I'm at the tail end of a lifetime career of software development, and the way I've come to understand it is that I largely enjoy it because it lets you conjure

I'm at the tail end of a lifetime career of software development, and the way I've come to understand it is that I largely enjoy it because it lets you conjure dreams into reality - really a kind of superpower given how abstract and arbitrary those dreams can be. I used to think that "We are the gods of the digital age" would be a cool business card logo, although I doubt it would go down too well! The other part of the job/hobby that I've always found enjoyable is in striving for "perfectly" minimal/clean designs where the code reads more like functional requirements than messy implementation detail. You look at the code and it is obvious that nothing can be taken out, and no more minimal implementation is conceivable. A bit like an impressionist painting perhaps, where every brush stroke counts, and all you are left with is the essence of the thing being captured. I would proudly consider myself to be a hardcore geek, but there is no doubt an aesthetic/artistic component to software done right, a goal you know has been achieved when at the end of a project you re-read the code and gloat over how beautiful and minimal it is! This part of the satisfaction of software development will sadly be disappearing as the role of coding is taken over by AI, but perhaps there will still be some satisfaction in minimal design, if not in minimal implementation.