From AI doomer to handwriting code again

The author reflects on how a personal crisis (being sick) led them to rediscover the joy of writing code manually, rather than relying on AI-driven development tools. They contrast this experience with their previous habit of wasting time on passive entertainment during illness. The article serves as a personal account of shifting from an "AI doomer" mindset back to hands-on, organic coding.

Let no good crisis go to waste -- Winston Churchill 1 I’ve been thinking about the above quote lately. Normally this is applied in political contexts, but I think it does a good job describing the last couple of months for me. For example, today I’ve been sick as a dog probably with that new covid variant . Normally I would be trying to speed things along by rotting my brain on YouTube or other pointless entertainment. While there was some of that, I was really surprised to find myself wanting to write some code for a project I’m working on And this wasn’t Agentic Engineering™. I was enjoying writing good old-fashioned, organic, artisanal, free-range, handwritten code. I knew I had to summarize at least for myself how exactly I got here.