I Never Really Wrote Code. Now That’s the Point.

If the syntax isn't the craft anymore, fantastic. It never was for me.

I’ve basically spent my whole working life orbiting code without ever doing the “sit down and carefully learn programming” thing people love to romanticize.

I’m a web and graphic designer first. Making websites was the hook, so at some point it was inevitable I would start poking at the stuff behind the curtain and teaching myself full stack–ish skills in the messiest way possible.

In the late 90s (high school era), Perl was my entry point. I threw together this tiny little CMS for a video game blog, and yeah, it was absolutely held together with copied tutorial snippets and whatever random forum post solved the exact problem I had that night. I never cracked open a programming book. I just kept building and scavenging code like a raccoon. If it ran, it stayed.

I Learned to Code Sideways

Then the web did its usual thing where everything shifts under your feet, and suddenly you’re “a PHP person” because that’s what hosting supported, and that’s what clients wanted, and that’s what you could deploy without a headache. I still copy-pasted constantly, but over time it stopped feeling like pure blind faith and started feeling like “ok, I kind of get what this is doing.” My real comfort zone was always HTML/CSS, plus jQuery when I needed the page to do anything more interesting than sit there. Vanilla JavaScript never became this deep craft for me. I knew enough to not drown.

When Node.js showed up, I tried it early, and it sort of rewired how I thought about building things. I wasn’t suddenly some hardcore backend engineer, but it made the whole idea of “full stack” feel less like a wall and more like a door you could just walk through. jQuery slowly faded out of my life as I prioritized snappier pages and followed my usual pattern of not mastering anything head-on, but absorbing just enough of everything to keep moving forward.

Design Brain, Developer Hands

The weird/cool part is AI has pulled me back into this stuff harder than anything in years. Tools like Claude Code (and the general wave of agent-y coding help) made it fun again in that early-internet way: you have an idea, you build it, it exists. The friction drops, so you spend more time making choices and less time staring at syntax like it’s a crossword puzzle. For me, that’s been the difference between “ugh, I should code this” and “wait, I can actually ship this tonight.”

Ryan Dahl (Node.js creator) posted something yesterday that hit me right in the gut:

“This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That’s not to say SWEs don’t have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it.”

That basically describes how I’ve always operated, minus the dramatic framing. I’ve rarely been the person lovingly typing every line from scratch. I’ve been the person stitching things together, testing, tweaking, making it behave, shaping it into something usable. So when people talk about “humans not writing code anymore,” I’m like... sure. That’s been my whole vibe for decades, just with worse tools.

Outsourcing Syntax to the Machine

And yeah, there’s still work. A lot of it. Figuring out what to build, keeping it from turning into spaghetti, deciding what matters, catching the subtle bugs, making it secure, making it maintainable, making it not a nightmare for whoever touches it next. AI can puke out a thousand lines, but it doesn’t automatically give you taste, judgment, product sense, or responsibility. It also doesn’t sit there worrying about edge cases at 2am because a client launch is in the morning.

So my take: coding is absolutely shifting from “type syntax” to “direct the machine,” and that feels more honest about what many developers have always done anyway. The people who only ever valued the typing part are the ones having a minor existential crisis. But don’t get me wrong, I can relate to the anxiety. I am a designer after all.

Where do you land on this? Do you feel like AI is turning you into more of a builder, or more of a reviewer/editor? Or is it just exposing what you were already doing?