After 12 Years of Programming, I Realized I Don’t Love Coding

A software engineer with 12 years of experience realized they don't love coding but love building things, and AI has enabled them to build more projects in a month than in a year. The engineer sees AI as a tool that lowers barriers for non-programmers to turn ideas into reality, though excellence still requires skill and hard work.

I’ve been a software engineer for more than 12 years. And like many developers, I’ve been watching AI improve at an incredible speed. Every new model seems smarter than the one before it. Tasks that used to take hours can now be done in minutes. Problems that required deep research can often be solved with a simple prompt. A few years ago, we used to say: Think of AI as a junior developer. That made sense at the time. But today, I don’t think that’s true anymore. AI still makes mistakes. Sometimes very obvious ones. But it also comes up with solutions that surprise me. Sometimes it finds an approach I wouldn’t have thought of immediately. Sometimes it helps me solve a problem much faster than I could on my own. And honestly, that’s both exciting and a little scary. But the biggest thing AI changed wasn’t how I write software. It changed how I think about my work. For most of my career, I thought I loved writing code. I spent years doing it. At work, on side projects, and whenever I had free time. Then AI became part of my daily workflow. In the last month, I’ve built more projects than I normally would in an entire year. Ideas that had been sitting in my notes for years suddenly became possible. And that’s when I realized something important: I don’t actually love writing code. I love building things. I love taking an idea and turning it into something real. I love creating products, solving problems, and seeing something that only existed in my head become something people can use. Code was simply the tool I used to do that. And now AI is another tool. That’s why I don’t hate it. In many ways, AI has helped me build more than ever before. It helped me revisit old ideas that I never had time to work on. It helped me experiment faster. It even encouraged me to explore areas outside software development, like animation and content creation. And this isn’t just happening to programmers. AI is changing design. It’s changing writing. It’s changing marketing. It’s changing video production. It’s changing almost every creative and technical field. What excites me the most is what this means for people who are just getting started. There are millions of people with great ideas who never studied Computer Science. They never learned Software Engineering. They don’t have years of experience. Before AI, many of those ideas would never leave their notebooks. Now they have a chance to build them. Will every product be great? Of course not. Will some of them break when real users start using them? Absolutely. But for the first time, many people can turn an idea into reality without spending years learning every technical detail first. That doesn’t mean expertise is no longer important. AI removed many of the barriers to getting started. It did not remove the barriers to excellence. Building something is easier. Building something truly great still takes skill, experience, and hard work. The best products will still come from people who understand their craft and continue learning. So how do I feel about AI? Honestly, I feel three things at the same time. I’m excited. I’m impressed. And I’m a little worried. But overall, I’m optimistic. I think AI will help more people create, experiment, and build the ideas they’ve been carrying around for years. And that’s a future I’m happy to be part of. As long as the AI companies don’t eventually make us apply for a visa just to use it.