12 things engineers miss since coding died: faster models, busier teams, lost satisfaction

rseroter · x · 2026-10-08

Engineering manager Anton Zaides admits he hasn't hand-written a line of code in over a year and lists 12 things he misses: the rush of making something work after hours of labor, debugging rabbit holes, and the satisfaction of hunting down obscure issues. His core observation: the stronger models get, the busier his team becomes — AI made code faster but didn't produce engineers who own projects end-to-end, while appetite for ambitious projects keeps growing. He argues for properly mourning hand-coding rather than just moving on. (Note: the article includes a BairesDev sponsorship.)

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