Nope not at all. The first ~10 years were as a kid, so not professionally. Professionally I'm at the top of my niche and decided to work as a consultant instead of starting doing my own startup or starting an agency as I wasn't able to commit and have a family, and I loved writing code (and was bloody good at it, and at making my teams much much better by leading by example & helping them grow).

I spent the pandemic being one of the key players in the pandemic response, writing a lot of code but also helping a load of teams over different countries collaborate, and anything else I could do to make everything work. Oh and bringing up kids at the same time.

Now I'm at a startup, finally, and getting the engineering team off of the ground. Still trying to code (it's really hard to give up chasing the highs) a bit but there's less time for it and no time for the really hard deep dives (and I'm not willing to ignore my family to no-life it as others can do).

With that context, yeah, it's not as enjoyable. Sure I could try and transition back to a full-time coding roll and yeah, I'd be working on fun puzzles and enjoying it, but that means my impact is more limited. It's a better use of my skills + experience to be doing what I'm doing. Pays more too but both pay well :-)

Sounds very interesting, and at first I thought maybe you're an outlier, but the more I read people mention "solving puzzles", the more I notice a more fundamental difference in enjoying programming. For me it's not solving puzzles, but rather finding elegant/eloquent expression of something complex (feel like I'm more of a writer than an engineer). That's what makes me tick: clear code that can itself serve as a primary source of knowledge of how a business functions. If I work with an AI agent, I become an editor rather than a writer — a very different job.

Uh, so in the end you pretty much ended up in a management role instead of coding and seems like you’re much happier that way.

So not far off from the comment you replied to.