There was a time when I loved web development.
Not in some vague, nostalgic way. I mean deeply loved it.
I loved how direct it was. You could make something real with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You could understand the whole thing. You could inspect it, shape it, refine it, and actually feel connected to what you were building. The web felt open, understandable, and honest.
Then over time, that feeling started to disappear.
Not because I stopped loving building.
Because building started to feel like a choreographed struggle against an ever-growing pile of complexity that never seemed to justify itself.
And eventually, I got fed up with it.
That may sound strange coming from someone as seasoned as I am, but that is exactly the point. I did not step away from development because I could not do it. I stepped away because I was no longer interested in dealing with all the ceremony, friction, and absurdity that had become attached to it.
I have been developing for a very long time. Long before the current framework era. Long before front-end development turned into a sprawling ecosystem of build tools, package managers, hydration strategies, transpilers, bundlers, meta-frameworks, and endless churn disguised as progress. I know what clean development feels like. I know what it feels like to work close to the platform, to understand the full stack of what you are building, and to ship without dragging an entire industrial supply chain behind a button and a form field.
I have been doing this long enough to know the difference between real progress and complexity that just learned how to market itself.
I come from a time when separation of concerns actually meant something. HTML for structure. CSS for presentation. JavaScript for behavior. Clean lines. Clear responsibilities. A system that made sense.
They took it all from us and replaced it with infinite complexity
Then the industry decided this all needed to be "improved."
And somewhere along the way, it lost the plot.
What used to be a relatively direct craft became wrapped in layers of abstraction and overhead, often in service of things that were not remotely complex enough to deserve it. Need a simple interface? Spin up a framework. Need a form? Add state management, validation libraries, component abstractions, a design token pipeline, and a dependency tree large enough to collapse under its own weight. Need a page of content? Great. First let's make sure it depends on JavaScript, hydration, and a stack of invisible machinery before it can fully exist.
Yes, frameworks solved real problems. No, that does not mean the industry needed to wrap nearly everything in this much ceremony.
That, to me, was never a compelling trade.
The web used to have native strengths. Resilience. Reach. Simplicity. Accessibility when you respected the platform. Pages that rendered. Links that worked. Forms that worked. Source that was understandable. You could build something solid without needing a small industrial complex to support it.
Then came the era where complexity became the culture.
Sites stopped working without JavaScript. Accessibility often got worse, not better. Dependency bloat became normal. Build steps multiplied. The barrier to entry shot through the roof. And somehow all of this was framed as professionalism. As maturity. As the cost of building "serious" products.
I never bought that. A lot of it just felt like needless suffering with good branding. Somewhere along the way, the industry decided that if a thing was more annoying to build, it must be more professional.
A lot of modern front-end development stopped feeling like building and started feeling like managing a hostage situation.
I did not lose interest in coding. I lost interest in babysitting an ecosystem. And after a while, I was done with it. Not done with making things. Not done with solving problems. Not done with software. Just done with the headaches.
Done with npm dependency roulette. Done with tooling stacks that broke because one package sneezed. Done with build errors that looked like they were translated from ancient prophecy. Done with spending more time managing the stack than creating the thing I actually cared about. Done with an industry that kept mistaking complication for sophistication.
So I pivoted toward product design.
I'm a designer. Hear me roar!
That pivot turned out to be the right move for me in a lot of ways. My development background made me a stronger designer. I understood systems, constraints, architecture, feasibility, implementation tradeoffs. I could see around corners. I could design with more realism and more depth because I knew what it meant to actually build the thing.
But I never stopped being a builder. That part of me never went anywhere. What disappeared was the desire to subject myself to the modern front-end experience.
Then AI coding came along. And suddenly, for the first time in a long time, development felt good again. Not because AI somehow turned me into a developer. I already WAS one. I have years and years of experience building software. That is not the story. The story is that AI removed enough of the friction, overhead, and pointless pain to make building feel fun again.
That is a huge difference.
AI did not give me my skills. It gave me back my momentum. It gave me back my tolerance. It gave me back the sense that I could just make the damn thing. I could just do things again.
Now I can build again without feeling like I have to wade through a swamp of framework ceremony and tooling fatigue every time I want to make something real. If I want to use a framework, fine. AI helps absorb a lot of the irritation. If I do not want to use one, even better. I can move faster, think more clearly, and stay focused on the actual product instead of the ecosystem theater surrounding it.
That is what feels so liberating.
For years, modern development often felt like this bizarre process where the real work only began after you had navigated a maze of setup, configuration, versioning, package conflicts, build issues, and docs archaeology. The stack constantly demanded attention. It wanted to be managed. It wanted to be appeased. It inserted itself between you and the act of making.
That was the part I got fed up with. Not the work. The machinery around the work. AI changes that. Now the path from idea to working thing finally feels short again.
I can think through an interaction, sketch the shape of a system, generate scaffolding, solve implementation problems quickly, and iterate with a level of fluidity that simply did not exist for me in the framework-heavy era. I do not need to manually carry every detail of the stack at all times. I do not need to stay permanently submerged in ecosystem trivia just to remain effective. I do not need to waste my energy on every layer of incidental complexity just to get to the part I care about.
The result is not just speed. It is clarity. It is energy. It is creative freedom. It is enjoyment. And honestly, I enjoy development more now than I ever did before.
That is the part that surprised me most.
Renaissance
I expected AI to make certain tasks easier. I expected it to accelerate the boring parts. I did not expect it to make me feel genuinely excited about building again. But that is exactly what happened.
It feels like a renaissance.
AI coding reopened a door that the framework era had effectively closed for me. It let me come back to development without also coming back to all the things that made me want out in the first place. The complexity is still there. The frameworks are still there. The dependency hell is still there. The culture of bloated abstraction is definitely still there.
But now I have leverage. Now I can route around a lot of that pain instead of living inside it. Now I can focus on what always mattered most to me: making something useful, interesting, elegant, and real. That is why this feels bigger than a productivity boost. It feels like a rebirth.
And I suspect I am not the only one.
A lot of highly experienced developers did not walk away from building because they suddenly lost their edge. They walked away because the experience of building became bloated, brittle, exhausting, and weirdly joyless. The joy got buried under machinery. The craft got buried under process. The work itself got buried under the conditions required to begin the work.
AI is changing that. Not by "replacing developers". By giving some of us a way back in. That is what happened to me. I did not return because the industry suddenly came to its senses. I returned because I no longer have to absorb the full cost of its nonsense just to design and build something great.
AI did not make me a developer.
It made development feel worth doing again.
