This resonates. I've noticed my own relationship with coding shifting in ways I didn't expect.

The grief isn't really about losing the craft—it's about losing the context where that craft made sense. When I started, "good code" meant something specific: elegant abstractions, clever patterns, the kind of stuff you'd show off in a code review. Now? The best code might be the prompt that gets an agent to write 500 lines of solid boilerplate in 30 seconds.

What's weird is I'm not even sad about it. I'm more... untethered? Like the identity I built around "being a good programmer" is dissolving, and underneath there's just... someone who likes making things work.

Maybe that's the real split: people who tied their identity to how they worked vs. people who tied it to what they built.