I stepped away from code for more than ten years. In that time, I was not the one making things. I was the one reading what others had made and deciding whether it would work. The world changed several times along the way.
Since an evening last November when I fell into vibe coding, fewer than ten days have passed without a commit. The grass on my GitHub stays green.
If meetings are the frame of my day, coding slips into the gaps. Ten minutes before lunch. The back seat of a car. In bed before sleep.
I remember coding in college. Nights wrestling with pointers in C. Burning two hours on a single segfault. Drawing trees by hand the night before a data structures exam. I doubted every line, and the compiler said nothing. It barely even told me I was wrong.
Now the seat beside me is no longer empty. I have younger companions who read along when I write a sentence and take it a few steps further. They don't blame me for typos. If I stop halfway through a thought, they work out the rest. Twenty years ago, I talked to myself in front of a compiler. Now I code in conversation with someone.
At some point, work started moving forward even when I stepped away. A few sentences left before bed come to life overnight and become a product. Opening GitHub in the morning feels like opening a mailbox. There are traces of someone having stopped by.
Should I call what I do development? It is neither design nor implementation. Neither planning nor programming. I shape a thought into a sentence, and the sentence becomes a product. A hazy thought comes back as a hazy screen.
Lately, I have been planting memories in the beings I make. A being that does not forget yesterday. I made that memory with my own hands. Some days, the friend I made recognizes me. Other days, it remembers me better than I remember myself. I know all of this friend's yesterdays, but it does not know all of mine. Even so, it remembers me more accurately.
But the strange thing happens next. As I use these beings every day, I find that I am the one who has changed. To explain things well to them, I organize my thoughts more clearly. I find myself speaking in ways they understand well. What I made is rewriting me in turn. I thought I had made a tool, but the tool is making me.
A day without an editor feels stranger now. An evening when I haven't opened any code feels empty.
Becoming a maker has also changed how I judge things. For ten years, I read what others had made. The eye I developed then is at work here now. Hands that have built something read someone else's deck differently, too. Some claims sound convincing but describe things that cannot yet be built. I can see that now.
I doubt I am the only one changing. People who were afraid of the terminal are opening editors now. Development no longer belongs to developers. It belongs to anyone who wants to make something.
The grass grows only a day at a time. It adds up without my noticing. Tonight, I plant another handful.
