I have a confession - I built a website with minimal dependencies. I realise this to be a revolutionary act. Furthermore, I built it with my own code and got AI to review it, not the other way around. It seems positively weird to be building a website right in the middle of the "chatbots will replace user interfaces" rhetoric.
Here is something else thoroughly strange... I used CSS 😱 Not SCSS, PostCSS, CSS modules. Because it's an Astro site, I just included the CSS in the file.
Why do I tell you all this? I say it, not to blow one's own trumpet (there's not much to trumpet anyway), but to ley people know it's okay to write your own code. Given the current "vibe code everything" movement, writing code and being an actual programmer is a revolutionary act.
Revolutionary, but also 100% necessary. If you're outsourcing your brain and thinking to AI then you're diminishing the power of said brain by reducing your ability to think, reason and problem solve.
I do find it amusing to watch the AI hype cycle we've been through in such a short period of time. Firstly, AI was going to be so good that we'd all be losing our jobs. Then, we were all moving from VS Code to Cursor, Antigravity or Windsurf (I've circled back to VS Code as many have).
We have very powerful agentic coding platforms drawing from incredibly advanced LLMs. However, now that the era of unfettered LLM use is coming to end, we're having to be very judicious with how we implement AI into our workflows. Tokens are not cheap anymore now that the AI companies have grafted all that data from us when we were giddy writing everything with AI.
Circling back to writing code by hand. I was struck by how freeing this was. Sure, it's only a one page website for my wife's craft business operation, but I had to go back and revisit how to use flexbox correctly, what clamp() is and why it's great for targeted typography sizing. I used color-mix function, which is something I had not used before. This led me down a rabbit hole of what the heck oklabs and oklch is and how that transforms the range of colours available.
In summary, I feel if you want to be fulfilled as a developer, get things done and stay mentally sharp, try not to just poutsource everything to the machines. If you do this, then you make yourself vulnerable to job displacement.