The happiest I've ever been

In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is.

You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.

Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.

Csikszentmihalyi's flow research[0] basically predicts the author's whole arc here. People are happiest during structured, challenging activities with clear goals and tight feedback loops. Coaching middle schoolers in a gym hits every condition on his list.

Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.

[0] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience if you haven't read it

Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in:

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To get a square on the screen. And then I was slightly older boy destroying my dad's precious slides for his presentation by formatting the entire disk accidentally while installing Red Hat Linux 8 Psyche from CDs my dad got at the bazaar. I was so excited for Shrike to come out the next year.

Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C.

Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today.

Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper.

Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.

These blog posts are fascinating to read. I don't have a personal blog, but if I did I'm sure I would've written a very similar post as I've been wrestling with similar thoughts over the last few weeks. I have the distinct sense that I will look back on February 2026 as an inflection point, where AI crossed over from being an interesting parlor trick to something that fundamentally and irreversibly altered what I do day-to-day. It's bittersweet, for sure - it feels inevitable that the craft of software development that I've loved for years will be seen as an archaic relic at some point in the not too distant future. It may be several years yet before the impact is broadly felt (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years) but this train doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. This post was a helpful reminder that who I am is not defined by the code I write (or don't write) - there's so much more to life than code.

The moving tiny rectangles framing is interesting, it gets to the heart of why I find all the anti-AI takes so difficult to comprehend. If you never made any effort to connect what you do with what value is added in real life, then it's no wonder better tooling is leaving you lost. Programming (other than code golf) has always been an implementation detail for solving problems IRL.

The latest developments in digital culture are somehow more frustrating than anything I saw in the previous 26 years. Experience is replaced by prompts. Taste perfected over the years with defaults.

I'm not afraid of competition with AI-driven competitors — I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics.

Perhaps this is indeed a good moment to switch to offline.

Thank you for sharing your inspiring example.

Isn‘t it ironic that we software devs laughed for decades when we automated other people‘s work with our code - „it‘s called progress, deal with it, dinosaur!“ But now we see that a meteor might have hit our planet too.

My new goals are: Seek beauty, Seek happiness and Don't make people sad.

With a lot of effort, it's working. However, I soon discovered the last goal was the most difficult. Long story short, I keep my mouth shut a lot more. I feared, at first, that this would make me feel I was compromising myself somehow. But I also discovered that sometimes when I shared my opinion, knowing it was correct, I would later regret how I made that person feel. Conclusion on their feelings: There's nothing to be gained by hurting their feelings when they weren't ready to hear the message. Double success, I'm still happy and I didn't cause them any sadness.

Personally I want to have my cake and eat it here. Tech has amazing potential to make the world a better place to live in and genuinely bring people together. The crowning achievement of AI so far to me is not Claude Code, it’s AlphaFold. I find the documentary DM released about developing it inspiring both as a technology story but also a team achieving things together that make the world better. I want to see more of that and hope I can steer my career in that direction.

OP might love tech, but he sure doesn’t sound like he loved the craft.

Describing it as sitting in front of a rectangle, moving all rectangles around is so reductive.

I honestly don’t understand how anyone has the time and energy to be a coach while working a full-time job. My kids practice three times a week, and usually have games on both Saturday and Sunday - sometimes several hours away. Just getting them to practices and games often feels exhausting to me - I can’t imagine all the planning and scheduling that goes on behind the scenes, or having to show up and actually run things all the time.

Hats off to youth coaches - you make a huge difference in kids’ lives.

> But improving each kid’s skill and confidence was the real mission. Instead of my desk job, I’d be asking Clayton how we could make Corey¹ use his body for rebounding. Or how Monte’s soccer skills could be best leveraged. Or how Evan, our best player, could become an on-court leader.

I wonder how software development would be like if we had coaches like this.

A lot of people aren't actually chasing leisure or money as much as they're chasing irreplaceability

I use my spare time helping kids at a FIRST robotics team. It's fun.

My boss is a technologist. Adding computers to problems makes him happy. Getting people out of the way makes him happy.

I’m an IC (no direct reports) and I’m a “humanist”. Helping people become better and more skilled makes me happy, in the same way the coach here got joy from the goofball making a great play.

On paper we should probably switch jobs. I have way more technical depth, but the crucial difference is that he is more goal-driven, better at managing upward, and more in tune with political trends.

I coached sports for all 3 of my kids. Great times.

One year, I had a superior athlete on my youth football team. A foot shorter than everybody else and skinny as a stick, the boy had the gift of speed. He’d run like the wind, arms and legs flailing wildly. It looked like he’d cover distance twice as fast as the other kids.

I took full advantage of the situation. Every game, I started by getting wonder boy the ball until we’d racked up enough points to be comfortable. Then the others got turns. We went the regular season undefeated and I began to convince myself I really had coaching talent. Maybe I could help out at the high school, or the local college! The sky was the limit, I was a natural.

Then came the championship game, also against an undefeated team. Their team had a wonderboy, too. He was actually faster than my speedster!

Predictably, their coach played it just like I had. Through superior speed, they took a healthy lead early in the game and never let it go.

I enjoyed all my years of youth coaching, but that year was just magical. Right up ‘till the last game. It was a memorable year.

> For years, you’ve sat in front of a rectangle, moving tinier rectangles, only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better.

In response to this I would say that being in the industry comes with a lot of learned role-playing, and if you are no longer happy role-playing your job in one way, throw it entirely out and find a new path.

I "move rectangles on screen" to pay for Kids and House. That's what makes me happy, and jobs I enjoy don't. There's no wake up call necessary.

I just wrote my own blog post thinking about this. I guess alot of us feel kind of weird right now.

OP might love tech, but he sure doesn’t sound like he loved the craft.

Describing it as sitting in front of a rectangle, moving all rectangles around is so reductive.

Exactly, basically then every desk or office job means sitting next to a box?

I don’t even know what he’s referring to. What are the rectangles he’s “moving around”? And couldn’t you say the same thing about all writers, for example?

The one downside to the Internet and social media is that truly useless takes can get much more traction than they deserve.

Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.

[0] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience if you haven't read it

My new goals are: Seek beauty, Seek happiness and Don't make people sad.

Hats off to youth coaches - you make a huge difference in kids’ lives.

I coached sports for all 3 of my kids. Great times.

Then came the championship game, also against an undefeated team. Their team had a wonderboy, too. He was actually faster than my speedster!

Predictably, their coach played it just like I had. Through superior speed, they took a healthy lead early in the game and never let it go.

I enjoyed all my years of youth coaching, but that year was just magical. Right up ‘till the last game. It was a memorable year.

I "move rectangles on screen" to pay for Kids and House. That's what makes me happy, and jobs I enjoy don't. There's no wake up call necessary.

In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is.

Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.

There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.

The entire zeitgeist of software technology revolves around the assumption that making things efficient, easy, and quick is inherently good. Most people who are "sitting in front of rectangles, moving tiny rectangles" have sometime grandiose notions of their works' importance; we're making X work better for the good of Y to enable Z. Abstract shit like that.

No man, you're just making X easier. If the world needs more X, fine. If not, woops.

The detachment from reality makes it all too easy to deceive yourself into thinking "hey this actually helps people".

Also, I think for a good number of people, their first job out of college is oftentimes one they will look fondly back on because they've just finished ~17 years of school, have financial independence with a salary, and are still bright-eyed about all the possibilities.

Similar for me. Happiest I've ever been was when I was an assistant guide for birthright Israel.

My job was to make sure the 40 kids that came were having a good time. When your job is to make others happy, you become happy.

Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in:

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Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C.

We're retiring later and later, working more per week, purchasing power is going down, quality of goods is going down, life expectancy is decreasing, child mortality is increasing, teenage suicide is increasing, illiteracy is increasing, &c.

But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!

Learning the lower layer felt like earning access to the next level of reality. You had to understand the constraints to make anything happen at all. Now it increasingly feels like you can just describe the intent and skip straight to the outcome.

>I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.

The future appears now to be: "Young kids wont have this sense of wonder, or control of the machine, anymore. And a whole lot less will now have a career in IT either".

And simultaneously we built this huge machine that gives us everything we need to survive on software we don't understand, ready to have it abducted by people who have never done a (positively) productive thing in their lives seemingly any moment now. Monkeys with computers.

I thought for a moment you were serious, but the line about us doing wonderful things with tech gave it away as satire. Yeah no. Best we can do is technofascism and surveillance state. Glad you happy though!

> (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years)

We definitely saw some kind of non-linear step function jump in quality around the beginning of the year - it's hard to express how good Claude opus/sonnet 4.6 is now. However, I wonder if we're going to see the same kind of improvement from here? It's kind of like we got to the 80% point but the next 20% is going to be a lot harder/take longer than that first 80% (pareto principle). Also, as more and more code out there is AI generated it's going to be like the snake eating it's own tail. Training models on AI generated code doesn't seem like it will lead to improvements.

One part of me tries to resist and tell you that our craft is not becoming an archaic relic, the other half already knows you‘re right. We just can‘t put the ghost back into the bottle and now‘s a good time to re-calibrate your passion.

Carpentry has always been an implementation detail for making furniture. They have been able to purchase flat-pack chairs for all of their lives, but for some reason there are people who learn this skill and have fun slowly making things that factories already make at scale. A subset of those people have made lucrative businesses out of the very human craft that is carpentry, and are able to create custom pieces on-demand that you could never justify retooling a factory to create.

It is okay to view code as a means to an end. I disagree, preferring to treat code as craft, and striving for better systems that are easy to understand, maintain and extend. And I think that's the source of our disconnect; deeper than one's opinion about AI is one's value of human skill and the effect that has on the output. Maybe I overvalue it, and maybe creating code "manually" is going to look more like carpentry in the future; but you cannot expect to convince a skilled carpenter that an IKEA chair is just as good and accomplishes the same task.

The programming itself is the reward for people who love doing it. It attracts the sort of detail-oriented thinkers who enjoy the doing and don't frame everything in terms of "value added."

AI is attractive to the sorts of people who have their secretary write their Christmas cards.

I think all it means when we say 'solve problems in real life' is just the stuff you have to do that tooling can't abstract you away from any more.

The sharp end of the debate now is around what exactly that means in the LLM world. It's extremely unclear what exactly the new level of abstraction unlocked is, or at least how general/leaky it is.

There's obviously just the stance of enjoying the craft, and that's one thing off to the side, but I think the major source of conflict for those who are more oriented towards living in the top level of abstraction (i.e. what you can do in real life) is between some of the claims being pushed about said level of abstraction and what many still experience in actual reality using these tools.

If you see programming purely as a means to an end, then yeah, I get this perspective. But to many there is enjoyment in the _doing_ and the craft of it beyond the end result. It’s why people get into woodworking or knitting despite the fact that it’s much cheaper, faster, and easier to buy a table or a sweater than to make one yourself. Value is subjective, and for some the value of code is not primarily in what you can sell to others.

If you've never made any effort to connect what you do to the underlying mathematics, then no wonder you think it's all an "automatible" implementation detail, despite three decades of the industry trying and failing.

The latest developments in digital culture are somehow more frustrating than anything I saw in the previous 26 years. Experience is replaced by prompts. Taste perfected over the years with defaults.

I'm not afraid of competition with AI-driven competitors — I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics.

Perhaps this is indeed a good moment to switch to offline.

Thank you for sharing your inspiring example.

>I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics.

This has been happening for at least a decade now, no help from LLMs needed.

I started programming when I was eleven years old and I’m now in my 40s. I have no idea what to do with the rest of my life.

I certainly wasn't laughing, plight of a fellow man is nothing positive. But this is usually so abstracted and distant from one's work that unless you have somebody close who gets literally hit themselves is just abstract movement beyond horizon due to myriad forces and random events.

> For years, you’ve sat in front of a rectangle, moving tinier rectangles, only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better.

> only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better

Teams are already using AI to scout opponents and plan game strategy. IDK how much that will ever happen at the youth level because they generally don't keep detailed stats at that age but it will be coming to high school sports for sure, if it isn't already being used.

I just wrote my own blog post thinking about this. I guess alot of us feel kind of weird right now.

Yeah, I decided to become a "professional" musician a few months ago after quitting my last tech job. I'm not amazing, but I've got some places to play, and I'm starting to give lessons, etc.

It's not an easy job, but I feel something I haven't felt in a long time as a software developer: fulfillment and contentment. Best of luck to anyone on a similar journey.

I feel similarly. Being laid off and doing job search recently got me thinking about switching to become an electrician. I don't mind starting over and lower wage, but mortgage and family depending on me still hold me off.