A developer's case for making things the hard way in the age of generative AI

Programmer and game-maker Joel Otter describes hitting a wall this week — not a dramatic breakdown but a quiet erosion of motivation — brought on by generative AI’s encroachment on creative work. His core objection isn’t primarily environmental or economic: he simply doesn’t enjoy coding with an assistant, takes no pride in its output, and doesn’t feel ownership of it. What stings most is the loss of craft’s social reward. The small tools he built by hand and shared with colleagues — like a git branch switcher he used daily — no longer feel special when anyone can conjure an equivalent from a prompt.

He frames this as the most turbulent moment he can remember for software engineers, a period where each person has to decide how to respond to a shifting craft without the benefit of hindsight. He doesn’t fault peers who’ve adopted the tools; the peer pressure is real and LLMs are genuinely capable at code generation. A conversation with a friend, Shad — who continues to build his film-emulating iOS camera app Uncamera entirely without AI despite sharing the same anxieties — helped him reframe the choice. He already does everything the hard way, writing his own game engine in C++ rather than reaching for Unity or Godot, precisely because he enjoys it and learns from it.

The piece resolves into three paths: adopt AI to keep pace and lose the joy, stop creating entirely, or keep making things the hard way for no reason beyond wanting to. He chooses the third. Beyond one person’s coping, it captures a broader identity crisis rippling through software and games as automation reprices hand-built work — and argues that intrinsic motivation, not competitiveness, is reason enough to keep going.