I'm having fun

I am writing more code than ever. And it’s not even my day job.

Actually, that’s not correct. I’m not writing more code. I’m building more software than ever. The code is being written for me by an extremely confident, untiring partner.

And I’m having a great time.

As Armin Ronacher puts it, “the puzzle is still there, what’s gone is the labour”.

I’ve always been a product-focused technologist. I like building things for a purpose. The unrivalled joy I got from being a developer was when I made something appear on the screen that did something useful.

When I started building things for others, the addiction was strong. I’m not an engineer who got much of a thrill from implementing a complex algorithm, or knowing a language inside out (although the fluency of writing code, of rapidly manipulating code in vim, that I do miss). I love the architecture, the system design, the product thinking.

And now I get to do all of that at a pace I’ve never experienced before. I rewrote my open source Obsidian plugin, Flow, in a weekend. It took 6 months to get it there originally. I built an app for my mum that takes medical documents and extracts conditions, actions, and advice, and presents them in an easy to understand way. In one day.

I spin up proof of concepts in minutes. I shared an end-of-year review at my workplace that I wrote as a website – it was too big for an email.

I’m shipping things rather than spending 99% of the time writing code. The barrier to getting something out there has diminished significantly. You try more things. Silly ideas aren’t left on a someday list, they appear and come to life.

I love programming ESP32s and displays. One of my side projects is the Bindicator. The flash/test cycle was quite slow. I asked Claude to build me a display emulator so I could test animations out rapidly. It just did it. Before LLMs I would never have gone down that path without a ton of spare time. Which I don’t have.

I’m more present when building things. I’m writing this while code is being generated for three of my projects.

I can do other work. I don’t need to stay in the zone. Remaining in a flow state has been a challenge for me throughout my life, and my 4 year old son joyfully interrupts me whenever he can (and I love that he does).

I’m having fun.