For months, I've wanted to write a blog post. But over the last five months, I've realized that it doesn't matter anymore.
It was supposed to be about my personal Golang+SQLite setup, a set of forks and utilities I've been maintaining and using for my personal projects over the last two years. But I no longer feel motivated to write that article.
Five months ago
Five months ago, I installed opencode and went down the rabbit hole of agentic programming. Embracing the speed and frustration of it to the fullest. Burning through personal and corporate token budgets, leaving my agents running, and checking their output at 23:30 just to give them one final long instruction so they can keep working all night. All of this while, in response to my wife's frown, promising her that this is totally normal, and that it is the last time I am going to open my work laptop tonight.
I have done several projects in 2-3 days that would each have taken me at least 2 weeks of focused deep work (which becomes rare and precious as time goes on, and your weekly calendar fills with meetings). At the same time, LLM output is off in that special way that you already know: dumb mistakes, weird assumptions, and then you totally give up on trying to understand the codebase. You become unable to make any changes without prompting an agent, and you accept that you need to fully rewrite it manually (or just embrace the slop).
I wrote skills and generated MCPs and CLIs specifically to be used by the LLM, including skills that distilled, improved, and created other skills. I went all in. Doing in hours what before took me days. Doing in days what took me weeks.
But although it felt fun and exciting at times, it was not the same.
The garden
I was a gardener, a gardener who enjoyed watering his flowerpots every day. I took care of my watering can, and cleaned it, polished it, and tried to come up with new and better types of cans that could improve the experience of watering the flowers.
One day a snake appeared in my garden: "What are you doing wasting all this time watering these flowers one by one? Putting time and effort into a never-ending task... There is a better way, let me teach you a spell. You won't need to individually water your flowers anymore. Instead, you will be able to spawn beings that do the work for you, like the creator did when he created you. And you will be like him."
The first time I cast that spell it felt magical. The sky filled with daemons that brought clouds and rain to my garden. It was not perfect, the flowers were not watered one by one the way I would have done it. But it was more than good enough.
As time went on, doing anything other than casting the spell felt like a waste of my time. The flowers were growing wild and in unpredictable, uncontrolled patterns, but hey, they were alive and growing.
I stopped putting on my gardener clothes and getting dirty with the soil. My watering can started to rust, and I stopped thinking about new designs and ideas for future cans. I forgot about the different kinds of flowers I had in my garden, and their individual needs and beauty.
One day I told the daemons to keep coming without waiting for me to cast the spell. And I started to think about what my purpose was in that garden, or if it had ever belonged to me at all.
What is left?
This is the part that reminds me of AlphaGo, a documentary about the match between Lee Sedol, one of the strongest Go players in history, and AlphaGo, the AI system developed by DeepMind.
There is a scene in the film that stayed with me. When Lee Sedol is defeated, you can almost see the pillars of his reality starting to crack. He begins to question what it really means to be alive, now that a machine can reproduce what he had thought was exclusively human: taste, intuition. And I think that all the devs who took joy from the act of programming itself, improving and leveraging their technical abilities, are kind of going through a similar phase. It is not that the machine can do everything we do (yet), or that it can think in the way that we think (yet). But does it matter at all? It kind of feels empty, like there is no point anymore in doing things without casting the spell.
There is a final scene in the documentary where Lee Sedol recovers the spark in his life, and starts to play Go again. If we look at the current state of Go, the ceiling of what a human player can do has increased dramatically since the introduction of AI to the game. I don't know if this can be extrapolated to programming as a work-related activity, since businesses optimize for effectiveness, not for meaning. But at least, something I have started doing myself is learning Game Boy Assembly. It is refreshing, and I don't feel the temptation to use AI because it is an activity of learning, so it would be totally self-defeating. It is an area where I feel much more comfortable "wasting" time while using AI as a tutor instead of an agent.
Maybe we are not meant to maintain a garden. Maybe we are here to discover new kinds of flowers.