Let's face it, we write less and less code every day. Software engineering changed for good. That ship has sailed.
And while we swing from "oh no, I'm going to lose my job soon" to "this clanker has no idea, of course I'm absolutely right", depending on the size and complexity of what we're building, we are not noticing what we are really losing.
The Flow
This one's short. Mostly because, despite growing up reading books, most of you now doomscroll your social media drug of choice and probably lost the attention span for more than a few lines of text. So if you made it this far, congrats!
What I actually want to talk about is something different, and honestly, a bigger problem than we think.
Those of you who enjoy programming will get this, back in the pre-AI days, coding felt like a craft. You'd have a problem, understand it, design a solution, go through the specs... and finally, the rewarding part, writing the code.
That moment was special because you'd already thought about it. You could see all the moving parts in your mind and you knew what you were about to build. You'd start typing, and soon enough, you'd enter that magical state a lot of people call "the flow".
It's that pure focus where distractions fade, you're deeply immersed in what you're doing, and time kind of dissolves. It's not about finishing or releasing your project (though that's nice too). It's about that "in the zone" feeling.
But that was the past
Now we just prompt.
It's rare for AI to nail it on the first try. If it does, it's because you wrote a hyper-specific prompt, if not you'll probably have to reword again and again as you catch tiny details that are off. We all love longer context windows, but at some point the slop written starts to multiply.
Sometimes I just bail out of the AI loop and start coding manually, especially when i get tired of arguing with a tool about something I already know how to do.
If you actually use AI at work, you know most of those YouTube demo projects don't even come close to the complexity of a real production codebase.
Anyway, back to the flow
We're losing it.
It's the most automatic, immersive part of our job, and it's slowly disappearing. Sure, AI keeps getting better, and it'll eventually handle more and more of what we used to do manually. But beyond that whole debate, losing the flow means losing a huge part of the joy of programming.
Instead of that deep focus where ideas turn into working code, we now live in a loop of reviews, prompts, tweaks, and retries.
I'm not sure where this is going. Maybe we'll learn to find that sense of flow at higher levels, when designing systems, architecting solutions, or abstracting problems. That can work for some.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that the old way felt better. It was more satisfying. We're removing a crucial part of the craft, a part that made you care deeply about the quality of what you built, as you shaped it, line by line of code.
And don't get me wrong, I’m not against AI. It's an incredible tool. I use it every day. But I can't help noticing that the more we rely on it, the less time we actually spend inside the problem.
We need to regain attention. Or maybe we're doomed to trade joy for efficiency, satisfaction for speed. Maybe the flow was the price we paid for progress.
Anyway, if you're reading this, maybe close your tab, open your editor, and code something today. No AI, no autocomplete. Just you, the problem, and that beautiful silence of being completely lost in it.
Be water my friend.