There used to be something deeply human about good software.

You notice it in the tone of an API response — not just what it says, but how it says it. You notice it in the user interaction as you move your mouse across that green line on the paystack checkout as follows your mouse.

The difference between something cold and mechanical, and something that feels like it understands the person on the other end.

You feel it in the quiet, almost indescribable satisfaction of finally winning a bug. Not just fixing it — winning it! After hours of chasing shadows, second-guessing your logic, drilling deep into docs, testing out even the low voted and questioning everything… it clicks. And for a moment, it’s just you and the system, in complete alignment.

You find it in the small, almost forgotten artifacts:

// DO NOT REMOVE — fixes production issue from years ago

That comment isn’t just code. It’s history. Context. A whisper from another engineer who stood where you’re standing, trying to make sense of something just as confusing.

Software engineering used to feel like a craft, like carpentry to Jesus, painting to Picasso. It was Closer to art than assembly.

Like any form of art, it rarely starts perfect. A drawing begins as a rough sketch — loose lines, half-formed ideas, something closer to a v1 or a POC than a finished piece. Over time, as the artist understands the subject better, the lines sharpen. The composition settles. It’s redrawn, refined, sometimes completely reimagined.

Software used to follow that same rhythm.

You’d build something rough. Sit with it. Learn from it. Then refactor, redesign, rethink — until what started as a fragile idea became something structured, something scalable, something intentional.

And in that process, you could see the engineer.

Everyone’s code had a signature. You could read it.

You could see the rushed edges of an unrealistic timeline in one place, and in another, the quiet patience of a slow weekend poured into a beautifully crafted function. You could feel experience in the way a system was designed — in data structure choices, in patterns that showed up not because they were trendy, but because they were understood.

The code spoke, because someone had lived through it.

There was also the humbling part of the craft.

Learning a new stack, a new language, a new way of thinking — where suddenly all your experience feels like fluff. The quiet return of imposter syndrome. The frustration of losing your mind for hours, only to find it again in a low-voted Stack Overflow response that somehow says exactly what you needed.

That process wasn’t just about getting things to work. It was about becoming.

But somewhere along the way, things shifted.

What was once a thoughtful, iterative craft is increasingly becoming a system of outputs. The rise of commercialized tooling — and now AI — has made it easier than ever to produce working software. Faster. More efficient. More scalable.

But also… quieter.

That texture — the rough edges, the intentional decisions, the fingerprints of experience — is being flattened. Compressed into something that looks right, works well, passes checks… but says very little.

What used to be nuance has started to feel like fluff — something that can be distilled into a “really good prompt” and handed off to a model that returns industry-standard code on demand.

And it works.

But it doesn’t feel the same.

We don’t sit with problems as long. We don’t wrestle with them the same way. The friction that once forced understanding is slowly being removed, replaced by abstraction upon abstraction. Code still works, but it doesn’t always have blood in it.

And in that shift, something subtle is being lost.

Not our ability to build — we’re better at that than ever — but the authenticity. The unspoken poetry that lived in the work. The sense that behind every line was a person thinking, struggling, deciding ,all gone.

I’ve always been an artist. It’s never really been about the medium.

Whether it’s paint on canvas, spanner in hand, or code in an editor — the instinct is the same. To shape something. To understand it deeply. To leave a piece of myself in it.

And that’s what software used to feel like.

You could see the person in the work — in every line, every doubt, every small breakthrough. All of it is quietly documented in files that eventually compile down to something binary, but never really lose the human story that created them.

Now, more often than not, it just feels… generated, feels like plastic edo beads, useful but meaningless.

This isn’t a rejection of progress. It’s an observation.

Because maybe the art isn’t completely gone.

Maybe it’s just fading into the background — quieter, harder to notice, easier to skip past.

And maybe it still lives in the engineers who care about the tone of a response, who still feel something when they solve a problem, who leave comments not just to explain, but to connect.

I’ve felt both sides of this.

An imposter with coding skills and a false artist with a claude subscription.

Here I am optimizing this article with the GPT-5 model, I poured my heart and some pieces of my soul into couple lines of bad grammar and here you are at the end of a story that is too real to be fake and too plastic to be considered an original idea.

A contradiction of idea and identity.

— Silva Chijioke Michael,
your insincerely,.. I guess.