I miss the grind of writing software before AI

[mrprincerawat]

I learned HTML at 10, spent an entire summer figuring out how to link webpages together. At 14 I built a CNN-based security camera system for a school science fair — took months, 14-16 hour days, and I had no idea what I was doing when I started.

Today I told Claude to fine-tune an LLM on my X posts. Prompt to finished model with a web UI in 30 minutes. I was impressed and unsatisfied at the same time. I achieved my goal but learned nothing — I don't even know which libraries it used.

I'm not anti-AI. I use it for everything now. But the old way of writing software — the googling, the failed experiments, being stuck on a bug for days — that's where the actual learning happened. Every feature forced you to understand the codebase, read docs, weigh tradeoffs.

I just wish the 14-year-old me had something left to figure out on his own.

Link to the full article: https://open.substack.com/pub/princerawat/p/software-in-the-age-of-ai?r=yts8r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

[txredking]

Yes I too miss the days where I could walk 6 miles into to town to go the general store. The grind of making every step myself, learning the path to avoid the mud, the rock in my shoe that just wouldn’t leave. Good times. Cars suck.

Kidding aside. The human brain has unsurprisingly a huge attachment to effort and equates it with perceived value of a process and outcome.

Whether one spent 20 years developing a general cure for cancer or just magicked one into existence right now does not change the immense value many could gain from it.

Writing software was never about the value to the writer it was about the value to the user.

In the past, one could care less about the user to an extent because they simply enjoyed the process or “grind” of building. There were signs like the engineer that went off to fix a bug and took 2 weeks rebuilding some part of some system delaying the overall feature or product release. The excuse being that it was of course necessary and good development takes time.

Now one may be able to fix that bug in minutes and anything that takes longer than an hour with AI is more seriously questioned as necessary. Sometimes it still is but more often than not that engineer simply wanted to build, to grind on a problem at the cost of potential user value.

[mrprincerawat]

You're right, effort ≠ value. I've caught myself spending days "perfecting" things that had zero impact on the user just because the grind felt productive. The post wasn't about AI being bad, I use it daily and wouldn't go back. Just a personal observation that the grind, even the unnecessary parts, is what taught me to build in the first place.

[mrprincerawat]

idk why the above link is not clickable: https://open.substack.com/pub/princerawat/p/software-in-the-...

[andsoitis]

ugh. nothing prevents you from writing "software the old way"

you have agency.

[mrprincerawat]

you're right, nothing stops me. i still can. but that's not really the point.

when everyone around you is shipping in hours what used to take weeks, the pressure to keep up changes how you approach things. you know the answer is one prompt away. that changes your brain. it's like saying you can still use a paper map when GPS exists, technically true, but you won't, and you know it.

the post isn't about going back. it's about acknowledging that something shifted in how we learn by building.

[JohnFen]

You could look for a position in a company where genAI use is not so prevalent. They're still very common and do very interesting work.

[mrprincerawat]

Yeah that's fair, those teams probably produce better engineers in the long run too.

[sinenomine]

Try harder problems