The Hidden Cost of AI Coding
May 1, 2025
Instead of that deep immersion where I’d craft each function, I’m now more like a curator? I describe what I want, evaluate what the AI gives me, tweak the prompts, and iterate. It’s efficient, yes. Revolutionary, even. But something essential feels missing — that state of flow where time vanishes and you’re completely absorbed in creation. If this becomes the dominant workflow across teams, do we risk an industry full of highly productive yet strangely detached developers?
Curiously I have found myself more in a flow state in recent months than in a long time while using LLMs as part of my software development process.
But as other things we’ve linked to recently have made clear, the nature of software engineering and development is undergoing a profound transformation. I think it’s very far from clear where we end up–my instinct is people will be be looking at and writing or at least editing (in the literary sense as much as the software sense) for some time to come–but I my be wrong about that.
