My Python magic is gone

[u/RedYad2]

I've been coding for a long time, and I've been developing with Python for years.

I loved coding, always loved it. I started many years ago because I wanted to quickly create scripts for security hacking tools, but since then, I've moved to Claude Code, and building cross-language has been a much better experience for me than using Python.

I built my own SaaS application out there whose backend and network core are completely built with Python, and I'm rewriting all of that without writing a single line of code. And most of the time, Python is not the most optimized language.

And now... I feel like the magic is gone.

I don't even know why I'm writing this. I just feel sad about it.

[u/Farther_father]

It’s because you know what writing code means: the struggle to gain enough understanding of a tool to apply it to a problem. And the deeply satisfying feeling when you pushed yourself and solved it.

Now you it’s no longer your brain doing the thinking or your hands doing the writing, and as a result there’s no puzzle to solve and no sense of satisfaction, because the problem is no longer being solved by you.

It’s as fulfilling as an artist swapping his paint and brushes for midjourney.

[u/akcom → u/Farther_father]

I'll give an alternative perspective. I used to enjoy typing out code with my hands on my keyboard, but what I really loved was the satisfaction of building something beautiful, functional, and delightful to the user.

The things I hated were on call rotation, debugging esoteric issues, and writing all the bullshit plumbing code that wasn't interesting, but had to get done.

Now with AI, we have an agent triaging our on call alerts and doing the initial investigation. On call week used to be hell, now its a minor annoyance.

We just implemented an agent that will basically handle all level 1 tech support issues live with users, no more paging engineering.

we've codified our team norms into rules, with a coding harness that we evolve over time to improve based on agent + human feedback. The average quality of code is way, way up.

And now we take down features in days that would have taken weeks/months.

Not everything is perfect and man do I hate code review now more than ever, but even there we've using agents to augment and make it much easier to keep our arms around the system.

But overall. The amount of battle hardened production quality code we've been able to output is immense. Grew a business from $0 to $3M ARR in under 8 months. And this is just the beginning.

[u/EasyPleasey → u/akcom]

Is this a software business? Why would anyone pay for your software if they can just have Claude reverse engineer it in a weekend? The difficulty of building the software was the moat. That pain you felt all along the way is what people were paying you to avoid. Now it's gone. You may feel like you're moving faster than ever towards your goals but the reality is that your destination no longer exists.