Has Programming Lost Its Fun?

I chose programming because I liked the challenges it gave me.

It felt a bit like putting different pieces of a puzzle together and eventually ending up with something real.

I liked doing creative things with it every day. I wanted to try things, break them, fix them, and eventually turn them into something that actually worked.

But lately, I don't feel that way as much anymore.

I feel like the challenges have become smaller, and the work has become more repetitive.

Frameworks are great. They make our lives easier and let us build things much faster. But at the same time, they also mean that a lot of the repetitive work is already solved for us by libraries, components, and abstractions.

And I've been wondering:

Did making coding faster also make coding less fun?

Especially now, when AI is becoming a bigger part of how we write code every day.

And the funny thing is, I'm literally using ChatGPT to fix the mistakes in this post instead of just writing it myself, making mistakes, and figuring them out along the way.

Maybe that's what we've become.

We want to do things correctly the first time, without making mistakes, without wasting time, and just get them done.

So I want to do the opposite for a while.

I want to build a framework from scratch.

Instead of making my work easier, I want to make it harder.

Partly because I want to understand what frameworks like React are actually doing behind the scenes.

But then another question comes to mind:

Do we really need to know what's happening behind the scenes?

I remember working on robotics projects, and one of the things I loved about them was how much you had to figure out yourself.

If you wanted to display a simple piece of text on a tiny LCD, you had to deal with hardware and protocols.

If you wanted to draw a circle, you couldn't just call a library and move on. You had to write algorithms for it, sometimes with a few ugly, nested for loops, just to make a circle appear on a screen.

It was frustrating sometimes, but it was also really satisfying.

Now, the further we go, the more libraries and frameworks we have for almost everything repetitive.

And I actually like that.

React, UI libraries, animation libraries... they're all amazing. It's pretty crazy that I can build something today in a few hours that would've taken me days before.

But sometimes I wonder if we're removing too much of the process.

Maybe I don't miss writing more code.

Maybe I miss figuring things out.

Building websites and applications is still interesting to me. I still love seeing something go from an idea to something real.

I just don't want everything I build to feel like following a recipe.

So that's what I'm going to try.

I'm going to build a small framework from scratch, without worrying too much about whether it's useful or production-ready.

Maybe I'll learn something important about how frameworks work.

Maybe I'll realize this was a terrible idea after a few days.

I don't know.

I just want to see if I can get that feeling back.

The feeling of actually building something.