I have been rebuilding the classic games — a flood puzzle, a Lunar Lander clone — and each now takes about an hour with AI doing the programming. The step that used to bring the joy, the problem solving, is skipped. Some thoughts on what replaces it, on being deskilled, and on the honest answer to "what will you do with the time instead?"
I have been revisiting the classics lately: a colour-flooding puzzle, then a Lunar Lander clone. Each took about an hour to build with Claude. That hour included the design and logic decisions, review, testing, and deployment to GitHub Pages. Granted, an hour does not produce a fully production-ready application — but what remains between a playable game on the web and a hardened product is mostly devops, not invention.
I have been building clones of these games since I first learned to code, and my history is littered with half-finished attempts. The fascination was always the logic. I would spend hours, sometimes days, working through it — getting the game to behave just right, chasing down the animation problems that invariably arose. Every platform brought its own fights: Java, the web in the jQuery era, then React — different libraries, physics simulators, and animation engines, the same stubborn problems in new clothes.
This time I did not see the code. I did not write the logic. Where does that leave us?
The joy that got skipped
The step that brought the joy — the problem solving — is now skipped. In its place is a different joy, one I had less access to before: the joy of finishing. Of publishing complete, working software and watching someone play it the same afternoon. The optimistic reading is that there are higher-level problems for me to solve now, and probably great joy to be found there too. I believe that reading. I also miss the days of tweaking algorithms, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise.
A test I set myself
A related thought: are we being deskilled by AI? Most definitely. It has been about a year since I wrote any Python by hand, so I set myself a test — a sudoku solver, no assistance. I knew exactly what I needed to do; the approach was as clear in my mind as it ever was. But the syntax had gone fuzzy. I had to think surprisingly hard to remember how to slice arrays cleanly and how to shape the loops I wanted.
There was some sadness in that, and a little panic. I spent so many years coding that I had assumed these skills were part of me, the way a language is. Apparently they are more like a muscle.
The longer view
Set against the rest of human endeavour, though, this is a familiar trade. Long letters written by hand gave way to short emails, and then to shorter text messages. Most of us no longer know how to grow our own food or weave cotton into cloth. We shed those skills — not without loss — and in exchange we developed the capability to do greater things.
Which suggests the real question is not whether I can still slice a Python array from memory, but what the recovered hours are for. The Bahá'í International Community made this point plainly in a statement on digital technologies: these tools are not neutral conveniences but reflections of our values, and their worth is measured by their role in carrying humanity toward its highest ambitions. Capability, in other words, is only half the ledger; the other half is what it serves.
Floundering, honestly
So — should I continue to hone my coding skills? Perhaps there is value in it beyond the value found in perfecting any art, though that value alone might be reason enough. And as for those higher-level problems I claim I will now focus on: I have been deliberately vague about them, because it is not yet clear to me what they are. I am still floundering in that space. It seems more honest to say so than to pretend the answers arrived in the same box as the tools.
References
- Bahá'í International Community, "Reflections of Our Values: Digital Technologies and a Just Transition" — statement to the 59th session of the UN Commission for Social Development - bic.org (2021)
- The clones in question: Flood · Lander
These thoughts are my own. I had help with grammar, structure, and research from Claude.