Double click the lamp or press L anywhere on the page to switch the lamp on or off. While the lamp is on, press and hold for 2 seconds to overload the filament; keyboard users can hold Space. Refresh to repair a broken filament.

The year I stopped writing code

I stopped writing code before I could explain why. This is the closest I've come to an answer.

2 min read0 views

The last serious project I worked on was mostly code I did not write.

I would open the editor in the morning, read what the model had produced, fix the parts that did not compile, and ask for another version. The work was real. It was also strangely weightless. At the end of the day I had shipped something, but I could not point to a line and say I had made it.

The last project

I did not decide to quit that day. I just noticed, over a few months, that I was opening the editor less for the joy of it and more because it was open.

The part of programming I liked was never the syntax. It was the middle of a hard problem, when the shape of it finally clicks and the code almost writes itself. You lose track of time. You forget to eat. When it works, you feel like you solved a small crime.

That feeling did not disappear because the tools got better. It disappeared because the work changed around the tools. The job stopped being about solving the problem. It became about describing the problem well enough for something else to solve. Describing is a skill. It is just not the skill I spent years building.

I tried to stay. I told myself that every field changes, that the people who adapt are the ones who last. I believed some of it. But there is a difference between learning a new tool and watching the part of the job you loved get handed to a text box. I could learn the new tool. I could not make myself care about it.

The decision

So I stopped. I did not delete my GitHub. I did not swear off computers. I just stopped pretending that the next project would feel like the old ones.

People ask if I regret it. I do not. I regret the years I spent waiting for the work to feel right again. Leaving earlier would have been kinder to me.

There is a version of this story where I stay, learn the new tools, and become very good at prompting. I am sure that person exists. I just did not want to be him. The job was no longer the thing I had wanted to do when I was younger, and pretending otherwise felt like a waste of time I could not get back.

What I do now

I still write code. Small things, mostly. A script to rename files. A page for this site. The kind of code that has no deadline and no one to answer to. It turns out I did not stop liking programming. I stopped liking what it had become as a job.

Last week I spent an evening fixing a bug on a page nobody visits. It was the happiest I had been at a keyboard in months. That is the honest answer. I stopped because the work I could do was no longer the work I wanted to do.