A week ago my blog post got noticed by developers. I got so many messages and there was a recurring theme. They feel helpless and anxious with the ever growing AI dominance in writing code that might not be perfect but it is almost good enough in many cases. But one question stood out more than others. “What’s the point?” of continuing to practice and learn the skills. As we know most engineers pride themselves in their work. In their free time they spend reading tech books, attend meetups. It is not just a job for them, it is their lifestyle. Almost a purpose of living. I didn’t have a real answer until today and I will try to write it.
Twenty years. I spent more than that since I got my first real work as a developer. I picked up and forgotten countless programming languages until I settled on a few that I still use to this day. New shiny frameworks that felt so futuristic yet so many are forgotten right now and only a few developers are still left maintaining the legacy code that used them. There were some paradigms that rewired how my brain works and writes code and until this day I use them. Some of it mattered. Some of it was just restlessness. Hard to tell which was which at the time.
Now AI writes the code. Good code. Not always great, but good enough in many cases and getting better faster than most people want to admit. So that question hit me differently than the usual career panic I was reading about. “What’s the point” is not really about employment. It is about identity. Engineers who spend their weekends on tech books and show up to meetups after a full work day are not doing it for a raise. They do it because it is who they are. That is the part nobody in these AI conversations actually talks about.
I sat with it for a while before I had anything honest to write back.
Through time I worked on so many hard things. Some were just hard at that time and now I laugh at how trivial those problems were. But after finishing them I was changed in a way that had nothing to do with the skill itself. Some projects took months of my life. I spent a long stretch buried in distributed systems, not just reading and researching but building, breaking, retrying, trying to understand why it does not work. It was not just consistency, replication or failure handling. I learned more about trust. About how two people can look at the same problem and see completely different realities. That way of thinking did not stay in the code. It got ingrained. It showed up in business decisions, in conversations, in moments that had nothing to do with software at all.
As years passed I kept noticing the same thing. The details of the problem fade. The way of seeing sticks.
Every engineer who has wrestled with genuinely complex problems for years develops a patience with complexity that is hard to explain to people who have not done it. We stopped expecting clean fast solutions. We started asking the question behind the question. Like chess where you are already thinking several moves ahead before you touch a piece. That is not a technical skill anymore. It is just thinking better than you did before.
That is the part people are actually missing when they feel the panic. All the late nights, the wrong fixes, the frustration, the soul draining periods where nothing works. And then suddenly it does. Your efforts did it. You feel relieved, even proud, like you did something nobody else had done in quite that way before. That feeling does not just make you a better programmer. It makes you more logical. More patient. More human in a way that has nothing to do with your job or your salary.
But only if the learning is real. A real feeling, going through the whole process, being genuinely lost, sometimes throwing everything away and starting from scratch. That kind of practice is something most people almost never get.
AI does not take it away. If anything it makes it clearer. The routine work goes to the model. What is left is judgment. Knowing when something subtly will not work. Knowing what question to ask before a single line gets written. That only comes from years of real struggle with problems that had no obvious answer. Without the learning, that judgment does not develop. And without the judgment, you are just a prompt.
The developer who asked me “what’s the point” is worried about the wrong thing. The code was never the point. The point was what learning to write it properly did to how you think about everything else. AI raises the floor. The ceiling is still yours to reach. And the people who spent years actually learning, not just using, are rarer now. Not less valuable. More.
Do I think solving hard technical problems has some higher altruistic meaning? I absolutely do not. But I do think the mental training we go through every day doing it can get us there. Not because the problems themselves matter that much. Because the discipline of being wrong, rebuilding, persisting, and staying honest about what you do not know yet, that builds something. Something that reaches past the code, past the career, past the industry entirely.
That might actually be the point.
Final Words
This one is more personal for me than most things I write and I genuinely do not know if I got the answer right. Agree with it, push back on it, tell me I am missing something. All of it welcome.
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What changed in how you think about the world outside technology, after years of learning inside it?
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