Coding Used to Be Hard. That Was the Point.

I've been in tech for over 10 years. I've been coding for a WHILE. And I'm going to say something that a lot of developers are feeling right now but nobody wants to admit.

I miss when coding was hard.

And I don't mean hard like "oh it takes a long time to learn." I mean hard like you could spend THREE HOURS looking for a bug and it turns out you had an extra curly bracket. One character. Three hours. Gone. And you know what? That frustration is what made coding feel like a craft. That's what made it feel like something real.

I'm not the only one feeling this either.

Because they felt it too.

Your Code Used to Be Delicate

When I was learning JavaScript, one extra parenthesis? Broken. Missing a comma in an object? Broken. Python with the spacing? You literally had to be precise with your SPACES or your code wouldn't run. Your SPACES. That's how delicate it was.

And every developer reading this right now knows EXACTLY what I'm talking about. You've stared at your screen for hours looking for that one thing that's breaking everything. Then you find it. It's something SO small. A missing semicolon. A misspelled variable name. And that moment when you finally find it? That was the high. That was the rush. Writing a complicated function from scratch? Building out nested loops and actually getting them to work? That took REAL thought. You had to know WHY something worked, not just THAT it worked.

That feeling is gone now.

That's it right there. It's not as FUN anymore.

The New Struggle Isn't the Same

Now look, I'm not saying there's no struggle anymore. There IS a struggle. But it's completely different. The struggle now is... is my prompt doing too much? Is my prompt even doing the RIGHT thing? I'll tell AI to do literally ONE thing and it changes ten other things I didn't ask it to touch. And now I gotta figure out what it broke.

But it's NOT the same. You're not hard coding anything anymore. You're not thinking through the logic yourself. You're not being precise with YOUR code. You're being precise with your WORDS. And yeah, prompt engineering is a skill. But it doesn't hit the same way.

It's like if you're a chef and your whole career you've been chopping vegetables, seasoning meat, timing everything perfectly. That's YOUR craft. Then someone gives you a robot that does all the cooking. Now your job is just to describe the dish really well. The food still comes out good. Maybe even better. But are you still a chef?

Being asked to wait in the corner. That's exactly what it feels like.

I Built Something Amazing and I Don't Feel Like I Built It

In the last six months, I've built seven AI projects. My latest one has a three layer memory architecture system built in TypeScript. Facts get validated on write. They get auto categorized. When something contradicts an old fact, the old one gets superseded, not deleted. Identity facts like your name and birthday? Pinned permanently. It's genuinely one of the most complex things I've ever been a part of building.

And I say "a part of" because I don't feel like I BUILT it. I'm proud of it. Really proud. But Claude Code built it. Opus built it. Cursor helped build it. They couldn't have done it without me. I was telling it what to do. Correcting it when it went wrong. Making the architectural decisions.

But even knowing all that? I still feel like I'm cheating. I feel like I'm lying to the world when I say I built it. Because I didn't write the code line by line with my own hands. You lose that moment where you ship something and you KNOW, deep in your gut, that every single piece came from you. That feeling is gone. Now you're more like a product manager than a developer. And that's a weird thing to say when your whole identity was built on being a CODER.

Senior Devs Are Losing Their Edge Too

I have friends who are ELITE developers. People who can code laps around me before I even finish my first one. And even THEY are telling me they don't feel like developers anymore.

When you use AI to code everything for the last few months, you start to lose that sharpness. That muscle memory. That instinct you used to have when you'd look at code and just KNOW something was off. That's fading. For everybody.

Fifteen YEARS. And the thing that made him love his job just wasn't there anymore.

I have a friend who was at GitHub right before they got acquired by Microsoft. That level of developer. They still don't use AI. I would never say they'd get replaced because they're genuinely that talented. But in the world of AI? They write code slower than even an average developer would now. Because an average developer with Claude Code or Copilot is just faster. That's the reality.

The Teach Back Problem

Here's the part that really bothers me. If someone sat me down right now and said explain this function line by line... I couldn't always do it. Not for everything. When you use Claude Code, you don't see everything. AI writes SO much code. You're giving clear direction, reviewing the output, but you're not always absorbing every single line.

That bothers me. Because I WANT to understand what I built. I want to know WHY something works so I can make it better next time.

So I built my own study app. I input the important files from my codebase and it tests me. Quizzes me on things I might have forgotten during the build. Reminds me of implementation details so I actually retain them. Because I don't want to just ship things. I want to LEARN from what I ship.

The fact that I had to build a separate app just to teach myself my own code tells you everything about where we are right now.

But Here's What I Gained

I'd be lying if I said AI didn't make me better in a lot of ways.

I'm a front end developer. That's my lane. But because of AI I can actually work with SQL databases now. Really intricate queries I could have NEVER written before. I can understand audio architecture. I can learn the differences between a 3072 dimension embedding versus a 1536 or a 512 for different use cases. Things that would have taken me YEARS to get into on my own.

That's the trade off. I lost the precision of hand writing every line. But I gained the ability to build things I never could have imagined. Things I never would have even TRIED because they were too far outside my skill set.

Wild stat about myself. I code MORE on vacation than when I'm at work. And I code a LOT at work. That's how much the friction has been removed. Nothing holds me back anymore except money for tokens. That's LITERALLY the only constraint now. Not skill. Not time. Not knowledge. Just tokens.

So Where Does That Leave Us

Coding used to be hard. And that WAS the point. The difficulty was the craft. The frustration was the teacher. The struggle was what made you feel like you EARNED the title of developer.

Now the struggle is different. You're not debugging a missing semicolon at 2 AM anymore. You're reviewing AI output and making sure it didn't hallucinate something into your production code. Different kind of hard. But if I'm being real? It doesn't feel the same. And I don't think it ever will.

But don't be discouraged. You can now learn in months what used to take five to ten years. You can build things that used to be completely out of reach.

And this shift isn't gradual.

We're IN it right now.

Coding used to be hard. That was the point. But the new point is what you BUILD with it. Adjust, adapt, and change. Or fall behind.

Chris Dabatos

Developer Advocate and content creator based in Las Vegas. He builds things with AI and writes about what breaks.