Last month I finished one of the largest side project of my career — an open-source framework, docs, demo, the works. Eight-years-ago me would have floated for a week.

Instead I felt… fine. Mildly pleased. Like I'd closed a well-run Jira ticket.

Here's the thing: a big part of the code was written with AI assistance. I designed everything — the concepts, the failure semantics, what the demo had to prove — and I reviewed everything. The thinking was mine. But the hours of grinding, the stupid bugs at midnight, the twentieth test run — those are gone. And apparently that's where the feeling lived.

I'm not against this. I don't actually want to hand-write boilerplate again, the same way I don't want to hand-wash clothes. But nobody warned me that the satisfaction was coupled to the struggle, and that automating one would automate away the other.

The best analogy I've found: it's the difference between cooking a meal and ordering a very good delivery. The food might even be better.…