Keep The Sparks

When the question is no longer "why I wanted it" or we just simply forgot why we wanted it, the easiest we can do is to get our hands dirty to remember the feeling.

Had the pleasure to connect with an old friend from work tonight. Though the conversation started with the (seemly bleak) outlook of SWE career, in the end my battery turned from half-dead to fully charged. It was all because I remembered the "why"¹. Remembered, how? It was not a question being answered, but rather a turn of topic that lead to the moment.

Through the sharing of his ongoing projects, I suddenly felt pulled back in the moment. It was when my focus was on how I worked around the obstacles so my craft could go out and help others, and how happy I was when I learned something new. Then I realized with knowledge I have been keeping, the people I helped are not more, if not less. The more I asked about the details, the more ideas came out, like a gush from a spring. And it leaded to the this - working on my side projects, and typing this out in the middle of the night. What a bliss to be able to learn things and solve the problems through my fingertips.

In this post-AI era, SWEs are being forced to be put on this running wheel called "deliver the result". Having to walk from one ticket to another, or even worse, doing them at once concurrently², we are so engaged in this andrenaline-spiking loop that we all forgot why we liked building softwares in the first place. For some, it could be the feeling in the zone or the sense of achievement. As for me, it is solving the hard questions for people, with lessons learned. And such is rare in my daily grind at moment.

AI might take away the pleasure of hand coding, but it will not (likely) replace the human judgement, in terms of making decisions and claiming responsibilities. We can either feel forced to do things in the new way, or ride on the tide, have AI freeing us up from low level work and enjoy the new future that we would not dare to dream. The sky is not the limit, only the lack of imagination is. I am ready.