I’ve come to realise that I need to change my mind on something I believed I would do.

If I had a button I could press that immediately solved a customer’s problem, I would push it every time

This is something I’ve always said in interviews or when talking to people about the kind of work I do.

The gist of that statement is that I’m not interested in the code or artefacts that we produce, but am focused on solving the problems of customers regardless of what that solution looks like.

Let me be clear that ultimately that is still the goal of what I am doing, but it’s the whole button part that I need to address.

With the arrival of AI in the last couple of years, the ability to generate entire web apps and code solutions has become entirely possible. Back when I started saying that statement there was no way I could imagine there being an actual button you could press, but as of today that’s entirely possible.

So I’ve had to ask myself: am I going to push the button?

And this is where I need to change my mind. To accept that I am probably a hypocrite when it comes to this thing that I’ve been saying for years, because:

I don’t want to push the button.

I like the code. The artefact. I enjoy crafting a solution using my own creativity, knowledge, and experience. Taking something complex and distilling it down to a pure and simple form that I can be proud of, but which also still achieves the goal of solving a customer problem.

And selfishly I don’t want that part to be taken away from me and put behind a button that I can press to just do it all for me.

I’m not naïve enough to think that this is going to last forever. One day I’m going to have to choose to push the button myself or someone else will do it for me.

But until then, I’m going to continue doing the part I enjoy the most: writing code.