The Joy of Programming

Even prior to coding agents, I started a lot of personal projects - and finished very few. Now, with coding agents, I start even more and finish even fewer. At least for me, its easy to jump into something - maybe a new topic or idea - while full of excitement, and then shortly run of out steam. Or, realize my initial approach was flawed / boring / wrong and then try to start up again.

I find that coding agents amplify this for me. Often, the joy of building something for me is in the time spent build it. While I enjoy outcomes, I also just genuinely enjoy writing code! When I use an agent to rush to the finish line, I get a project that is “complete” in some sense; I could put it on GitHub, do a writeup on my hypothetical blog, and go viral on X.com.

But the problem is that, to me, there’s no joy in it; there’s no pride in what I’ve built; it doesn’t feel like craft anymore. I receive an alien artifact that fulfills my constraints.

I don’t particularly have an answer here - my only takeaway is to use agents less for personal projects. Automate the boring shit sure, but spend your time building the interesting pieces. There’s no point in burning tokens just for the sake of it.