Brace yourself, it’s even more words about The Age of AI.
I had a small handful of personal projects that I’d been putting off indefinitely that I blasted through soon after paying for Claude Code. Then I built a few games in a little weekly game jam I set myself, which was pretty fun, but they’re just toys. Already scraping the bottom of the barrel, I built a few small tools and little utilities to save myself seconds per month. And now, the barrel is empty. Building software now costs me almost nothing and I just can’t think of any software worth building.
Now that there’s almost no gratification or self-actualisation from the actual writing of the code, the product is the sole purpose to build the thing. Before the advent of agentic coding, I had to ply my trade, use a skill, spend effort. Now, I type “Here are some captured HTTP requests to the tennis court booking website, build a CLI for it and then set up a cronjob to book court 2 for every thursday at 0900”, and then I walk away and have a coffee, play with the dog, spin around in my chair, and then the thing I wanted exists and fulfils its purpose. I, however, have less purpose than ever before.
I never felt that I was a particularly creative person, but I did think I was relatively good at programming. However, I never actually loved the actual writing of code (I definitely just liked feeling smart), so doing it without LLM assistance sounds like a complete waste of time - especially because Claude Code writes better, nicer code than I ever would bother to. But this means that my personal value-add is pretty small - I’m not creative enough to think of cool, interesting, valuable things to build with the practically unlimited power of Claude Code, and my actual programming ability has atrophied. Now I’m not much more valuable than a layperson who knows what all the acronyms mean.
I’ve long joked that I’ve been trying to move out of tech for as long as I’ve been in it. Maybe it’s really getting to be time. I don’t think my tech skillset is going to survive much beyond the next decade and I’m approaching middle age - as good a time for change as any other. But let’s see how long I can get paid for knowing what the acronyms mean.