I hear you. There was something special about the old days when programming was all about taking your time, thinking through every step, and truly understanding

I hear you. There was something special about the old days when programming was all about taking your time, thinking through every step, and truly understanding what you were building. I miss the days of punching cards — there was a certain simplicity to it. You’d write your code, feed it into the machine, and if it broke, it was your fault. There was no hiding behind tests or CI/CD pipelines, no auto-fixes or layers of abstraction. It was just you and the machine, and every bug was a lesson you had to learn the hard way. The feedback loop was slow, but it was real. Now, everything feels automated, fast, and often a bit too dumb. Sure, it’s easier, but it’s lost that raw connection to the work. We’ve abstracted away so much that it’s hard to feel like we’re truly engineering something anymore — it’s more like patching together random components and hoping it holds. I think we lost something when we all started staring at screens all day and disconnected from the hands-on nature of building. There's a lot of slop now, and while some people thrive on that, it’s not for everyone.