What You Leave Behind

Around November last year, our 6 year old dog Sophia got very sick, seemingly out of nowhere. On the 25th December she was diagnosed by a vet with Protein Losing Enteropathy. On 5th April, Sophia passed away.

By coincidence, during this period I also started using agent based coding tools like Claude Code in a professional capacity. Suffice to say, my workflow has changed dramatically. Being paid to write code, all of a sudden, felt very quaint.

Of course, these 2 events are not really comparable. Yet both have contributed to this weird feeling of having something destabilising happen to my world and identity, without any agency on my part about whether they happen or not. Both had this common thread of feeling like large sections of my old world, the one I had known (and was, selfishly, fairly comfortable navigating), were slowly slipping away from me. I do not think either of them will come back.

The act of programming was something that I came to appreciate. When I first began trying my best to make computers do stuff, it was purely in service of wanting to make useful, fun things. I didn't build websites for the Runescape Clan I was in because I was in love with expressive beauty of the HyperText Markup Language.

Over time, though, I really came to appreciate the act in a way beyond just slapping stuff together to make something happen. I loved seeing how writing different intents in different languages felt, I loved feeling how translating problems into different language paradigms also steered how I thought about those problems in the first place (discovering Prolog in University was a revelation). One of my proudest moments was nervously standing on stage at PyCon UK 7 years ago talking about how code has this remarkable property of being a text we expect humans to read, that also has an intentional mechanical effect in the world. A text that can act upon the world. This somehow feels pointless now. Languages will be made to be read, just not by us.

In retrospect, I wish I had valued these times for what they were. It now feels unfathomable that there was a period you could parley dicking around with a computer into an optimistic profession that was in demand, you could work with a diverse and interesting group of people interested in collaboration and learning, where hobbyist passion almost directly translated into demand for you, and you could be compensated decently enough for doing so. Despite everything, it was very welcoming to me too. I wouldn't have wanted to try my luck in other technical/engineering professions on that front.

Fwiw, I don't entirely blame the new way of doing things for this world slipping away. The end of low interest rates were the killer, but I think the current world means that what would have been a cyclical shock has turned into a structural change.

The communities too. As much as I might roll my eyes at the whole vim/emacs thing, it was genuinely nice that people gathered around the languages, tools and approaches they liked, built welcoming conferences around them. Remember conference budgets?

Try as I might, I can't see how any of this survives now. It felt like the time and effort cost to make any of this naturally drew people together in collaboration, for common use cases and patterns to be folded into things with widening adoption. Maybe community formation forms higher up the chain, around more tool-creating-tooling rather than the tools themselves. I have my doubts though, it feels like this level is just as fast moving and unstable as the level below it. Maybe the last communities standing will be around which AI Lab API endpoint people like to use.

Many of the people in my circle are excited and curious about where things are going. I am too, in a way, just that it's all covered o'er with uncertainty. People talk about how taste, and judgement, are still important. Maybe for now. A year ago the present situation seemed implausible and overfitting on it feels similarly silly. What does any of this look like a year, 2 years, 5 years from now? It feels like trying to reassure myself that the sand under my feet feels solid, occasionally with the sea bumping up against my toes. The tide is coming in, though.

All this is to say, I feel like something has been lost. I miss the tractable world I remember. I miss Sophia. But I'm picking myself up, recalibrating to the new way of things. Dusting off side projects again. Still though. Some things are not coming back.