Coding clicked for me in college, when a friend showed me how to use the nano command line text editor to edit a file and save it to disk. The bare page with a classic “hello world” message was besides the point.

Me: Wait. What’d you do? Did you create a web page?
Them: Yeah. It’s just a text file. HTML you know…

It made sense. Websites should be deterministic, text-based artifacts that anyone can edit with basic tools and then open in a web browser. In high school, I learned how to make websites with graphical software like Dreamweaver that abstracted away the underlying code, and while I accepted the use of drag-and-drop to rearrange visual elements and Ctrl-Z to undo mistakes, I also wondered how the people who made the tools were able to work without making a mess. I moused around to create a beautiful chocolate-themed personal site with heavy use of CSS border-style: inset.

Text editors were revolutionary. Required more thinking and planning, but the control was amazing - if the text was the same, then the website would be exactly the same. Color codes were more precise than color wheels or swatches, pixel specifications beat finessing cursors, and mathematical styling patterns provided a sense of proportion and rigor over tongue eyeballing. This way was right.

That pivotal moment came to mind at work when I decided to use AI to produce an executive summary of a project plan as a HTML file.

Took 5 minutes with minimal instruction, and the result was a stochastic surprise. AI generated a nice web page that laid out the project plan, its milestones, and key tasks. It was easy to filter and sort the information, and the design was slick. The correct code looked like a jungle compared to the simple HTML file my friend made and manual changes would be tedious, but AI could update it and also produce PDF versions as a familiar alternative to the .html file extension.

Alas, Dreamweaver all over again with more power and less control - although this time I’ve built a career out of building web software by hand and understood the base technology. Still made me nervous about the implications of habitual hand-off of implementation details to tooling that will become better and faster over time. What would happen to my skills? Will I think less and less? Sure, I’ve used AI in complex projects and racked my brain poring over architecture and design but it can’t be the same as struggling with a single function for hours with my own mind only.

Don’t get me wrong - “intelligence on tap” is useful. I’ve incorporated AI in various aspects of my life and spend plenty of time on optimization. Doesn’t change the fact that I got here using my brain, and all that mental exercise must have resulted in hypertrophy of sorts. AI took me to places I might not explore without, yet I believe it’s easy to be fooled by the illusion of competence. I remember dribbling a basketball after years of no playing due to injury and it felt like I was doing it for the first time even though I never stopped visualizing the act.

Unlikely to go back to traditional software development, but I want to learn with fundamental methods and do it in public. Read somewhere that writing is thinking, so this space is for composition without AI help. Gotta mean something that it took forever and felt weird!