I’m a builder

I loved coding. At least I thought so. I used to stay up long into the night despite having to wake up early the next day, just to finish this one feature. Compile, test, fix this last bug, compile, test, now fix it for real. And then stay up one hour longer to give it the final finish - maybe the text looks better one font size larger?

I know there are people who love coding. They love solving the little puzzles you need to solve along the way. Like sudokus. But I always found these to be necessary hurdles, not the real joy in my job and hobby. When I learned about sudokus I did more and more difficult ones for a day, and after I understood how that worked, I lost interest and found them boring.

When ChatGPT came along, the little puzzles were solved for me, and just the levels higher up were for me to solve. So, no more boilerplate code, no more “keep track of this var while iterating that one”. Instead, I could concentrate on the greater structure. How the different components interact with each other. Interfaces and architecture. And I noticed that I got more productive at work and did more programming in my free time as a hobby.

Then coding agents came along. They were astonishing and impressive, but also stupid and slow. But I “vibe coded” my first app, not because I wanted to do more coding, but because I needed it. My guitar tab editor has not a single handwritten line of code, and the code structure and quality is probably very bad (I never looked too deeply into it and I never cared), but this is the only guitar tab editor that works as I needed it in the moment I had to tab a song for a band practice the next day. Yes, I spent 4 hours vibe coding an app so I could save maybe 10 minutes (in contrast to just using a text editor) tabbing that song. But it got me: “Wouldn’t it be nice to also have that one specific feature?”

This was fun. I did not think about algorithms, I did not think about code structure, I did not think about software architecture. I thought about the thing I wanted to create.

That was the time people started loudly complaining about AI slop and unmaintainable vibe-coded garbage. Open source maintainers complained about stupid PRs and bogus bug reports. I understood. The software quality was bad, and it was unmaintainable. But it was also “there”, and it would not have been there if I would have needed to reserve multiple days of family, work, fitness, sleep or even other-hobby time for it. So: yes, vibe coding is bad, I have a guilty conscience doing it, but it was just for me and I really enjoy the process.

Then the models got better. But more important, the tooling got better. The interplay of harness and model got much better. And suddenly, the quality of the resulting code got better. Open source maintainers complained about high-quality bug reports. I felt safer using coding agents at work. I double checked, a few weeks later I only single checked. Now I just check when it matters. And I feel so productive. Screw these studies saying that productivity gains are just imagined. I am more productive.

Now I had the fortunate chance to be gifted unlimited Codex tokens for 4 weeks. And that’s when it finally got me. I now see what’s really making me love “coding”: It’s the dopamine rushes you get from bringing a piece of software, a product, to life step by step. The one hour I stayed up longer to give a feature the final polish - that’s the main part of my development work now. It felt like an addiction, piling up prompt upon prompt.

Only now I understand that I never loved coding for the code itself. I love the process of building something. That has always been the case, but now the part I loved most about my profession is the only thing that is left. Maybe you have higher expectations than me and agentic coding is not up to your standards, but will that still be the case in 2 years? In 5?

I’m convinced that even in 5 years, AI will not come up with a product idea of its own (at least not a good one). And even if it does, fine, it’s not taking away the joy of creating something step by step, piece by piece. To turn an idea into a script, transform it into a library, build a CLI for it, a GUI around it, add features and polish all of this until it turns into something even greater than the initial idea I had in mind. That was always the stuff that kept me awake one hour longer.

I think I’m a builder. Coding was just the first tool that let me build.