--- title: 12 things I miss since coding died | daily.dev description: A nostalgic, personal reflection from an engineering manager mourning the craft of hand-written coding now that AI coding assistants like Claude have taken... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/12-things-i-miss-since-coding-died-3gqfg5xk2 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: 12 things I miss since coding died | daily.dev og:description: A nostalgic, personal reflection from an engineering manager mourning the craft of hand-written coding now that AI coding assistants like Claude have taken... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/12-things-i-miss-since-coding-died-3gqfg5xk2 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/3GqfG5xk2.png og:image:alt: 12 things I miss since coding died og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # 12 things I miss since coding died **[Manager.dev](https://daily.dev/sources/zaidesanton)** · 10 min read · 143 upvotes · 23 comments ## Summary A nostalgic, personal reflection from an engineering manager mourning the craft of hand-written coding now that AI coding assistants like Claude have taken over much of the work. The author lists twelve experiences he misses—debugging mysteries, satisfying code reviews, rabbit-holing into bugs, exploring obscure tech, learning the debugger, taking real breaks, unreasonable personal automation projects, mentoring juniors, solo 'aha' moments, pairing to solve monster bugs, writing technical designs, and the thrill of finally solving something impossible. He frames this as a genuine career transition with an ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning, urging managers to acknowledge the loss their engineers feel rather than rushing past it. The piece includes a sponsored mention of BairesDev staffing services and links to other newsletter picks. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@phlisg** · 11 upvotes > Spot on **@chelmix** · 8 upvotes > I'm still enjoing all of this in what is probably the last months of (partly) old fashion conding at my workplace **@heymantas** · 5 upvotes > Sometimes there are business-related problems that require you to deeply understand the situation and figure out the solution yourself, where just writing a prompt won’t help. > > I still have those “My brain is awesome” moments, but they feel less rewarding than they used to. **@pwitham** · 4 upvotes > The biggest one I miss is the satisfaction of finally solving something that kicked yet butt for way more hours than it should have and you finally found it in the early hours and sit back knowing YOU did it. **@hitprim** · 3 upvotes > the one I'd add: reading someone else's source for an hour to figure out why something doesn't work. I still do it a lot with browser automation libs, and honestly that's where the weird bugs live - the AI happily writes the flag, but only reading the code tells you the library silently drops it 🙃 ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [I Miss Writing Code](https://daily.dev/posts/i-miss-writing-code-yxc7ryasd) · iamluminousmen · 0 upvotes · 1 comments - [Something About Coding Stopped Feeling Good — and It Took Me a While to Figure Out What](https://daily.dev/posts/something-about-coding-stopped-feeling-good-and-it-took-me-a-while-to-figure-out-what-3i9mrgkxo) · DEV · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [I'm done using AI](https://daily.dev/posts/i-m-done-using-ai-vwdc40jl0) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#career](https://daily.dev/tags/career), [#leadership](https://daily.dev/tags/leadership), [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/12-things-i-miss-since-coding-died-3gqfg5xk2) ```json 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is probably the last months of (partly) old fashion conding at my workplace","datePublished":"2026-10-06T09:10:28.182Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/3GqfG5xk2#c-GLSrZFc7t","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"MiSz","url":"https://daily.dev/chelmix","image":"https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/95591662?v=4"},"interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":8}},{"@type":"Comment","text":"Sometimes there are business-related problems that require you to deeply understand the situation and figure out the solution yourself, where just writing a prompt won’t help.\nI still have those “My brain is awesome” moments, but they feel less rewarding than they used 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I still do it a lot with browser automation libs, and honestly that’s where the weird bugs live - the AI happily writes the flag, but only reading the code tells you the library silently drops it 🙃","datePublished":"2026-10-07T11:38:38.203Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/3GqfG5xk2#c-t6wkgFmQW","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Alexandr Kazmin","url":"https://daily.dev/hitprim","image":"https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/316548136?v=4"},"interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":3}}]} ```