I’ve been making software for over a decade, and I taught myself programming in college (I was a design major), so this current moment in the arc of technology hasn’t made something impossible possible, but it has made the “takes a while, maybe I’ll get to it” more like “will probably take minutes, why not.” I’m making things I just wouldn’t have found the time for before, and it feels great. I just like making things, period.

When I first started using large language models and tools like Claude Code or Codex to help me make things, I first did so only if I was looking at all of the code along the way, even for goofy stuff. I wanted to bring them into code-centric spaces, where they played the supporting role rather than the lead. I thought that I’d do that for a long time, but it’s shifted for me pretty quickly, at least for the goofy, transient stuff.

I was making something over the past couple of days, and I haven’t looked at the code at all really. I glanced at a couple of diffs out of curiosity, but otherwise I worked in an agent-centric tool (this time, Codex) and just expressed the thing that I wanted. It was frustrating during a couple of moments, but it was mostly great. It was a super simple project, but still, I noticed that this behavior had changed in me.

I have a sense of pride (or maybe just ego) at having taught myself some hard things over the years, and I’m still going to cling on to it for a little while longer, but it feels good to lean into this new thing a little more and take myself less seriously. I still think that writing code is fun, and that thinking in code is useful (because thinking logically is useful) but it’s also fun to just get floopy and do the thing from time to time.