I get the grief about AI, but I don't share it.

After ten years of professional coding, LLMs have made my work more fun. Not easier in the sense of being less demanding, but more engaging. I am involved in more decisions, deeper reviews, broader systems, and tighter feedback loops than before. The cognitive load did not disappear. It shifted.

My habits have changed. I stopped grinding algorithm puzzles because they started to feel like practicing celestial navigation in the age of GPS. It is a beautiful skill, but the world has moved on. The fastest path to a solution has always been to absorb existing knowledge. The difference now is that the knowledge base is interactive. It answers back and adapts to my confusion.

Syntax was never the job. Modeling reality was. When generation is free, judgment becomes priceless.

We have lost something, of course. There is less friction now, which means we lose the suffering we often mistook for depth. But I would rather trade that suffering for time spent on design, tradeoffs, and problems that used to be out of reach.

This doesn't feel like a funeral. It feels like the moment we traded a sextant for a GPS. The ocean is just as dangerous and just as vast, but now we can look up at the stars for wonder, rather than just for coordinates.