2026-03-12 I made this! TLDR: I gain a lot of fulfillment by making things. I don't consider things built by others at my request to be made by me, and are therefore much less fulfilling. And then I feel sad. This article starts strong and then heads off into the weeds. There have been a lot of pieces written about what I'll call "the AI dev schism" And I think there's a lot of truth to those: Loss of the craft, coding things by hand Loss of low-level problem-solving Loss of fun Gain of high-level problem-solving Getting through back-burnered projects Gain of fun We'll just grant those as being correct for various developers. But there's something else that troubles me. Backstory before we get going, so you can get a better idea of my perspective: I'm a Gen-X hacker; I cut my teeth 80s microcomputer era. I hold a BS and MS in CS. I have 20 years industry experience, (Hewlett-Packard, startups, cofounder, Activision, etc.). CS instructor for the last 9 years, now at Oregon State University-Cascades.…