Nostalgia is an Anchor

This made me cry in my coffee.  If you don't want to read it, it's basically a letter to senior engineers just like me about AI coding tools, and how they're just a fact of life now. He's right. As much as I, or anyone else wants to fight, at work, he's right.

I do think there's still a place for craft and for hand-crafted code. The craft is all around you. You still need to know how to break down fuzzy big ideas into chunks of work. You still need to be able to build consensus. You still need to design systems. You still need to build people up, and convince them they can do the thing.

The place for hand-crafted code is probably not at work. It's in your spare time. It's for fun - again and finally.  It's for the thing that no one's ever built before that you just want to see exist.  Go do that by whatever means you want, you brilliant wizard.

I got a case of the nostalgias last week at work - it even prompted some posts to Mastodon about my various web standards adventures in the early part of this centry (yes, that made me feel even older than I already feel), and I even let a couple of stories fly at work.

The problem with nostalgia is that it's an anchor you're always dragging behind you, and it's a memory that's never actually accurate.  The past sucked too, just in ways you've chosen to forget.  The best parts were different than the best parts now, but that don't let anyone tell you they were necessarily better - they just happened when the rememberers were younger and weren't dragging these stupid memory anchors around.

Writing code was hard. We were doing things on the web no one had ever done before. Our lead times to do anything novel or at scale were long. I remember sitting in meetings where we had to talk about timelines to order huge machines, and then how long it would take to rack and wire them. We don't talk about those stories. We talk about the thrill of shipping the thing we built with our friends. Look around. You can still build and ship things with your friends. You're just doing it faster, cheaper, easier, and a little different. The thrill is only different because you're different, but you should still enjoy it.