My old job feels very distant now (Pinecoder, October 15, 2026) is a wonderfully personal reflection on how AI coding agents have transformed the experience of being a software engineer.
This passage particularly resonated with me:
How I work is changing again; we adapt as we must. If I forget about my fear, I instead become very excited.
Over the past two years, I’ve found myself oscillating between excitement and a strange sense of mourning. One moment I’m on a high, thinking about all the incredible things I can build. The next, it’s “Fuck, we’re all going to be extinct in six months.” And then I’m excited all over again.
I’m genuinely excited about what AI coding tools make possible. But at the same time, I’ve been mourning the loss of something I spent decades enjoying: writing code by hand, solving those little puzzles, and experiencing the satisfaction of finally making something work.
I’m a recovering manual coder, slowly coming to terms with the fact that it’s time to move on.
Looking back, writing code by hand now feels a bit like an archaeological excavation. You’re handed a tiny spoon and carefully uncover artifacts, one painstaking piece at a time.
Then someone gives you a shovel. Then a jackhammer. And suddenly you’re operating a massive excavator, moving in minutes what used to take days.
That’s what these new tools feel like to me. I can build 10 or 20 times more than I could before.
And yet, every now and then, I still miss that little spoon.