This is the good times

“I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”
Andy Bernard, The Office, S9 Finale

I think we all have rose-tinted glasses when looking back. Everything seemed so peaceful, so calm.

In many ways, there are signs telling us that the decade or two before 2022 were truly the good old days, before we entered a phase of great transition. I mean this in every aspect of our lives.

We’ve had no major wars globally since the Second World War. We’re about 80 years into that peace. Pax Britannica lasted about a century; maybe Pax Americana will last a bit longer, but there’s no doubt we’re nearing the end of that timeline.

So much has happened in the last decade. Social media is everywhere, with “influencer” becoming a viable career. I would have been laughed out of my class if I had put that on my career goals in middle school. Information nowadays is comparable to processed food: synthetic, not usually healthy, but we consume it anyway.

I was probably among the last graduates to have gone through university without LLMs (class of 2021). We had autocomplete, but that was about it. Coding was still googling and Stack Overflow. We actually had to write multi-page essays; cheating still required you to find similar essays and copy-paste. Now it’s just a prompt.

When I was romanticizing becoming a programmer, I used to watch this video a lot. Look at that Sublime editor. The calmness. We didn’t have Next.js. Web programming was still cool. Mobile apps were becoming the next big platform.

Now I’m more of a manager of agents. I can materialize my ideas much faster with far less effort, but that feeling of coding in those days... I miss it. In the early ChatGPT boom, before Sonnet 3.5 on Cursor, using AI almost felt kind of dirty. Now, not using AI gives me the feeling of being left behind. It’s almost foolish to code by hand.

It’s not just programming. I get similar feelings when I think of my childhood: the classrooms, going to public baths with my dad and buying ice cream on the way back, the first snow.

I think similar feelings will apply to what we do every day that feels so mundane. Grocery shopping, driving, commuting, searching for electricians and plumbers. AI and robotics will probably change all of this (for the better, I hope), and someday we’ll reminisce about these routines the same way I reminisce about coding the old way. Keep an eye on the future, but enjoy the everyday.

Merry Christmas.