Grief and the AI Split
TL;DR: AI-assisted coding is revealing a split among developers that was always there but invisible when we all worked the same way. I've felt the grief too—but mine resolved differently than I expected, and I think that says something about what kind of developer I've been all along.
Photo by Lucian on Unsplash
A few months ago, I wrote about how making computers do things is fun. The gist: I've never been in it for the elegance of code. I've been in it for the result. I learned BASIC on a Commodore 64 at age 7 not because BASIC was beautiful—it wasn't—but because I wanted to make things happen on screen. Then I learned 6502 assembly because BASIC was too slow for what I wanted to do.
That post was my attempt to explain why AI coding tools felt like a natural fit for me. But since then, I've been reading other people's reactions to this moment, and I want to come back to it—because I think something bigger is going on.
The Mourning
James Randall wrote a piece that hit a nerve. He's been programming since age 7, like me—started in 1983, a year after I did. But his experience of this moment is subtly different from mine:
The wonder is harder to access. The sense of discovery, of figuring something out through sheer persistence and ingenuity — that’s been compressed. Not eliminated, but compressed. And something is lost in the compression, even if something is gained.
Nolan Lawson put it more starkly in "We Mourn Our Craft":
We’ll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor. We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM. We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of, something true and right and good. We’ll miss the satisfaction of the artist’s signature at the bottom of the oil painting, the GitHub repo saying “I made this.”
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