3 am glows in contrast against the edge of a screen which has bled into my retinas. The neon glow of an ozymandian complex from the glass views serenade me. I still need to get it right. I need to see the green tick before I can embrace death’s cousin. A few more taps. A few more sips of caffeine. The groan of my team mate from across the room as he wrestles another beast in the same maze. All is quiet. And then the blood rushes straight to the temple. I see green. A van Persie-esque knee slide ensues, and I can finally rest before presenting our frankenstein in a few hours to a table of CEOs.
This is a snapshot in time. Literally now. Its not fiction but it really captures what 16 year old me did and used to do on the regular about 12 years back. While this was highly dramatized and the moment itself felt bigger due to the national significance of the consequences. The rush was a common occurrence often felt at 8pm at my desk after my school day was done. It was what urged me to think that “Wait, people get paid to do this?” Little did I know that those units of “work” would be reduced to tokens in the ether in a decade.
Okay, I’m not gonna rant about how coding is just prompting now, or people who do not use an agentic coding harness are luddites. I just wanted to express what I am feeling. Its somewhere in the middle and I thought “let me write it down so its clearer where I stand”. And let me start with each end of the spectrum, throw an analogy, and end with where I started: feeling. Because facts may not care about feelings, but you should. Its the only real thing in the mush at the top of your head.
There was a moment, probably, in the middle of the 19th century when looms were being adopted widespread across England, when a mill worker who would weave fabric by hand came in and was told: No no, this is how we do it now. You can do more by using this machine. At first they would be amazed, and then it would settle in that this is your life now. Instead of weaving with intricacy, you just pull and push and voila.
I’m sure there must have been workers who would have enjoyed the detailing, the actual act of weaving the warp and weft but the wheel of progress took it from them. The same feelings of “flow” and “things clicking together” were missing. As this anger snowballed it turned into what is called the Luddite movement. Today when AI adoption is increasing people have co-opted this term and called it the neo-luddite movement. Of people protesting against using AI to replace human labour.
One small misconception and nuance that is missed by people opposed to the luddites is that they were not anti-technology. They were not anti-progress. They were simply against how the technology was being deployed. Their focus was on the economic side of things, of livelihoods and policy. And these things are important. But I want to call back to the feeling. Did it really go missing? Is it gone now when I code using these agents? Am I (and you) needed?
Biggest lie you’re being told today. Tech bros armed with harnesses and tokens from their overlords, sauté their prompts, mix in a few skills, and a sprinkling of MCPs to produce an okay looking, quite edible thing that is just about tasty that they can claim “The era of SaaS is over”. Its the sunday cook phenomenon all over again. If you’re unfamiliar with that term, it means someone who puts in a lot of effort on a Sunday afternoon to make their favourite restaurant’s meal. It is cheaper, good enough, and makes you go “I never have to pay insane amounts to eat that meal again”. But guess what, next week you’re there.
Why? Because you can do it once. You can do probably even do it a few times. But it takes effort. It requires expertise. And if you think you can compete with the restaurant, you have to deal with the monster named “scale”.
And who can deal with these things. Who can fix bugs that you don’t know exist, and your bloated harness spends $40 over the weekend to fix partially? Yeah you guessed it.
You still do need software engineers, and they need to be empowered with the harness. If you don’t know how to code and think you can prompt your way into a billion dollar app or service, be my guest. Prove me wrong.
On a given day, you think you have a limit. And you then go for this limit and you touch this limit… you suddenly can go a little bit further. - Ayrton Senna
This guy was an F1 driver. Probably the greatest ever. This is what he had to say about racecraft. A term that I learned about half a decade back when I really got into motorsport. What it means the “art” of surviving and winning a race. It has more to do with you the driver than the machine you are driving. Whether you are starting out with a kart, or in the seat of an F1 car with controls that rival a fighter jet or spaceship. This skill is the same.
Going back to that feeling, in that fleeting moment all those years ago. This was what it was. Codecraft. That’s not going to change. When I started coding, it was a notepad on my old lenovo, then in college it was sublime text and vim with extensions and a fancy terminal. Now, its claude code, pi, codex, with a stacked zed and a fancier terminal. The only thing that has changed are the tools. The feeling was not tied to who wrote the code, but what the code did. The implications of what was in that IDE. Whether the tests were red or green. Whether those judges liked what the app did and felt.
Today, we as programmers have been upgraded from karting to F1. Get used to the controls, strap and go. The pace is higher, but the codecraft. The craft of how the code works, the art of surviving and winning users, it will remain.
To impose your will on reality is to be human, and we cannot lose that. Agents may have agency but they have to reflect yours not vice versa. You cannot blame the agent or the LLM underneath for your mistakes. Tune it. Learn how it works. The underlying parts of it, the compression for compaction, how the codebase is navigated, what is the research hierarchy before drafting a plan. You are pushing different buttons but you are still driving.
There is a scene from the F1 movie (I’m sorry but the motorsport analogies just seem to work here). Where Brad Pitt is on one of the final laps, and everything falls away, and he’s flying. There is no music, no dialogue, just him floating and feeling the breeze on his helmet. He is in flow. Something that he felt he had lost. You too have that.
I leave you with this. Yes, there is magic in writing words that invoke logic and make structure where none existed before. And you can still do that. You can still open your terminal type vim and start with a blank cursor. It’s not gone. I do that too. Fernando Alonso enjoys driving his Toyota Yaris too. But that does not mean you cannot have the same feeling when you’re driving a more powerful coding agent.