Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI
For the last quarter century, I've experienced the "hobby of programming" as the gift of a four-way win. Meaning that practicing the art of programming created harmony across four major aspects of my life: work, home, community, and self. This has been nothing less than miraculous with regard to my quality of life. But this window of unfettered joy is closing in the age of AI (specifically with agentic programming). And it's been difficult for me to reorient myself to this new reality.
I don't want hand-coding to go away because I enjoy it. I love the problem solving of it. I love looking at code and seeing its shape and the way it reads and the way it plays nicely — or rudely — with a broader architecture. I love to try new syntax styles to see how they make me feel. I love to try something "too clever"; and then I love to spend the next 3 days hating myself for being too clever before I refactor back to something more "obvious". I love to feel the pain of a poor choice for days or months or years before I finally — finally — figure out how to salve that pain with a new strategy or pattern.
I love every aspect of coding. None of it feels like "grunt work" to me because every line of code that needs to be written is a choice; and every line of code that gets written is a lesson to be learned — an investment in my future understanding of how applications fit together.
And as much joy as this "hobby" has brought me personally, it's also been a huge win professional because there is — or, at least, there has been — so much direct transference to my daily work. All the little experiments that I did would eventually pay back dividends. Sometimes immediately. Sometimes in a few years. But never did any of it ever feel wasteful.
This is no longer true. In a world where AI generates the code, my syntax explorations simply don't matter. My digging into the edge cases of a language or a framework have become irrelevant. My desire to develop "taste" around code methodologies and organizational strategies has become vestigial.
At least it has professionally.
But not personally. In terms of exercising my brain and giving myself a moment of zen and a source of joy, coding is still a high-value activity. Just in a much narrower sense. Coding is no longer the four-way win that it once was — it's now become my version of gardening. Or of meditating. Or of doing the crossword puzzle. Or of painting. It is a self-care luxury that I can indulge when I have some free time.
Which is not to say that I won't use agentic programming within my hobbyist endeavors — it's only that I'll use such techniques in a capacity that still brings me joy. It's my hobby and I get to make the rules.
And who knows, maybe there will still be some cross-over professionally. But it will be a happy accident now and not an expectation.
It's been challenging for me to arrive at this realization. For the past 8 months, I've wondered how I can still justify my hand-writing code. But now that it's my hobby, not my profession, I don't have to justify any of it to anyone but myself. And I'm hoping that this clarity will bring me a new type of joy.
Reader Comments
But what has now become your profession, I wonder?
I'll let you know when I figure it out 😜 I hope that I still get to build "things" for "people". That's ultimately what always made me the happiest at work. Solving their problems, seeing their days get easier. Hopefully more of that (but in what exact shape, I don't really know yet).
Excellent article. However, I still think that the process of developing, especially on the front end, is better served when the developer uses both technical expertise along with a curiosity to explore. The best interfaces aren't made on paper; they're made by exploring possibilities and refining the interface iteratively.
That said, when I was younger, I was an expert tournament chess player, and I never thought a computer could beat a master chess player. At that time, people debated whether chess was a science or an art. Those days are long over and computers have mastered us on the chess board. Maybe AI will also master us despite our intuition when developing, but I would like to think we can still create something better.
Take care,
Gregory
Im 57 and thinking of getting a commadore 64 to learn basic. I had one as a kid and had no clue what to do with it.
I also want to make a rig out of an 11inch tablet and mini keyboard to learn python and data mining using ai as a teacher.
That being said, what are some fun things to do that are coding/hacking related? I dont only want to learn coding, but I want to have fun as if I were gaming so to speak.
I've been in the programming as hobby since the apple II. I agree the finding your way through a problem is rewarding and entertaining. But then life happened and found myself in a rut I couldn't get out of. My speciality was build systems and development tool chains, programming is hard! So I became proficient in getting the code to compile for any anything, hand me code and give me a architecture target and I can get you a binary for that target. Often only needing to know enough programming to make the necessary changes or fixes to get code up to date and running on a newer compiler. I never fulfilled my childhood dream of being das uber hacker, so AI has actually been good for me there, and often I know what needs what where and can just vaguely point and mumble coherently enough that AI can fix the bug for me. Currently working on a little AI controlled spider bot, when it is done I plan to release the code open source. That's something I couldn't do without another 30 years of learning programming. AI isn't all bad I suppose.
@Gregory,
Chess is actually a perfect parallel. Just because we have computers that can beat us at chess, it's still a wildly popular game (maybe more so now than ever). That's how I see "coding". It's a personal challenge, now - even if there are ways that the computers can do it faster, I'm still keen to learn it better for myself and my own edification.
As far as UX (user experience) is concerned, this is a fun one to consider because UX is sooo personal. For example, on LinkedIn, even to this day, you can't submit a comment with the common
CMD+Enterkeyboard command .... which is absolutely bonkers in my mind. But, presumably (one would hope) there's a good reason for them to exclude that. So this is where human taste comes to bear - maybe a machine wouldn't wire something like that in by default; but we complex humans can help steer the machines in the right direction.@Ricky,
That's one of the exciting things about AI - the ability to onboard much quicker into new topics. As far as what to do, I'm the wrong person to ask - I'm probably one of the more boring people you'll meet 😜 But I know that a lot of people have loved using the Raspberry Pi computer boards. It blends the physical world with the digital world. Plus, I think people will then plug their Pi's into their network to have it do fun things.
re: Basic, you can almost certainly get an emulator for it. There's probably even website that will let you just run Basic - no need to get an old computer to have a little fun.
@Ben B.,
I don't mean to denigrate AI at all. It's powerful stuff and is helping me get things done. Even in places where I still want to hand-code, I'm using AI to help me consider workflows and alternatives. And then sometimes I hand-code the suggestions; and sometimes I just let it rip.
Right now, I'm building a small AWS Lambda Function for syntax highlighting. And it's essentially all AI built (using existing npm packages, and then wiring it all together). Like you're saying, there's nothing in there that I probably couldn't figure out - but the barrier to entry would be a lot more effort than I would ever put into it. So, in cases like that, AI is letting me do some things that I otherwise wouldn't try.
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