Last weekend, I opened my laptop.
No deadline. No client. No pressure. Just me, my keyboard, and a Sunday afternoon.
A few years ago, this was my favorite way to spend time. I'd open VS Code, start something random — a game, a tool, a weird experiment — and lose myself for hours. No reason. No goal. Just the pure joy of making something from nothing.
Last Sunday, I stared at the screen for 20 minutes.
Then I opened Cursor. Typed a prompt. AI wrote the code. I copied it. It worked. I closed my laptop.
The whole thing took 7 minutes.
And I felt nothing.
That's when it hit me: I don't really code anymore. I prompt. And somewhere along the way, I lost the part of coding I actually loved.
What I Lost Without Noticing
I used to code because I loved it.
Not for money. Not for followers. Not for a green GitHub graph. Because solving a problem with my own brain — that specific feeling — was addictive in a way nothing else was.
I'd spend hours debugging. Not because it was efficient. Because finding the bug felt like winning a small lottery. That dopamine hit was real, and I chased it.
I'd refactor the same function three times — not because it needed it, but because making it elegant was its own reward. Nobody would see the difference. I didn't care. The act of making it better was enough.
I'd stay up late working on side projects nobody asked for. Not because I had to. Because I genuinely couldn't stop.
That joy wasn't productivity. It wasn't performance. It wasn't career growth.
It was just fun.
And I didn't notice when it quietly packed up and left.
How the Joy Disappeared
It didn't happen overnight. That's what makes it hard to point to.
First, I used AI for boilerplate. The boring stuff — project scaffolding, config files, repetitive patterns. No joy lost there. Smart move, I told myself.
Then, I used it for functions I could write but didn't want to. Faster. More efficient. Still felt fine.
Then, I used it for functions I should have known. This is where I should have paused. I didn't.
Then, I stopped writing code first. I started prompting first. Why struggle when AI can do it in 10 seconds?
Each step felt like progress. A smarter way of working. Keeping up with the times.
None of them felt like losing something.
But last Sunday, when I sat down to code for fun — just for fun, no agenda — and realized I didn't know what to do without a prompt box in front of me, I understood what had happened.
The joy was outsourced. Gradually. Willingly. And I hadn't noticed until it was already gone.
The Moment I Couldn't Hide From
Last month, a junior developer on my team asked me something simple:
"How would you write this without AI?"
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
I knew the logic. I knew the steps. But the syntax? The specific method names? The exact order of parameters I'd written a hundred times?
Gone.
My brain had been outsourcing those details for so long, the muscle memory had quietly disappeared.
I laughed it off. Said something about "letting AI handle the boring parts." Moved on.
But I was embarrassed. Not because I couldn't answer. Because I didn't recognize who I had become.
That junior developer was asking because they genuinely wanted to learn. I was supposed to be the experienced one in the room. And I was the one who didn't know.
That stayed with me.
Why Nobody Talks About This
I've never admitted this before.
Not to my team. Not to other developers. Not online, until now.
Because admitting that coding isn't fun anymore feels like admitting failure. Like I'm not grateful for a career I genuinely wanted. Like something is broken in me.
But I don't think I'm broken. I think a lot of us are quietly feeling this — and nobody wants to say it first.
The discourse around AI in development is always one of two things: "AI is going to replace us all" or "AI makes us 10x more productive."
Nobody is talking about the third thing: what happens to the developers who loved the craft, and quietly stopped loving it — not because they were replaced, but because they replaced themselves.
That's the conversation we're not having.
I Don't Have a Solution. Not a Real One.
I'm not going to give you a 10-step plan to love coding again.
Because I haven't figured it out. And I'm tired of articles that pretend otherwise.
I've tried:
No-AI days. They're harder than I expected. I kept reaching for the shortcut that wasn't there. It felt like missing a limb — which maybe says more than I want it to.
Building something just for me. No users. No metrics. No deployment. I kept catching myself optimizing for "good enough" and shipping it nowhere. The habit of efficiency doesn't turn off easily.
Going back to basics. I opened an old project from 2019 — before any of this. Read code I'd written without any assistance. It was messier than what I write now. It was also unmistakably mine in a way my recent code isn't.
Nothing has fully worked. Not yet.
But I've started to understand something: that joy I'm missing wasn't about being productive. It wasn't about output. It was about creating — actually creating, with the friction and the struggle and the dead ends intact.
AI gave me speed. And speed, it turns out, is the enemy of the specific kind of patience that makes creation feel like something.
Small Experiments (Because I Have to Try Something)
I'm not quitting AI. That's not realistic, and it's not what I want anyway.
But I'm trying some small things:
One hour, no AI, every morning. The first hour — no Copilot, no Cursor, no Claude. Just me and the problem. Some mornings it's frustrating. Some mornings I remember why I started.
Building things no one will ever see. No publishing. No likes. No metrics. Just creation for the act of creating. It feels strange. I think that's the point.
Writing code I'll delete. The output doesn't have to survive. The act of writing it does.
Asking myself the honest question: "Am I coding right now, or am I just prompting?" Just naming the difference, out loud, changes something small.
Will these bring the joy back completely? I genuinely don't know. But they're better than sitting with the loss and calling it productivity.
One Question
When was the last time you coded just for fun?
Not for work. Not for a side hustle you want to monetize. Not to impress anyone. Not to learn something "useful." Not to stay relevant.
Just because you wanted to. Because the problem was interesting. Because you were curious what would happen.
If you can't remember — you're not alone. Not even close.
I'll be honest in the comments about where I actually am with this. I'd love to hear where you are too.
Because I think we need to start having this conversation. And someone has to go first.
If this hit something you haven't said out loud yet — share it with a developer who might need to read it. Sometimes just knowing you're not the only one is enough to start.
A note on writing this: The feelings, experiences, and embarrassing moments in this article are genuinely mine. I used AI to help organize my thoughts and structure them clearly.