life. As a product person, that loop is addictive.
But I started my career writing front end code, and that part of me is a little bummed.
The magic of development was never the finished screen. It was the hunt. Something breaks, you dig in, you form a theory, you test it, and then that moment when it finally works. You earned it. You knew every line because you fought for every line.
Now it’s a black box. A lot happens in the background. I still review the code, but reviewing isn’t the same as solving. I don’t have to think about every line or what the problem actually was. I hand that off and go work on strategy, or go find the next problem worth solving.
The PM in me says that’s exactly right. I stay focused on the why and the what. The developer in me misses the how.
Image generation hit me even harder. I developed an illustration style I love for my content. Now AI produces it for me. I don’t have to sit with a blank canvas anymore. Part of me is relieved, because I never loved the repetitive production work. Part of me feels like I gave away the fun part along with the tedious part.
So the dinosaur caught up. Turns out that wasn’t the hard part. The hard part is realizing that getting fluent means letting go of some of the things that made me love this work in the first place.
The craft didn’t disappear. It moved. The taste behind that illustration style is mine. The judgment about what to build and why is mine. The diagnosis still happens, just one level up.
I’m not sure that fully replaces watching your own code finally run. I’m still figuring out where the magic lives now.
Anyone else who used to make things by hand feeling this too?