AI Can Write My Code. I Still Want to Cook My Dinner.

When I was doing mobile development, compile time was my secret productivity hack. Those thirty seconds to three minutes while the app built? Perfect for push-ups, chatting with teammates, throwing in a load of laundry. The computer was at full power, I’d just finished a chunk of work, and I had this natural pause.

Now AI coding agents have democratized this for everyone, not just mobile devs.

I describe the problem, hit enter, and suddenly I’ve got one to five minutes of actual free time while the agent works. During this time, I’ve caught myself doing things I used to postpone indefinitely. The dishwasher that sat full until evening. The meal prep that seemed too ambitious during a work day. The mini workout that never quite fit into my schedule.

Here’s the surprising part: I’m not disengaging from the code. If anything, stepping away from the screen gives me moments of clarity I never had when I was typing every line myself. I come back refreshed, the chore is done, and I can focus on the architecture and design decisions that actually matter.

It’s not that AI is doing my chores. But it’s created space for them.

The Rhythm of Productive Waiting

There’s something ancient about this pattern. Farmers sow grain and wait for it to grow. Runners sprint and rest. The rhythm of intense effort followed by necessary pause isn’t new. We’ve just forgotten it in knowledge work, where we convinced ourselves that productivity meant never stopping.

Compile time gave this back to mobile developers. AI coding agents are giving it to everyone.

But here’s where it gets interesting: the pause is longer now, and more consistent. A minute at minimum for simple tasks. Sometimes five. The physical activity matters more than I expected. After watching screens all day, something tactile and concrete brings me back to my body. Folding laundry, chopping vegetables. And I’m still thinking about the code. Often more clearly than when I was staring at it.

These breaks make me less drained at the end of the day. I’m more consistently productive because I’m not trying to maintain focus for eight straight hours. The environment change, the physical movement, the mental reset. They all matter.

What One Person Can Build Now

I’m not an iOS developer. Yet I’m building iOS features like Time Shields for Activities Matter at neck-breaking speed considering how much free time I have for the project. This is moving faster than anything I’ve built in over ten years of software development.

The surprise isn’t just the speed. It’s what becomes possible when the cost of creation drops dramatically.

I’m not writing every line of code anymore. I’m designing the system. I’m making architectural decisions. I’m choosing what to build and why. The AI handles the individual implementation details: the boilerplate, the syntax, the mechanical refactoring I would have spent hours on.

This is how new startups are building so much so fast. This is why small teams in large companies can suddenly move like they’re ten times their size. Skilled engineers overseeing AI can build stable, well-architected systems without writing most of the code themselves.

One person with a side project can now build features they never could have tackled before.

The Luddites Weren’t Afraid of Progress

We remember the Luddites wrong. They weren’t afraid of technology. They were skilled craftsmen being replaced by low-wage workers operating machines. Between 1811 and 1816, textile workers in England watched their livelihoods evaporate, not because they couldn’t adapt, but because factory owners could pay untrained workers a fraction of what skilled weavers earned.

The Luddites fought back. They broke machines. They organized. They tried to preserve a way of life they’d spent years mastering.

The British government made machine-breaking a capital offense. Some Luddites were hanged. Others were transported to Australia. Most eventually had to accept the new reality and work in the factories under worse conditions than they’d had as independent craftsmen. The movement was violently crushed within five years.

Why couldn’t they just continue as boutique craftsmen? Some did. But the economics were brutal. Machine-made cloth was ten to twenty times cheaper. Only the wealthy could afford handmade. The market shrank from everyone to maybe five percent of the population. These weavers had families to feed now, not years to build a luxury clientele.

Meanwhile, more people could afford clothes. Factory production meant workers’ families could have multiple outfits instead of one worn for years. Society gained even as individual craftsmen lost everything.

The transformation happened whether it was good or not.

I think about this when I hear developers say they don’t like AI coding tools. I understand the impulse. The craft matters. The skill matters. But would you have been a Luddite? Would you have broken the machines, knowing what we know now about how that ended? Or would you have been one of the few who found a way to make boutique work viable? Or would you have gone to the factory?

It’s easy to say what we’d do from two hundred years in the future. It’s harder when it’s your livelihood disappearing in real time.

Look at the clothes you’re wearing right now. How much did they cost? Do you know where they were made? How they were produced? If you don’t know, they’re most likely from cheap overseas labor, made with plastic fibers instead of cotton or organic materials. And we’re mostly okay with that. We choose price and convenience. The transformation the Luddites fought against won completely.

A More Recent Example

Let’s look at something closer to home. IKEA has helped millions of people furnish their homes. Students in their first apartments. Young families on tight budgets. People can now furnish an entire house for what one handcrafted piece used to cost.

But IKEA furniture is made of compressed paper and veneer. It falls apart if you move it twice. It’s designed to be cheap, not to last.

Then again, that compressed paper is recyclable. IKEA has stronger sustainability commitments than most furniture manufacturers. They’re making it easier for people to return and recycle old furniture. They’re investing in renewable materials.

But they’ve also replaced furniture builders around the world. Craftsmen who knew how to join wood properly, who built pieces that lasted generations, who charged what their skill was worth. Most of them had to find other work or make factory furniture under someone else’s terms.

So is IKEA good? It depends on what you’re measuring. More people have furniture. Fewer people specialize in traditional woodworking. Furniture is cheaper and more disposable. Some of it’s more sustainable than what other mass-market furniture stores offer.

The question itself might be wrong. We all choose IKEA. We choose convenience. We choose price. I’ve done it before. You’ve probably done it. The masses consistently prefer cheaper stuff, and there’s no way to stop this at scale.

Some furniture makers did survive as boutique craftsmen. They serve wealthy clients willing to pay for handmade quality. The market exists, but it’s tiny compared to what it was.

The Luddites weren’t wrong about what they’d lose. They just couldn’t stop it.

When Automation Takes Too Much

But not all automation is like IKEA or factory-made clothes. Some automation doesn’t just change how we produce things. It removes us from essential processes entirely.

Getting calories is easier than it’s ever been. Food delivery brings restaurant food to your door in thirty minutes. Ultra-processed food sits on shelves for months, ready to microwave and eat.

Getting actual nutrients? That’s harder. We’ve optimized food for convenience and shelf life, not for health or satisfaction.

The ease of ordering food has made us forget how to cook. An entire generation is growing up without learning to plan meals, to understand ingredients, to develop intuition about flavors and techniques. We’re eating worse food, spending more money, and losing skills that humans have passed down for thousands of years.

Not every part of cooking is meaningful, of course. Scrubbing burnt pans isn’t soul-enriching. Repetitive chopping for meal prep can be tedious. But the creative parts—deciding what to make, learning how flavors work together, developing technique and intuition—these connect you to your food in a way that heating up pre-made meals never will. The ritual of planning, the judgment calls about seasoning and timing, the satisfaction of something coming together because you understood it. That’s what matters.

It’s the same with code. Writing your fiftieth API endpoint with identical boilerplate isn’t craft—it’s just typing. But designing how your system should work, choosing the right abstractions, understanding the trade-offs? That’s the craft worth preserving.

But here’s where the analogy breaks down: cooking and coding serve different purposes in our lives. Coding is mostly a means to an end. We code to build products, to solve problems, to earn a living. If better tools let us focus on higher-level thinking, the profession evolves like it has before. Most developers don’t mourn the loss of manual memory management or writing assembly.

Cooking is different. It’s a biological necessity and a social ritual humans have practiced for thousands of years. We need to eat, and how we relate to our food shapes our health, our culture, our daily rhythms. Automating cooking away entirely removes us from something fundamental to being human in a way that automating code implementation doesn’t.

This is different from the Luddites and IKEA. Those were about production efficiency and market forces. Food delivery and ultra-processed meals are about removing ourselves from an essential human process.

Some things in this space are murkier. Grocery delivery, for instance. You lose the experience of walking through a market, seeing what’s fresh, discovering something unexpected. But you gain time, and you’re still choosing your own ingredients, still cooking your own meals. The trade-off depends on your situation. If grocery delivery means you cook more instead of ordering takeout, maybe it’s worth it.

But ultra-processed food? Food delivery three times a week? We’ve gone too far. The convenience isn’t worth what we’re losing.

Drawing the Line

So how do we know what to automate and what to keep?

Cars let us move around freely without understanding how an engine works. We gain mobility and independence. We’re still making decisions about where to go and how to get there. We’re thinking at a different level, not removed from the process.

Fridges give us fresh produce at home, but not pre-packaged meals. We still have to cook. The fridge handles preservation. We handle creation.

Dishwashers and washing machines remove the repetitive manual labor: scrubbing, wringing, physical effort. But we still decide what needs cleaning, when to run them, how to organize the load. They automate the noise so we can focus on the decisions that matter.

AI coding agents work the same way. They handle the repetitive implementation: boilerplate, syntax, mechanical refactoring. I focus on what actually requires human judgment: the architecture, the design decisions, the trade-offs between different approaches. The AI removes the noise (writing another CRUD endpoint) so I can focus on the signal (how the system should work). When the AI is running, I step away from the screen and do something physical. I come back refreshed and ready to evaluate what it built.

The pattern: good automation removes the noise so we can focus on the signal. It handles what’s repetitive, not because those tasks are beneath us, but because they distract from what actually requires human judgment. It elevates what we think about without removing us from thinking. It gives us capability we didn’t have before.

Bad automation removes us from the creative decisions themselves. Food delivery doesn’t just handle prep work. It removes you from deciding what to make, how to prepare it, whether it turned out right.

Someone else shops, someone else cooks, someone else decides what you’ll eat. You just consume. Ultra-processed food is even worse. You’re not even eating real food anymore, just engineered calories designed for shelf stability and profit margins. There’s no judgment, no learning, no connection to the process.

The difference isn’t always clear. IDEs have autocomplete. Frameworks abstract enormous amounts of code. Languages keep getting further from actual machine code. Every layer of abstraction is another step away from the metal. Each time, someone worried we’d lose something essential. Each time, we did lose something. Each time, we gained something else.

But here’s the key: those abstractions still required us to make the creative decisions. Writing in Python instead of assembly didn’t remove architectural thinking; it removed manual register management. Using React instead of vanilla JavaScript didn’t eliminate design decisions; it eliminated repetitive DOM manipulation. The craft stayed. The noise left.

There’s absolutely a place for people who want to stay close to the code, who want to understand every line, who prefer to write it themselves. Some developers will become boutique craftsmen, commanding premium rates for hand-crafted code.

But most of us won’t. Most of us will use the tools that let us build faster and focus on design decisions rather than implementation details. Not because typing code is beneath us, but because it’s often the noise that drowns out the signal. We evolve to the next level of complexity by letting go of the previous level’s implementation details.

The question was never whether to use the tools. The question was how. And what we choose to keep doing ourselves.

What We Choose

We’re in a transformational period. Not just programming. The whole way we create and consume is shifting. AI brings enormous possibilities. It also brings real risks.

The transformation itself is neutral. It is what we make of it.

Markets are ruthless and don’t care about what we think is good. The Luddites couldn’t stop the factories. Furniture makers couldn’t stop IKEA. We won’t stop AI coding agents.

But individuals often underestimate their power and influence. We choose what to automate and what to keep. Cooking instead of ordering delivery. Letting AI handle boilerplate while we focus on architecture. Using the AI pause to step away from the screen and do something physical. These are all choices we make, not defaults we accept.

Thinking about these choices intentionally and purposefully, and sharing that, can help others take this path as well.

The code ships faster. I’m building things I couldn’t have built alone before. I’m also further from the actual implementation than I’ve ever been. But I’m still thinking, still designing, still making the decisions that matter.

The dinner takes time. I could order it in ten minutes. But I’m choosing, I’m creating, I’m engaging with something essential. The ritual matters. The skill matters. The connection to my food matters.

The technology doesn’t make these choices for us. We do.

That choice matters more than we think.