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).
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