Coding is fun actually!

You'll have to stick with me for a bit on this one - I've got a half-baked thought and I wanted to blog about it, so it might not be super clear that there's a point until there is one. If there even ends up being one? This is my blog so I'm just going to write and see what happens.

This thought has come out of me leaving Hashnode actually, because it's led to me doing a lot more coding in my spare time to make sure my blog is fully-functional. As a result, I'm finding myself sitting here on a Saturday morning writing code in front of the TV, which is something I haven't done in a very long time. I was meant to be out at the allotment, but my hayfever is so bad today that I've had to give it a miss, which is both sad and a little bit of good fortune because it's meant that I've had time to play around with some code and then write about it.

I've really been noticing how much fun I've been having just... solving random problems and figuring out how to do stuff in Next.js app router, as well as adding tooling that I know will make my job easier as I go on to develop the blog further. And as I've been noticing this, it has naturally led me to reflect on AI. I do have a basic Copilot licence on my personal laptop (it comes with Office 365, which I pay for), and I had originally asked it to set up a lot of the scaffolding for this blog, as I was in a rush to move off Hashnode. However, now that it's up and basically working, I'm doing a lot more stuff myself and, well, I'm having fun!

Even messing around with tags and rejigging my util files has just made my brain feel fizzy in a good way. It makes me wonder whether passing all of that grunt work off to AI is really so wonderful - I mean, sure it makes us faster, right? And I guess given the capitalist society we live in, that is the ultimate aim - to be as productive as we can in the time our companies pay us for - but does that really make us happy and fulfilled?

I'm not going to lie, I'm still finding myself asking Copilot to figure things out for me, even when I'm working on this blog - it's just more convenient, right? But is convenience always such a good thing? In the book Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, the author makes the point that convenience is what got us into the mess that is the modern internet in the first place and allows us to be exploited. Get us hooked on the convenience so we can't do without the product, and then make us pay through the nose for it. Do we really want to be controlled by big corporations in that kind of way?

I know at some companies, software developers feel like they have no choice but to use these tools because there is risk associated with not doing so, but if you have the freedom to use (or not use) whatever tools you want to, maybe it's worth coding by hand a bit more. Choosing not to use AI (or use it less) is becoming a bit of a radical act and might just make you happier, because coding is fun dammit! If you want some tips on how to reduce your reliance on AI, check out my ideas in this post about the middle ground of AI.