A month or two ago, I read an essay that turned me into a DeepSeek fan.
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/zk0KxuLzhmMJ4LPYW_OHMA
How extraordinary the developer who wrote it was, or how remarkable his achievements might have been, was perhaps beside the point. What struck me was how familiar his feelings as a developer were to me.
Having spent many years as a developer myself, I felt a deep kinship with him. And I found myself looking at another developer with a profound sense of respect.
There is a kind of joy in being a developer that is difficult to explain to others.
It is the act of creating something out of nothing. The moment an idea that has been circling around in your head becomes code, and that code finally works. The moment you discover a clue to a problem that seemed impossible to solve, and suddenly, everything falls into place.
The exhilaration of solving a problem you have wrestled with for a long time. The satisfaction of watching something you built behave exactly as you intended. The feeling that something impossible yesterday has become possible today, through your own hands.
I think every developer has experienced these moments at least once. There was a joy uniquely our own, something we could recognize in one another without needing to explain it.
Sometimes, we stayed up late working on things no one had asked us to do. We spent hours improving something that already worked well enough, simply because we wanted to make it better. A more elegant architecture. Faster execution. Cleaner code.
These differences might have seemed insignificant to others, but they mattered to us.
Because the process itself was enjoyable. Understanding something, creating something, searching for a better answer. Through that process, we found a kind of joy that went beyond simply doing our jobs.
And now, the world is changing.
Artificial intelligence has begun to perform, at astonishing speed, tasks that we spent years learning and mastering. Code that once took days of thought and effort can now be generated in an instant. Even complex implementations have become possible with just a few sentences in natural language.
Watching this transformation, I find myself wondering.
Perhaps we will no longer find joy in exactly the same moments as before.
But that does not necessarily mean we are losing the joy we have always found in being developers.
When the times change, the way we work changes. And when the way we work changes, so do the moments in which we find joy.
In the past, we might have found immense satisfaction in understanding a complex algorithm, solving a difficult problem, and finally completing a program one line at a time. In the future, we might find even greater joy in bringing something ambitious into existence that we could never have imagined building on our own.
The moment an idea that existed only in our imagination becomes reality. The moment something we once abandoned because of countless technical limitations finally becomes possible. The moment a small thought of ours becomes something tangible in the world.
Perhaps the moments that bring us joy are already beginning to shift.
Of course, the pleasures we knew before are still precious. The joy of writing code ourselves, digging deep into a problem, and finding our way to an answer will not simply disappear. It is just that, in a world where so much is changing, the ways we discover joy will change as well.
I think that is only natural.
Looking back, software development has always been this way. Whenever a new language emerged, a new tool arrived, or the development environment changed, the way we worked changed with it. Technologies that once defined an era became basic tools in the next, and things that once seemed unimaginable gradually became part of everyday life.
Throughout that process, developers kept learning new things, encountering new problems, and discovering new possibilities.
The emergence of AI may bring a greater transformation than anything we have experienced before. But I hope this change will not mark the end of what it means to be a developer. Instead, I hope it will be another turning point, one that expands the range of joys we can experience through development.
We will find new sources of joy.
We will take up new tools, explore new possibilities, and create things that do not yet exist in the world. We will marvel at different moments and find fulfillment in different ways.
And through it all, we will continue to love what we do.
Perhaps that is what it means to be a developer. To be someone who never loses the desire to create, even as the times change and the tools evolve. Someone who turns the seemingly impossible into something possible, and uses their own hands to make the world a little better than it was yesterday.
I do not yet know what kinds of joy lie ahead of us.
But one thing seems clear to me: we do not have to hold on to the exact same joys we experienced in the past in order to keep developing.
We will discover new joys in this new era. And in pursuit of them, we will learn, experiment, take on new challenges, and build again.
And in doing so, we will continue to live as developers.
When the world changes, the moments that bring us joy change, too. But the beautiful act of creating something, turning possibilities into reality, and finding joy in the process will continue.
I believe we will keep loving this work for many years to come.