The job I fell in love with barely resembles the one I do today. I don't say that with regret, exactly. But something has changed, and there are parts of the earlier version I miss.
My first internship was a long time ago. I was fresh out of university, aware immediately that I didn't have the skills I wanted and that the only way to get them was to be somewhere doing the work. I also wanted to go abroad, so I started applying to anything I could find in the UK. I arrived with broken English and somehow landed a frontend role in Devon, in the south-west of England.
The job was simple. I received PSDs and had to make WordPress themes match them, pixel by pixel, editing a CSS file. Nothing more than that. Brutal styling work, occasionally bordering on hacking things together. But it was a good school. It taught me to adapt, to find a way through unfamiliar problems, and it gave me a genuine love for design and the discipline of getting things exactly right.
I won't go through every step of what followed. There were side quests into SEO and social media marketing, a period managing the full stack of a PHP SaaS application, and eventually a more settled identity as a developer working in React and AWS. Each phase taught me something different and added another layer of context. What I kept noticing was that I had a knack for picking things up and adapting. I just didn't always realise it at the time.
The changes came slowly enough that I often mistook the environment shifting for me falling behind. The levels of abstraction kept compounding. CSS fixes gave way to component libraries and JS frameworks. Frameworks gave way to thinking about systems as a whole. Microservices, infrastructure, architectural patterns. I thought I was just trying to keep up. The reality was that thousands of developers were doing exactly the same thing, all at once. Then AI arrived, and the pace stopped feeling manageable.
At first it felt like something categorically different. But stepping back, it's the same pattern again, just more dramatic in scale and speed. Another abstraction layer. Now I pull Jira tickets directly into Cursor, ask for a plan, review it, and let the agent build the code while I handle the final check. I have a custom command that generates PR descriptions following our team's template and conventions. It works. It's fast. And it's a long way from those afternoons in Devon, hunting down obscure CSS rules to make a layout match its design.
There's a lot of talk about coding being dead. Maybe in its older form it is. What I'm doing now is less coding and more engineering. And I've come to think that all the generalist knowledge I accumulated over the years, the context, the pattern recognition, the instinct for what makes something well-built, is exactly what makes working in this new system possible. The foundations weren't wasted. They're what lets me guide, evaluate, and push back on what the agents produce.
It's a different world and a different job. I do miss the clarity of pure coding, the contained satisfaction of solving a problem entirely with your own hands. But I'm finding new energy in this too. New ways of thinking, new areas to understand, new skills that matter. The learning hasn't stopped. The system has just changed again, as it always has.