Maybe code was never the point

Note to myself. Reflection on from writing code to owning outcomes, from shipping features to creating momentum, and from chasing activity to recognising opportunity.

I was scrolling Substack the other day and came across this quote in an article.

The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.

At first, it sounded right. Later, I started thinking about it more.

I don’t write code the way I used to. Earlier, my days were commits, pull requests, debugging, and refactoring. Code was how I measured progress. Now my days look different hiring, customer calls, product decisions, leadership reviews, and docs.

At some point, you have to accept it. The engineer inside your changes. AI makes this very obvious. You open Cursor or Claude Code and get clean code in seconds. Things that once took effort now take a prompt. It forces you to ask uncomfortable questions about your identity as an engineer.

At first, you try to compete. Then you realise code was only a tool. The real work was always understanding problems, talking to customers, making trade-offs, and owning outcomes.

What bothered me about the quote is how we confuse activity with progress. In tech, we stay busy. We ship. We attend meetings. Later, when something works, we say it happened because we worked hard. But I’ve seen people grind for years and go nowhere. I’ve also seen people get lucky with one right move.

The big changes in my life didn’t come from working harder. They came from opportunity. Talking to customers early. Starting before things were ready. Exploring problems, I cared about. Being in motion when something opened up.

You don’t catch opportunity by waiting. You need momentum. You still have to build, test, talk, and ship. But this is different from hustle. If you’re avoiding something because it scares you, do it. If you’re avoiding something because you hate it, forcing yourself usually doesn’t help.

Somewhere along the way, the nature of the work changed.

Earlier, progress meant writing code and shipping features. Now it shows up differently. Not because I wanted it to, but because responsibility expanded. When you start owning outcomes instead of tasks, the work moves away from the keyboard. You stop optimising functions and start optimising decisions. You stop thinking in tickets and start thinking in systems.

These days, progress looks like forming a hypothesis, validating it with users, and repeating the loop. It looks like balancing work and family. It looks like finally taking that long-planned trip. Sometimes stepping away gives more clarity than pushing harder.

You still need technical depth. You still need to understand systems. But you don’t need to be the fastest coder anymore.

Your work changes. It becomes listening more, deciding more, and creating clarity for others. This is also work, and it’s easy to avoid because there’s no immediate feedback loop.

Engineering taught me one simple thing. Clarity comes after action. Momentum comes after shipping. Never before. And maybe that’s the real lesson of this AI phase.

Maybe code was never the point.