The Joy of Building

There’s something deeply satisfying about building something that didn’t exist before.

Software engineers know this feeling. So do artists, carpenters, metal fabricators, gardeners, and anyone else who makes things.

That satisfaction comes from lots of places.

Having an idea and making it real. Getting lost in the flow of the work. Being an expert at something. Solving a problem. Finding that elusive bug. Discovering an elegant solution. Seeing something work for the first time.

And, of course, looking at the finished product and thinking, I made that.

From the dawn of computers until about the end of 2025, software engineers got to experience all of these things. And forming the syntax in your brain, then typing it in, wasn’t just a necessary part of the work. It was part of the reward.

That part has died. Forming the syntax and typing it in. You don’t do it anymore. Let’s put its time of death at January 2026.

AI does that work now.

It also does a lot of the debugging. And the designing. And the testing. And the refactoring. Often faster and better than we can.

For many engineers, this feels like losing the best part of the job. I was in a meeting yesterday where someone said, “But that’s what I love about my work. How will I derive any satisfaction from what I do?”

I understand that point of view. But I don’t share it.

Was typing code really the best part? The syntax?

Or was it the satisfaction of solving the problem? The creativity of designing the solution? The judgment required to make the tradeoffs? The curiosity that led to understanding something new? The actual functioning thing?

We have no choice now but to separate the satisfaction of creating from the mechanics of creation.

The software engineer’s job isn’t disappearing. But the source of satisfaction is moving.

From writing the code to imagining what could exist. From debugging the implementation to questioning the design. From mastering a programming language to mastering a problem domain.

The challenge isn’t just learning how to work with AI.

It’s learning to find the joy of building in the other areas.