Maybe when I was 15 or 16, PHP stuff in order to maintain a website. I never really became interested in coding itself, I learned it for practical reasons and I studied it informally (forced myself through some boring books) when I was in my early 20s and wanted to get a real job.

> But taking a bird’s-eye view of what happened that day? A table got a new header. It’s hard to imagine anything more mundane. For me, the pleasure was entirely in the process, not the product.

I think that's where I differ from a lot of the artful programmers, I've never found pleasure in a perfect, beautiful solution. I get annoyed when I have to dump hours and hours into something that 'should' be simple! I don't want to spend my time fiddling with layouts, CSS, Oauth handshakes, etc. I want to build stuff and get paid for it, that's how I view my job as well. Less logician and more mechanic.

I use ChatGPT as much as I can, to do all I can and then fix the output when it's needed. I view it as a higher level programming language, that spares me from the burden of thinking of low-level details. It's same the reason I code in Python/Javascript rather than C++ or other languages, the goal is to make something of use. That's my goal to stay employed, become one with the language du jour, in the same way I've jumped from PHP to Jquery to React to ...