Writing Code Is Fun

Writing Code Is Fun I became a software engineer because writing code is fun. Thinking through hard problems, designing elegant solutions, seeing the things you’ve built working for the first time... these moments are all deeply satisfying, so why in the world would I ever surrender them to AI? I know the arguments for using AI to write code; I hear them constantly from all levels of the tech industry. I’m told that it’ll make me more productive. I could use Copilot to write boilerplate or unit tests for me so I can focus on more creative work. I could use Claude Code as a sounding board or planning tool for complex features, refactors, or other projects. I could run and coordinate multiple concurrent agents and have them write and maintain an entire application for me from scratch. I could do all of these things, but I won’t. Writing code is just too much fun! When people use generative AI to produce images, videos, music, etc., they like to style themselves as “AI artists”. But they’re not artists. Even if you decide to be generous and call the final piece “art”, they’re commissioning that art, no matter how detailed or iterative they are with their prompts. They are, at best, art directors. Likewise, the more you rely on AI to produce code for you, the less of a software engineer you become. Instead of spending your time solving problems and writing code, you spend your time reviewing AI-generated code. Maybe you’re relying on AI for code review, too, in which case you’re mostly just writing requirements, determining how best to format them into a prompt, and maybe managing AI agents. When someone’s primary job is to figure out and write requirements or manage the entities who are actually producing the code, we don’t usually call that person a software engineer. We call them a product or project manager. This isn’t to say that it’s bad to be a product or project manager! We sometimes need product and project managers just like the art world sometimes needs people to commission and direct art. I’ve reluctantly tried various AI coding tools over the last few years and, while they have become more impressive, they remain deeply unfun. Writing code is, of course, only one duty of being a software engineer, but where code is concerned, there are two primary responsibilities: writing it and reviewing it. For people who enjoy being a software engineer, I think it’s safe to say that most of them would agree that writing the code is more fun than reviewing it, so I ask again: why cede the fun parts of your job to AI? Just to chase the increasingly demanding productivity requirements of the ruling class? Just to produce a bit more in a shorter amount of time? The thing is, in all my attempts to use AI coding tools, they’ve never actually enabled me to move faster. They initially felt faster because the tangible output came...

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