Coding Became a Thriller

There are two kinds of movies. The ones you half-watch while folding laundry. Background noise with a few sharp moments. And the ones that keep you locked in the whole time. You finish the first one relaxed. You finish the second one wrecked.

Software engineering used to be the first kind.

Write a function, wait on a build, scroll Twitter, come back, tweak a test, wait on a deploy. Short bursts of focus with lots of quiet time in between. You could do it tired. You could do it while half-listening to a meeting.

AI changed that.

Now every minute is live. The AI is always one step ahead. You're reading code it wrote, catching the small thing it got wrong, deciding the next move, tracking three things at once because it all moves that fast. The quiet time is gone. All that's left is the intense part, all day long.

It's thrilling. It's also exhausting in a way the old job never was.

This isn't a job for everyone anymore. It's for people who can carry heavy mental load all day without breaking. People who can stay locked in for eight hours and come back the next day to do it again. The ones I see thriving aren't the fastest coders or the deepest algorithm people. They're the ones who can carry the weight.

If you're ending the day exhausted, you're not doing it wrong. You're doing it.