it's strange to see the world of the past fade before my eyes from 2012 through 2024, I wrote code in long sessions of sitting in vim -- sometimes typing, mostly thinking, flipping between different terminals, making changes, looking at errors, googling, reading stackoverflow... I took pride in carrying in my head these towering abstractions. I knew every nook and cranny of my business logic, like a neighborhood you live in. I felt extra fast when tab-completing a single long variable name. Nice. I placed every parenthesis, every semicolon, myself. Hundreds of thousands of them. And like a great wave washing over your sandcastle on the beach, it is now all gone. Engineering will never again be as it once was. What's especially significant about it to me is that there's barely a record of the way it was: I've spent thousands of hours writing software, and I don't think there's a single video recording of me doing it. I remember how it was: the long breaks of meditative silence, the frustration of hunting a particularly tricky bug, the relief and joy in solving it, the expressions of taste and cleverness that come with any manual craft. But it's hard to communicate how it was to someone who has never experienced it. As with all histories, the narrative is lacking in depth: you really had to be there.