A personal essay reflecting on finding happiness and meaning through coaching youth basketball. The content engages themes of dignified work (Article 23), freedom of opinion (Article 19), and education (Article 26), advocating for fulfillment outside of tech industry norms. The evaluation finds mild to moderate positive signals for these themes.
The latest developments in digital culture are somehow more frustrating than anything I saw in the previous 26 years. Experience is replaced by prompts. Taste perfected over the years with defaults.
I'm not afraid of competition with AI-driven competitors — I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics.
Perhaps this is indeed a good moment to switch to offline.
These blog posts are fascinating to read. I don't have a personal blog, but if I did I'm sure I would've written a very similar post as I've been wrestling with similar thoughts over the last few weeks. I have the distinct sense that I will look back on February 2026 as an inflection point, where AI crossed over from being an interesting parlor trick to something that fundamentally and irreversibly altered what I do day-to-day. It's bittersweet, for sure - it feels inevitable that the craft of software development that I've loved for years will be seen as an archaic relic at some point in the not too distant future. It may be several years yet before the impact is broadly felt (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years) but this train doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. This post was a helpful reminder that who I am is not defined by the code I write (or don't write) - there's so much more to life than code.
The moving tiny rectangles framing is interesting, it gets to the heart of why I find all the anti-AI takes so difficult to comprehend. If you never made any effort to connect what you do with what value is added in real life, then it's no wonder better tooling is leaving you lost. Programming (other than code golf) has always been an implementation detail for solving problems IRL.
Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in:
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
To get a square on the screen. And then I was slightly older boy destroying my dad's precious slides for his presentation by formatting the entire disk accidentally while installing Red Hat Linux 8 Psyche from CDs my dad got at the bazaar. I was so excited for Shrike to come out the next year.
Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C.
Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today.
Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper.
Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.
Isn‘t it ironic that we software devs laughed for decades when we automated other people‘s work with our code - „it‘s called progress, deal with it, dinosaur!“
But now we see that a meteor might have hit our planet too.
Csikszentmihalyi's flow research[0] basically predicts the author's whole arc here. People are happiest during structured, challenging activities with clear goals and tight feedback loops. Coaching middle schoolers in a gym hits every condition on his list.
Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.
[0] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience if you haven't read it
My new goals are: Seek beauty, Seek happiness and Don't make people sad.
With a lot of effort, it's working. However, I soon discovered the last goal was the most difficult. Long story short, I keep my mouth shut a lot more. I feared, at first, that this would make me feel I was compromising myself somehow. But I also discovered that sometimes when I shared my opinion, knowing it was correct, I would later regret how I made that person feel. Conclusion on their feelings: There's nothing to be gained by hurting their feelings when they weren't ready to hear the message. Double success, I'm still happy and I didn't cause them any sadness.
In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is.
You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.
Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.
I honestly don’t understand how anyone has the time and energy to be a coach while working a full-time job. My kids practice three times a week, and usually have games on both Saturday and Sunday - sometimes several hours away. Just getting them to practices and games often feels exhausting to me - I can’t imagine all the planning and scheduling that goes on behind the scenes, or having to show up and actually run things all the time.
Hats off to youth coaches - you make a huge difference in kids’ lives.
Personally I want to have my cake and eat it here. Tech has amazing potential to make the world a better place to live in and genuinely bring people together. The crowning achievement of AI so far to me is not Claude Code, it’s AlphaFold. I find the documentary DM released about developing it inspiring both as a technology story but also a team achieving things together that make the world better. I want to see more of that and hope I can steer my career in that direction.
My boss is a technologist. Adding computers to problems makes him happy. Getting people out of the way makes him happy.
I’m an IC (no direct reports) and I’m a “humanist”. Helping people become better and more skilled makes me happy, in the same way the coach here got joy from the goofball making a great play.
On paper we should probably switch jobs. I have way more technical depth, but the crucial difference is that he is more goal-driven, better at managing upward, and more in tune with political trends.
Every generation of builders believed their tools defined their value. Then the tools got easier, faster, automated, and the definition had to change.
But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear.
AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up. The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.
As someone who taught kids in person and fell into a deep depression with how Kafkaesque that job was and then found so much more gratification as a SWE, all I can say is, the author's experience is not universal. (And I am a parent, so it's not about disliking kids.) I will say though that remote work is definitely dystopia. I need an office and the presence of people physically.
This is exactly why, as someone who thought I'd be an IC with my head buried in code my whole life, I accepted a role as a tech lead last year. Humans will always need other humans to be human for them. I love working with computers, but supporting, teaching, and mentoring junior engineers has been rewarding for me in ways that writing code never could be. There is no social substitute for concrete relationships with specific people that grow in visible ways. Maybe they can automate away the part of me that's good with logic and reason, but empathy can't be simulated.
Great post. I coach my son’s club and school teams. 4 practices + games each week. A huge commitment but pays off in so many ways. Good for you for volunteering!
It’s not exactly nominative determinism, but maybe this could all be explained by every Ben Wallace being destined for basketball greatness (middle school or nba or otherwise)
I started coaching my son's little league baseball team a few years ago, mostly because that was the only way I could keep him interested it and I just wanted him to keep playing a team sport. But, that first season showed me how incredibly rewarding the whole process can be. Every practice, every game, you see them improve. And the more you work at designing a good practice, helping each player develop skills, the better they get! And, the joy...the pure, unadulterated joy of a short stop making a a clean throw to first for an out, a hit into the grass with a quick slide into second for a double, a dash across home after a wild pitch rolls into the cage for a run on the steal! I don't get paid, of course, but it's the best job I've ever had.
The part that resonated most with me was the contrast between activities that feel like things you "should" be doing vs. things that actually pull you out of your head.
When you're early in your career, there's this pressure to optimize your off-hours correctly - networking events, side projects, gym routines, following the news. You accumulate them all and still feel hollow because none of them require your actual presence in the way that 6 kids staring at you in a gym waiting for instructions does.
Coaching youth sports specifically has this property where you cannot half-ass it. You can zone out at a networking happy hour, you can passively skim Twitter while doing some of these "enriching" activities. But when a 12-year-old is confused about why they're supposed to set a screen and looks at you for the answer, that is the whole moment. There's no background processing.
I think this is the actual mechanism behind a lot of "finding meaning through service" stories - it's less about altruism and more about the fact that responsibility to others forces you into full attention. Which happens to be the same thing meditation is trying to get you to do, just with external stakes.
The programming itself is the reward for people who love doing it. It attracts the sort of detail-oriented thinkers who enjoy the doing and don't frame everything in terms of "value added."
AI is attractive to the sorts of people who have their secretary write their Christmas cards.
One part of me tries to resist and tell you that our craft is not becoming an archaic relic, the other half already knows you‘re right. We just can‘t put the ghost back into the bottle and now‘s a good time to re-calibrate your passion.
I don’t even know what he’s referring to. What are the rectangles he’s “moving around”? And couldn’t you say the same thing about all writers, for example?
The one downside to the Internet and social media is that truly useless takes can get much more traction than they deserve.
I certainly wasn't laughing, plight of a fellow man is nothing positive. But this is usually so abstracted and distant from one's work that unless you have somebody close who gets literally hit themselves is just abstract movement beyond horizon due to myriad forces and random events.
I thought for a moment you were serious, but the line about us doing wonderful things with tech gave it away as satire. Yeah no. Best we can do is technofascism and surveillance state. Glad you happy though!
There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like
a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.
We're retiring later and later, working more per week, purchasing power is going down, quality of goods is going down, life expectancy is decreasing, child mortality is increasing, teenage suicide is increasing, illiteracy is increasing, &c.
But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!
And simultaneously we built this huge machine that gives us everything we need to survive on software we don't understand, ready to have it abducted by people who have never done a (positively) productive thing in their lives seemingly any moment now. Monkeys with computers.
Learning the lower layer felt like earning access to the next level of reality. You had to understand the constraints to make anything happen at all. Now it increasingly feels like you can just describe the intent and skip straight to the outcome.
Also, I think for a good number of people, their first job out of college is oftentimes one they will look fondly back on because they've just finished ~17 years of school, have financial independence with a salary, and are still bright-eyed about all the possibilities.
>I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.
The future appears now to be: "Young kids wont have this sense of wonder, or control of the machine, anymore. And a whole lot less will now have a career in IT either".
Carpentry has always been an implementation detail for making furniture. They have been able to purchase flat-pack chairs for all of their lives, but for some reason there are people who learn this skill and have fun slowly making things that factories already make at scale. A subset of those people have made lucrative businesses out of the very human craft that is carpentry, and are able to create custom pieces on-demand that you could never justify retooling a factory to create.
It is okay to view code as a means to an end. I disagree, preferring to treat code as craft, and striving for better systems that are easy to understand, maintain and extend. And I think that's the source of our disconnect; deeper than one's opinion about AI is one's value of human skill and the effect that has on the output. Maybe I overvalue it, and maybe creating code "manually" is going to look more like carpentry in the future; but you cannot expect to convince a skilled carpenter that an IKEA chair is just as good and accomplishes the same task.
> (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years)
We definitely saw some kind of non-linear step function jump in quality around the beginning of the year - it's hard to express how good Claude opus/sonnet 4.6 is now. However, I wonder if we're going to see the same kind of improvement from here? It's kind of like we got to the 80% point but the next 20% is going to be a lot harder/take longer than that first 80% (pareto principle). Also, as more and more code out there is AI generated it's going to be like the snake eating it's own tail. Training models on AI generated code doesn't seem like it will lead to improvements.
If you see programming purely as a means to an end, then yeah, I get this perspective. But to many there is enjoyment in the _doing_ and the craft of it beyond the end result. It’s why people get into woodworking or knitting despite the fact that it’s much cheaper, faster, and easier to buy a table or a sweater than to make one yourself. Value is subjective, and for some the value of code is not primarily in what you can sell to others.
The entire zeitgeist of software technology revolves around the assumption that making things efficient, easy, and quick is inherently good. Most people who are "sitting in front of rectangles, moving tiny rectangles" have sometime grandiose notions of their works' importance; we're making X work better for the good of Y to enable Z. Abstract shit like that.
No man, you're just making X easier. If the world needs more X, fine. If not, woops.
The detachment from reality makes it all too easy to deceive yourself into thinking "hey this actually helps people".
I think all it means when we say 'solve problems in real life' is just the stuff you have to do that tooling can't abstract you away from any more.
The sharp end of the debate now is around what exactly that means in the LLM world. It's extremely unclear what exactly the new level of abstraction unlocked is, or at least how general/leaky it is.
There's obviously just the stance of enjoying the craft, and that's one thing off to the side, but I think the major source of conflict for those who are more oriented towards living in the top level of abstraction (i.e. what you can do in real life) is between some of the claims being pushed about said level of abstraction and what many still experience in actual reality using these tools.
Heh, I've posted here for years and every post I've made saying programmers should unionize has been controversial at best and nearly dead at worst. So many people trust the same system they watch eat others.
I don’t think this whole thing had anything to do with AI or not. It has to do with ‘teaching kids in a gym’ or ‘sitting in front of a screen in an office’.
> Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.
Would like to hear more about this. Both for myself and from what I've seen in others, people tend to be far happier during a relaxation-focused holiday trip than during their average working Monday.
Yeah, hopefully an outgrowth of this will be new amazing applications like that, that we never could've dreamed of before. I imagine "distributed services" will be "solved" by EOY, and the days of glorified CRUD app coders making 200K straight out of college are over for good.
But I think there will be new opportunities for people who are willing and able to learn. Entirely new fields will pop up and somebody will have to work on them. Most likely, the CS grads who are out of a job, or just frustrated and want to do something else.
So I don't think the opportunity to do innovative things and make a difference in the world is gone. But the opportunity to do so by typing code into a text editor may have breathed its last.
Thanks for saying that! I was worried I was the only one. I mean, I'm glad I tried it, but I was happy to get back to a little more determinism in my day to day.
I once heard a former professional athlete say the hardest thing about working outside the world of sport, was not being able to look up at a scoreboard at the end of the game every week and know how well you did.
build af177b1+4aph · deployed 2026-03-01 06:49 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-01 10:30:59 UTC
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