I'll be honest, six months ago I was dreading opening my IDE. Every project felt like climbing a mountain in lead boots. The joy was gone.
I'm a data engineer by day, managing complex pipelines and infrastructure at a healthcare ad-tech company. I've always had side project ideas, but the gap between "cool idea" and "actually building it" felt insurmountable. Learning new frameworks, debugging for hours, fighting with CSS, it all felt like work on top of work.
Then I tried something different.
The Experiment
I'd been skeptical of AI coding tools. Felt like cheating somehow. Like I should be able to build things "the right way," learning every framework deeply, understanding every line of code I wrote.
But burnout doesn't care about your principles.
So I grabbed Cursor IDE and Claude, picked a simple idea (a collection of developer tools), and just started building. No grand plan. No trying to learn React from scratch first. Just building.
What Actually Happened
Here's the weird part: it worked. Really well.
I built Toolpod.dev, 48 browser-based developer tools like a JSON formatter, regex tester, base64 encoder, and a bunch more. Plus an API directory. Full responsive design, deployed on Firebase. The kind of project that would've taken me months of grinding through tutorials and Stack Overflow.
Did it in weeks.
But more importantly, I enjoyed it.
The Mental Shift
The fraud feeling was real at first. "Am I even a real developer if AI wrote most of this?"
Then I realized something. I've been using tools to be more productive my entire career. Frameworks instead of vanilla JS. Libraries instead of reinventing the wheel. Stack Overflow when I'm stuck. Git to manage versions. VS Code extensions for productivity.
AI is just another tool. A really powerful one.
What I actually do is architect the structure, make product decisions, review and modify AI-generated code, debug when things break (they do), optimize and refactor, and make it actually usable.
The AI handles the tedious stuff. Boilerplate, syntax I'd have to look up anyway, converting designs to code, repetitive patterns.
The Unexpected Benefits
The speed is obvious, but what surprised me is I'm not cutting corners. The code is solid. It's just faster.
I actually learn faster too because I can ask "why did you do it this way?" and get explanations in context.
Starting a new project doesn't feel daunting anymore. That's huge for side projects. The activation energy is so much lower.
And honestly, the joy is back. I'm building things again. Lots of things. The creative part is fun again.
What It's Not
Let's be real, it's not magic. You still need to understand what you're building. You'll hit walls and need to problem-solve. Bad prompts get you bad code. You're still responsible for what ships. Complex architecture still requires real expertise.
But for MVPs? Side projects? Learning new tech? It's a game-changer.
The Bigger Picture
I see posts about developers worried AI will replace them. I get it. But I think we're looking at it wrong.
AI isn't replacing developers. It's removing the grunt work that was burning us out in the first place. The tedious stuff that made us dread opening the IDE.
What's left is the interesting part. Solving problems, making decisions, building things people actually use.
Try It Yourself
If you're feeling burned out, or if you have ideas you've been putting off because they feel like too much work, just pick one small thing to build. Use Cursor or GitHub Copilot (both have free trials). Don't overthink it, just start. See how it feels.
You might surprise yourself.
For me, it changed everything. I went from dreading code to shipping projects again. The tools didn't make me less of a developer. They made me a happier one.
And honestly? That matters more than I thought it did.
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