"Euphoria. Yeah — that’s usually how it starts 🙂 You get a tool that does something genuinely new. It becomes an extension of your hands and your thinking, removes the most annoying, repetitive tasks, and does it much faster. And suddenly, you can’t stop.
Programming is probably one of the very few intellectual disciplines with feedback loops this short — and at the same time, the material we work with is extremely plastic. It’s not that far from pure thought.
But sooner or later, as systems grow and the scope of tasks expands, more and more hard work appears — work that simply has to be done to get results.
Important nuance: hard doesn’t mean complex.
Cleaning up an ancient codebase, writing boilerplate for a new project, covering everything with tests — these are hard tasks, but not complex ones.
Sometimes a bright idea dies not because it’s bad, but because you suddenly realize how much routine you’ll have to grind through just to validate it — not to mention shipping it to production.