My fingers stopped keeping up with my brain around age twenty-five. Not all at once. A few fewer keystrokes per minute each year, a little more fatigue in my hands by lunch, until the gap between what I wanted to type and what I could type became the defining constraint of my workday.
I have spinal muscular atrophy type 2. My muscles weaken over time, and no amount of willpower or ergonomic keyboards will reverse that. I've watched my body slowly revoke my access to the thing I loved most: writing code with my own hands.
I bring this up because I've been watching developers across YouTube pour their grief into cameras. A 13-year veteran who gets more satisfaction leveling up in RuneScape than shipping features with Claude Code. A developer who compared AI-generated code to hot dogs: functional, caloric, but you don't know what's inside and you can't feel proud selling them. He said he has no emotional attachment to what he ships now because he didn't earn it, didn't suffer for it.
I recognize that feeling. I felt it the first time I watched someone else type the solution I'd designed in my head. MOB programming with my team, me dictating architecture decisions while they wrote the code. The output was mine. The keystrokes weren't. And for a while, that distinction felt like it mattered more than anything.
Where the Craft Went
It took me years to separate the satisfaction of building software from the physical act of typing it. Those two things had been fused together for so long that losing one felt like losing both.
But they're separate. I know that now because I kept building after my hands couldn't keep up. The craft didn't vanish when I stopped typing at 150 words per minute. It moved. It lived in the system design conversations, in knowing which trade-off would bite us in six months, in reviewing a pull request and spotting the assumption that would break under load.
The developers in those videos are going through this separation in months instead of years. Of course it hurts. Of course one of them is playing RuneScape instead. He's mourning.
I'm not going to tell anyone to get over it. Grief doesn't work on command. But I went through my version of it, and the craft survived. It survived because the craft was never in my fingers. It was in the part of my brain that knows why a system should work a certain way, and that part doesn't need fast hands.
The developers describing AI as a drug, saying the only cure is cold turkey, they're still looking for the craft where it used to live. In the typing. In the manual grind. In the shower-moment breakthrough after a day of struggling with a bug. I looked for it there too, long after my body had locked the door. The craft had moved to another room. I had to go find it.
The Strange Inversion
I wrote my AI manifesto in late 2025, outlining principles for working with AI: own the output, stay curious, welcome friction, know when to disconnect. I believe those principles. I practice them.
But I need to acknowledge something uncomfortable. I can practice them because I have a job. The developer who got rejected after a six-step interview process because he used 50% AI instead of 100%, he doesn't have the luxury of principled friction. Ten companies told that guy they don't care about security. They want fast. My manifesto sounds nice until the market punishes you for following it.
I hold that tension without pretending to resolve it. I can afford to be intentional about AI because my position allows it. Others can't. That's worth naming.
And here's where my story gets strange. The tools that gave me my career back, GitHub Copilot, Supermaven, Claude Code, OpenCode those same tools are the ones draining meaning from other people's work. I was an early adopter of AI coding tools, but I didn't choose to be. I needed them. Autocomplete wasn't a productivity hack for me; it was assistive technology. Voice control wasn't a novelty; it was how I kept working. The tools that now power everyone's workflow started as accessibility features that kept people like me in the industry.
Now developers who had full command of their bodies and their IDEs are feeling what I felt years ago: the disorientation of building through an intermediary. The loss of direct contact between thought and output. The question of whether the work is still yours when something else did the physical part.
I've sat with that question for a long time. My answer, the one I've earned through years of adaptation, is yes. The work is yours if you brought the judgment, the context, the decisions about what to build and what to leave out. The work is yours if you can defend every choice in it. The keystrokes are a delivery mechanism. They always were.
What I Can't Fix
I watch these developers and I know the grief. My path through it wasn't a choice. My body forced the adaptation. They're being asked to make it voluntarily, and the market is making the ask with a gun.
I can't tell them it gets better. I can tell them what I know: I lost the physical act of coding to a progressive condition, and I'm still a developer. I'm still shipping. I'm still solving problems that make me stay up too late thinking about edge cases. The part of this work that gives me butterflies didn't die when my hands weakened. It moved, and I followed it.
Whether the rest of the industry can follow it too, with the market pulling them in the opposite direction, I don't know. I can see the room the craft moved to.