The System Went Down

The system went down. One leader opened Slack. The other opened the logs. Same title. Same years of experience. Same team size. The difference was proximity to the system they were responsible for. I try to avoid writing code from scratch now. I need to sit with that sentence for a moment because it still doesn't feel true, even though I've been living inside it for months. There was a time when I would stay up endless nights losing myself in the thinking of writing code. Not shipping. Not hitting deadlines. Just the pure absorption of building something from nothing, watching it take shape, debugging until the logic finally yielded. It was something I loved. That's not where my attention goes anymore. All of it has shifted to optimizing AI or reviewing AI or shipping AI. I've trained a completely new muscle. And when I go back to the old one ... when I actually sit down to write code from scratch without tooling assistance ... I feel it immediately. The retrieval cost has gone up. Syn