Facts. For me the bigger the gap between what i saw in my head and the speed with which my fingers could physically make it a reality the more stress i would feel and some marathon coding sessions would end w my back all messed up just from the tension
Edit: I recall reading somewhere that John Carmack doesn't care about which editor he uses because typing was never the bottleneck. Admittedly, he worked on some really difficult problems.
I always found that the act of chugging the code helped to refine my thoughts along the way, including the big picture of it all. I've adapted in that I still have agents do most of the heavy lifting of code writing. But it still requires me to be invested in the details, which can't happen at the scale people discuss when they're talking about full on agentic development.
It's a coping mechanism. Goal shifting to protect yourself.
1. https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
I often found myself impatient in getting something I knew would work to actually work, and it was always due to the tiresome fractal of complexities that any non-trivial task involves, like looking up an API or working around the quirks of some dependency.
On a related note, this is also why I find AI-assisted coding so efficient: I have the code visualized in my head to a decent level of detail, and so reviewing the AI's output is a breeze; it's like doing a semantic diff of what I had visualized and what it produced, and so any issues are glaring and easy to spot.
Unfortunately, most modern software development is atrocious, full of distractions and incidental complexity and tangential issues that are not conducive to staying in the flow. Latent bugs and dependency quirks and environment issues that force you into some irrelevant sidequest were the most frustrating. Like, this video is the prefect analogy for modern software development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0
I do NOT miss that experience and I'm glad to let the agents take care of it.
But I have more software I want to write than I have time, between my day job, my kids and family, chores, other hobbies, etc.
I had so many projects I wanted to do, but when I thought about all of the work that went into each one, I realized I didn't have time to do them and they were pushed to the back burner.
These last few months I have been able to get to so many of those back burner projects because I don't need nearly as much time anymore.
For me, honestly, no. Once i have the solution i have the solution. The only people that care about how fast it gets published are the project managers at work, certainly not me.
And besides, writing it all out and confirming it all along the way seems helpful to me, it ensures i understood everything correctly and sometimes inspires new ideas as well
The research, the understanding, the planning, the design, all of it's iterations, the testing, all of it's iterations, debugging etc.
'I see the code and need to get it down' is a key thing obviously but a smaller part.
With better abstractions, we'll be putting 'architectural ideas' in our head, instead of algorithmic.