Maybe I Like The Misery

I absolutely LOVE programming. I admit it. Sometimes, for the sake of it, I’ll just write functions for things that absolutely do not need functions – just because I like the abstraction of it.

I recently decided to spice up my own personal website, because I thought it’d be good to own my own spot and be able to manage that directly. And, of course, nobody is doing it alone these days – I spooled up my (paid) AI subscription and decided to see just how quickly I could get through teaching myself a new technology and get a website built.

There are two massive takeaways:

1. The speed was absolutely off the charts, I had three environments and a productionised personal website, fully branded and with content, in less than five hours development time from scratch. It probably could've gone faster, but I forced it to use NextJS and Sanity - in an effort to ensure I was still "coding".
2. I learned absolutely nothing. I could potentially reproduce what I did easily enough, but I couldn’t honestly say I really understood the architecture.

In spite of these two points, something stood out more: I don’t like coding with AI.

Now, let me be clear, I am not not going to use AI as my skills and career progress. It’s simply too powerful to ignore. I think, for the same output, it may have been eight to ten hours of development without AI – meaning I saved potentially 50% of the total development time. For a business, you cannot hope to articulate ‘value’ more effectively than that. An effective doubling of productivity.

That being said, though, I realised towards the end that I’d written almost no code at all. It had conceived, designed and written the whole thing. I had effectively copy-pasted my way to success (with about an hour's worth of debugging version incompatibilities and one particularly grim deployment issue).

There are other problems, too. I have a fairly good grasp of the notion of security, so I have to say that I was baffled by its suggestion that I could store my env.local file (a file storing sensitive credentials, etc) in the Git repo. I was even more baffled when, at the point of exasperation with an outstanding bug, it suggested I downgrade the version of a NodeJS package to one with significant security concerns. Yikes!

In spite of the productivity increase, the security issues and the lack of learning – it was the fact that I’d written no code that’s stuck with me. I imagined all the promises of rapid prototyping and development and wonder if this is how all the old first principles developers felt when much more user-friendly languages like C# and Python appeared to abstract away the highly technical challenges of languages like C or C++.

I was reminded of the Father Ted episode when Mrs Doyle is being sold the “Teamaster”, a machine that ‘takes the misery out of making tea’:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nDsldY5HZ_c

It turns out that I, in fact, like the misery.

Nevertheless, the productivity boost was undeniable and, if I manage to decouple myself from the fear of losing my chance to write the odd function, the opportunities to work like this seem endless. The code was nowhere near accurate enough to replace a human developer itself, but it was clear that I should be able to shuttle through projects in a way that will keep me deeply entertained – so all’s well that ends well.

Check out the website here, although, there's a decent chance you're already on it - depending on where you're reading this!

Definitely still like the misery, though.