# At Last I Am Free
2026-02-25
There's a part in me that hates to admit it but over the last months I've never felt so productive as with the AI agents. Writing code by hand was always a craft. A hard skill earned over a long time. Forging evolving unfinished ideas into code that was flexible enough to bend and adjust to reality was a skill. A hard one to learn and an even harder one to teach. I've tried.
At last I am free. I still need the skills of system thinking, problem solving and attention to detail. The ability to read and write Go code is still important. But I can just build, inspect, learn and refactor with ease. It's liberating. Like working with several skilled colleagues who have infinite patience, high skill and unmatched speed. I'm no longer constrained how quickly I can turn my ideas into code. It's liberating.
I can finally build beautiful and useful user-interfaces without being constrained by my mediocre HTML and ncurses skills. Making tools good, fast and easy to use is what I love and oh-my-god is this fun to build.
Yes, building green-field applications is nice and you can one-shot interesting applications. But there is an enormous amount of code which was written over decades and which is very important. Systems that need to be maintained, fixed, evolved, understood and migrated. Replacing old bugs with new ones is not enough.
Software isn't dead! Every new engineer needs the same skills as the current ones: problem solving, logical thinking, attention to detail. But they are no longer constrained by how quickly they can type or whether they can learn a language.
Be an expert in something. It teaches you how to learn and become good at something. Use the power of the new tools we have been given.
And then build the next wave of software.