Egregoros

@hj @phnt so I have opinions here.

My career was primarily systems administration, database administration, email, DNS, networking, that sort of thing. About ten years ago I wound up getting moved into primarily development because of "the cloud" and the fact I actually don't write terrible code and I work well in a team (and I can actually resolve a merge conflict without a fucking committee meeting).

That having been said, I find absolutely zero joy in code or writing code. There's no "creative joy" from building something, no beaming "look at what I made" from neat tricks or a slick UI, no dopamine from "here's a clever solution in a method" kind of thing. I never did, that isn't new. I could never comprehend people who would spend a day at work and then sit down and write *more* code on their own. I never judged anyone what they did for fun but I never understood it at all.

I always had more fun and pleasure from bolting parts together. I'm of the school of thought that most worthwhile software already exists, but in the form of component parts. Call it unixy if you like, the shoe mostly fits. For example, I built a "minimum viable streaming" web "application" out of an nginx plugin to capture an OBS stream and Dash.js in an HTML stub to stream it back to the user. To me that was fun and really interesting. How slim can I make this, how little code is required, etc. And it works great, like 3 seconds latency, no server load spike, etc.

As a result, development is really binary for me. Does The Thing do what it is supposed to do? Is it stable and reliable? Is it performant? Some of those are subjective but it all comes down to whether The Thing gets the job done, to a given degree of need and satisfaction, or not. If so, then its great.

To those ends, I've been having good results with Cursor. I'm happy to sit and spend significant time mapping out requirements, needs, caveats, how things fit into a framework, and so on, typing this out in plain directives that form a coherent request, and reviewing a plan for an implementation before anything gets generated. Then once I've got my hands on whatever came out, and seen it working, if there's nothing abhorrent or egregious, it ships. The Thing is doing the job and meets the company's metric for code quality, so send it.

To answer the original question, I don't "hate" software development, but its joyless and rote and usually just a hurdle getting the desired result. Maybe that makes *me* a little joyless but I'll own that.