I've been a software nerd all my life (and there was a time where I worked 60 hours a week at a startup working hard to make mobile games), but there's just been so much extra crap associated with it (especially web development, and especially corporate web development, what currently pays my bills) over the years that it's worn me down and I'm happy to let A.I. churn through the hard or frustrating or endless amounts of boilerplate bits, and let me focus on other things.
Part of me still wishes we were making websites with just HTML, CSS, PHP, and a little Javascript here and there (before AJAX). I'm still not convinced all this extra SPA functionality is really needed for most corporate website needs (something like Google maps or real-time chatting, sure, other things not so much), but I do it because they insist.
I also really like game design, and I had a fairly simple game idea that I prototyped a physical version of and playtested a few times and thought, 'yeah, this is pretty fun'.
But I don't have the energy to code it in my spare time anymore. Was curious how close to a working MVP it could get with me writing up a specification yesterday with the help of ChatGPT (after I brainstormed a few aspects of the design), and dumped that spec into a new repo on GitHub, and about 20 minutes later, it had a fully functional game that worked exactly like my physical prototype.
It was still missing other features, like tutorials and stats and sharing abilities and the like, and I'd like to adjust the presentation some, and the computer opponent A.I. was a bit weak and could have been stronger, but it was fully functional and even looked pretty good, kind of like a Wordle presentation, which was what I was going for anyway.
Something that would have taken me probably 40 hours of dedicated work at least to get everything working and looking as nice as it did.
So yeah, it's kind of like 'well what's the point of me manually coding this anymore'.
What I really like about software was solving puzzles, but now I can focus on the more interesting puzzle of what makes a good game design and 'how best to present this to players' instead of how to get five different libraries and/or APIs to play nice together and learn how it all works.
If coding hadn't become some labyrinthian monstrosity and got out of your way when coding, I probably would want to keep coding more.
Some languages/frameworks get close to that, Lua/Love2D is pretty smooth except when it gets to you wanting to distribute it on platforms other than PC/Mac/Linux, or integrate with external libraries, or for me work with shaders since I'm still pretty weak with shaders.
But even then, it was hard to deny how much faster A.I. could code a feature and I've started getting more hands-off there as well.
That being said, work has gotten less fulfilling, since I'm not doing any actual design work really, just implementing features and making them look according to Figma specifications or fixing bugs, so that's gotten less fulfilling without the busywork of solving coding puzzles (now it's 'how to say this to the A.I. to get it to fix this right, which is still a puzzle but a much weaker one). I'm starting to get tempted to make a go of starting my own business so I can have more autonomy again.
Part of me still wishes we were making websites with just HTML, CSS, PHP, and a little Javascript here and there (before AJAX). I'm still not convinced all this extra SPA functionality is really needed for most corporate website needs (something like Google maps or real-time chatting, sure, other things not so much), but I do it because they insist.
I also really like game design, and I had a fairly simple game idea that I prototyped a physical version of and playtested a few times and thought, 'yeah, this is pretty fun'.
But I don't have the energy to code it in my spare time anymore. Was curious how close to a working MVP it could get with me writing up a specification yesterday with the help of ChatGPT (after I brainstormed a few aspects of the design), and dumped that spec into a new repo on GitHub, and about 20 minutes later, it had a fully functional game that worked exactly like my physical prototype.
It was still missing other features, like tutorials and stats and sharing abilities and the like, and I'd like to adjust the presentation some, and the computer opponent A.I. was a bit weak and could have been stronger, but it was fully functional and even looked pretty good, kind of like a Wordle presentation, which was what I was going for anyway.
Something that would have taken me probably 40 hours of dedicated work at least to get everything working and looking as nice as it did.
So yeah, it's kind of like 'well what's the point of me manually coding this anymore'.
What I really like about software was solving puzzles, but now I can focus on the more interesting puzzle of what makes a good game design and 'how best to present this to players' instead of how to get five different libraries and/or APIs to play nice together and learn how it all works.
If coding hadn't become some labyrinthian monstrosity and got out of your way when coding, I probably would want to keep coding more.
Some languages/frameworks get close to that, Lua/Love2D is pretty smooth except when it gets to you wanting to distribute it on platforms other than PC/Mac/Linux, or integrate with external libraries, or for me work with shaders since I'm still pretty weak with shaders.
But even then, it was hard to deny how much faster A.I. could code a feature and I've started getting more hands-off there as well.
That being said, work has gotten less fulfilling, since I'm not doing any actual design work really, just implementing features and making them look according to Figma specifications or fixing bugs, so that's gotten less fulfilling without the busywork of solving coding puzzles (now it's 'how to say this to the A.I. to get it to fix this right, which is still a puzzle but a much weaker one). I'm starting to get tempted to make a go of starting my own business so I can have more autonomy again.