I miss the deep focus.
There was something real about sitting with a problem, turning it over until you understood it, and then building something by hand. Digital, yes, but still by hand. You had to earn the solution. That process had a kind of joy I am not sure I knew I was enjoying until it started to go away.
Manual coding was a craft. And like any craft, we kept trying to industrialise it. Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, SAFe, whatever the next thing was. We never quite agreed on the best way to scale it. But underneath all those frameworks, the actual work was still artisanal. You still had to understand the problem. You still had to write the code, line by line, and live with what you made.
Now we have moved to something else. The best word I have for it is orchestration. You are no longer the craftsperson at the bench. You are the factory floor manager.
There is still a kind of craftsmanship there. Designing the right orchestration layer, finding clever ways to prompt and compose and redirect, these are skills. Problem solving at its core has not gone away. But the scale changes everything.
When you were coding by hand, your attention could go deep. One problem, one flow state, one moment of understanding a tricky system from the inside out. That was the good part. With the factory, your attention has to stretch across the whole floor. Watching where quality is slipping, catching errors as they happen, figuring out whether what the machine is producing actually matches what the person at the other end of it needs.
And unlike a real factory, which makes one thing repeatedly, this one always produces code but the final product is always different. A different user, a different context, a different need that maybe got missed while you were looking somewhere else.
A lot of people are saying engineers are still essential because they understand users, because they think about the product. But that was always true of only some of them. Others were tunnel-visioned on the technical challenge, great at craft, poor at product. Which means the factory model may actually suit the product-minded engineer better. They already had an end-to-end view, already thinking about the whole production line rather than their small piece of it. The irony is that the deep-focus specialists, the ones who thrived on craft, may be the ones who struggle most with orchestration.
The framing has shifted. The joy of the craft is not exactly gone, but it is buried. Buried under the mental overhead of managing breadth and depth at the same time, watching the whole factory floor while also trying to understand what any one part of it is actually doing. That is a different kind of exhaustion than the deep focus ever was.
The real challenge, the one I don’t think we have figured out yet, is how to design a factory that doesn’t exhaust the person running it.