I miss coding.

It’s 2023, I want a new website. Someone I went on a date with admitted they had stalked my website — at the time it was totally work-focused — so why not let people tell me who they are first?

So I build it. I design it and write pretty much all of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript by hand. It’s a cute idea and it works great. It also took about 8 hours, mostly because I am not a good designer.

Now it’s 2026, and I need a blog. I do some rudimentary research, equip Claude with Playwright and a frontend design skill, and tell it to make me one. Then I tell Claude to QA it, and then to play UI/UX designer and make the design better. While it’s working, I’m honestly not sure what to do. Sometimes I sit and wait. Sometimes I look up new ways to make Claude even better. Sometimes I just mindlessly scroll.

When the feature is ready, Claude commits my code and writes my PR. Claude reviews its own code with 5 sub-Claudes. I press a variant of “Yes” and “Yes, and don’t ask me again” for what feels like forever. I run out of tokens. I decide that I don’t need this review, it’s a static blog. I merge.

I’m done in record time. But I miss coding. I miss the rush of writing 10 lines of JavaScript and seeing things change color or shape on the page. I miss debugging, even. I miss using Chrome DevTools to get the font-size juuust right.

If I miss coding so much, why am I ruthelessly trying to automate it, even when building things for fun?

When my old job is completely gone, what’s the new one that remains? And is that a job that I even want?

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Time to create blog: ~1 hour

Lines of code written by me: 0

Prompts: 14

Lines of code written in this feature branch: ~400