And Thorsten Ball feels fine. Joy & Curiosity #68:

2025 was the year in which I deeply reconsidered my relationship to programming. In previous years I had the occasional “should I become a Lisp guy?”, sure, but not the “do I even like typing out code?” from last year.

…

And the sadness went away when I found my answer to that question. Learning new things, making computers do things, making computers do things in new and fascinating and previously thought impossible ways, sharing what I built, sharing excitement, learning from others, understanding more of the world by putting something and myself out there and seeing how it resonates — that, I realized, is what actually makes me get up in the morning, not the typing, and all of that is still there.

I’m still adapting to this, having previously identified as a “Ruby guy”, “a Vim enthusiast”, and “a TDD devotee”. A couple of times a day, I find myself executing the “careful, incremental steps” tactics that scarcity of code demanded. And then I wonder, what’s the corresponding move for abundance of code? (I think 2026 is, for me, likely about exploring and finding that answer.)

I learned from a couple turns as an engineering manager that it’s the problem-solving, technical and social, that really excites me. If using coding agents means I code and think about the particulars of software development less, in exchange for writing and thinking more about what’s possible with software and teams, that’s a fine trade-off.

What if we don’t have to worry about how often someone or something would have to redo a contribution? What if we don’t have to worry about in which order they produced which lines and can change that? We’ve always treated auto-generated code different from typed-out code, is now the time to treat agent-generated PRs and commits different? What would tooling look like then?

I’m with Simon Willison here: what we produce now as software developers is trust-worthy changes/contributions that do the thing we say they do and don’t break all the other things.

Most teams are over-indexed on “produce code” and short on “make sure we didn’t break other things” part. I suspect, for a few months/years, we’re going to see lots of (weird) ideas about how to shift from scarcity of code to scarcity of verification. I’m not sure that coding agents can help us slop/generate our way out of that, at least not in January 2026.