424: I Never Really Loved Coding (And Only AI Made Me Realize It)

Hey, it's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. If you had asked me a couple years ago if I loved coding and software development, I probably would have given you a resounding yes at that time. No other job had ever been as enjoyable to me. There hasn't been any other activity that has ever been as rewarding as building software and writing code and building systems that do what I want them to do in ways that other people couldn't. But if you ask me now, and I just realized this very recently, I think I have a much more nuanced perspective. And it comes from two places really. Having been a software entrepreneur and developer for well over two decades at this point, that is one of them. And having experienced the fundamental change that is software engineering with AI assistance, right? The stuff that has only been happening for a couple years. Quick word from our sponsor, paddle.com. I used them as my merchant of record for all my projects. And if you really wanna make sure that you can only focus on your product, you don't have to focus on financial regulators and banks, check out paddle.com as your payment provider. Let me dive into what I recently realized. I never really loved coding. I just always thought I did. I thought I loved coding because that's what I could do. That's my skill. And what I was able to do very effectively was build the software product. So that was kind of my contribution to the market. It felt like it was the thing for me to do and nothing else ever came close. It was my superpower, my identity at some point, and it was a craft that I had figured out pretty well. But now that I've been dabbling at first and then later, like, establishing a pretty solid workflow with AI assistance, I'm realizing that the coding part was never actually the thing. Like, watching an AI agent solve my problems much faster, much more comprehensively than I ever have, well, that's given me this completely new perspective on what coding actually means to me. Because in the past, I never really had a choice, right? Either I figured it out or I didn't. Either I made the machine do the thing that I wanted it to do, or I didn't. And anything that I couldn't figure out was impossible for me to solve. The act of composing text into lines of code and then deploying these lines and testing each individual line and building the strong mental model of the whole code base in my mind, and then implementing it in the text editor. All of this stuff that makes coding possible was inseparable from the outcome to me. But now we're using AI systems to build things for us. And suddenly, the act of writing this code is not required anymore, not in the traditional sense, at least. I'm …