After over three years at AwesomeMotive, I’ve made the difficult decision to step away. This wasn’t a decision I made lightly. My time at AM has been full of amazing opportunities, growth, and some truly remarkable people I call friends. From taking me around the globe to the amazing autonomy I was given, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work there. I leave with nothing but gratitude and will always recommend AM as a great place to work.
But, recently I’ve realized that the way I find meaning in my work has started to diverge from the direction that much of the software industry is going. The rise of “AI-First” has been fast and invasive, and I want to be clear: I’m not against AI, but I’m not okay anything removing joy and craft in my work.
I think DHH sums up how I feel about AI pretty clearly:
I’m using LLMs all day long, but I’m not letting it write my code… I want to reserve the fun part of programming for myself.
To me, coding isn’t just a means to an end. It’s a creative act—an art form. I care about how the code is written, how it’s architected, and the learning that goes into mastering a craft. Which I think leads to something deeper: felt growth, deep understanding, and the kind of mastery you only get by doing the hard stuff yourself. It’s not just about finishing a task—it’s about how you got there. It’s something to be proud of—and knowing when another developer sees your code, they might say to themselves, “Nice!” The finished product? That’s the result of someone doing this kind work, something built with a genuine love for what they do, not a prediction.
Code is Poetry.
This phrase has always meant something special to me. It’s at the heart of how I’ve always felt about WordPress. WordPress isn’t just a platform I work with, coding within WordPress has brought me years of joy. It’s where I discovered how much I actually loved coding, how much I cared about the beauty of it, learned more about it, and how good it feels to ship something that has my code in it. That spirit was once deeply woven into what made WordPress special. I worry that it’s slowly losing that spirit out of fear of being left behind—as large corporations gain too much influence in the open source ecosystem, shifting focus towards product instead of process. It’s sad to see, and I hope WordPress continues to somehow hold on to its original spirit…with AI or not.
The pressure to use AI for everything is clearly growing. In many places, it’s being measured and increasingly shaped by performance metrics over quality, and now the direction feels like it’s being forced into something mechanical—away from creativity—and towards raw productivity. Human coding is starting to be seen as a performance issue rather than a skill.
And I am not okay with that.
I can’t speak for everyone. Some people are fine with this shift toward speed, performance, and output. But I believe this mentality is sidelining something really important: craftsmanship. It’s not something AI offers through pattern recognition and predicting what tailwind classes to use, but real craftsmanship that comes from genuine human curiosity about what they are trying to accomplish. I hope in the future we’ll see a renewed appreciation for that kind of work. AI-generated code will feel like junk, and when that happens I hope it will be the people who never let go of craftsmanship that we’ll look to again.
Read the continuation of this: What I found in that beige box
With all that said, I’ve chosen to step away for a bit. I’m going to take a few months to think, reflect, and explore where I choose to go next in all this. Maybe there’s a place where I can keep writing code with LLMs, and by hand. Or maybe it’s time for something entirely different.
—I don’t know.
But I do know this: I can’t just give in. I want to save the fun parts—all for myself.