Coding Used to Be Hard. That Was the Point.

I've been in tech for over 10 years, and lately I have caught myself missing when coding was hard.

And I don't mean hard like "oh it takes a long time to learn." I mean hard like you could spend THREE HOURS looking for a bug and it turns out you had an extra curly bracket. One character. Three hours. Gone. And you know what? That frustration is what made coding feel like a craft. That's what made it feel like something real.

A widely shared post described the same feeling:

Your Code Used to Be Delicate

When I was learning JavaScript, one extra parenthesis? Broken. Missing a comma in an object? Broken. Python with the spacing? You literally had to be precise with your SPACES or your code wouldn't run. Your SPACES. That's how delicate it was.

I remember staring at a screen for hours before finding one misspelled variable. Solving it felt good because I had built the mental model needed to find it. The same was true when a complicated function or nested loop finally worked.

I get that feeling less often now.

The New Struggle Isn't the Same

Now look, I'm not saying there's no struggle anymore. There IS a struggle. But it's completely different. The struggle now is... is my prompt doing too much? Is my prompt even doing the RIGHT thing? I'll tell AI to do literally ONE thing and it changes ten other things I didn't ask it to touch. And now I gotta figure out what it broke.

But it's NOT the same. You're not hard coding anything anymore. You're not thinking through the logic yourself. You're not being precise with YOUR code. You're being precise with your WORDS. And yeah, prompt engineering is a skill. But it doesn't hit the same way.

I Built Something Amazing and I Don't Feel Like I Built It

In the last six months, I've built seven AI projects. My latest one has a three layer memory architecture system built in TypeScript. Facts get validated on write. They get auto categorized. When something contradicts an old fact, the old one gets superseded, not deleted. Identity facts like your name and birthday? Pinned permanently. It's genuinely one of the most complex things I've ever been a part of building.

And I say "a part of" because I don't feel like I BUILT it. I'm proud of it. Really proud. But Claude Code built it. Opus built it. Cursor helped build it. They couldn't have done it without me. I was telling it what to do. Correcting it when it went wrong. Making the architectural decisions.

But even knowing all that? I still feel like I'm cheating. I feel like I'm lying to the world when I say I built it. Because I didn't write the code line by line with my own hands. You lose that moment where you ship something and you KNOW, deep in your gut, that every single piece came from you. That feeling is gone. Now you're more like a product manager than a developer. And that's a weird thing to say when your whole identity was built on being a CODER.

I Noticed My Own Muscle Memory Fading

I noticed my own muscle memory fading after months of delegating implementation. Friends described the same problem, but I can only measure it in my own work.

The Teach Back Problem

Here's the part that really bothers me. If someone sat me down right now and said explain this function line by line... I couldn't always do it. Not for everything. When you use Claude Code, you don't see everything. AI writes SO much code. You're giving clear direction, reviewing the output, but you're not always absorbing every single line.

That bothers me. Because I WANT to understand what I built. I want to know WHY something works so I can make it better next time.

So I built my own study app. I input the important files from my codebase and it tests me. Quizzes me on things I might have forgotten during the build. Reminds me of implementation details so I actually retain them. Because I don't want to just ship things. I want to LEARN from what I ship.

I built the study app because reviewing a diff was not enough to make me retain the implementation.

What I Gained

I'd be lying if I said AI didn't make me better in a lot of ways.

I'm a front end developer. That's my lane. But because of AI I can actually work with SQL databases now. Really intricate queries I could have NEVER written before. I can understand audio architecture. I can learn the differences between a 3072 dimension embedding versus a 1536 or a 512 for different use cases. Things that would have taken me YEARS to get into on my own.

The tradeoff is real. I write fewer lines by hand, but I can now work through SQL, audio pipelines, and retrieval systems I would have avoided before.

I sometimes code more on vacation than at work because the startup cost is so low. Tokens are now a visible constraint, but understanding and reviewing the result still takes time.

What I Want To Keep

Handwriting code forced me to stay with a problem long enough to understand it. I miss that part of the work.

Now the struggle is different. You're not debugging a missing semicolon at 2 AM anymore. You're reviewing AI output and making sure it didn't hallucinate something into your production code. Different kind of hard. But if I'm being real? It doesn't feel the same. And I don't think it ever will.

At the same time, I can reach unfamiliar parts of a system much sooner than I could before.

I do not want to give up the range AI gives me. I also do not want to ship code I cannot explain. Figuring out how to keep both is the work now.

Questions about this post? Ask the terminal on my homepage — it knows this whole site.

Chris Dabatos

Developer Advocate and content creator based in Las Vegas. He builds things with AI and writes about what breaks.