Request, Review, Accept, Repeat: The Life Inside the Loop

I used to be a developer. Now I'm a very well-paid while (true) loop.

Request, review, accept, validate. Repeat.

A small eulogy for the fun part

Remember the bug that took three days? console.log("HERE"), then console.log("HERE 2"), then console.log("WHY"). And on day three, in the shower, it hit you: the timezone. It was always the timezone.

That little fireworks show when the problem finally clicks? Mostly gone.

Now the agent finds the timezone bug in forty seconds. No shower needed. It just says "The issue is a UTC conversion in the date parser. Here's a fix." and waits for me to press accept, like a waiter holding the bill.

I miss being clever. I miss the whiteboard full of arrows only I understood. The part where I solved the puzzle got replaced by me reading someone else's solution and nodding.

Rest in peace, console.log("WHY"). You were a real one.

So what did I get back?

Time. Actual, unscheduled time. Here's where it went.

Big picture. When you're deep in the code, you see the function. In the loop, you see the system. Why do we have three services that do the same thing? Who approved this architecture? (Me. In 2021. I'm not proud.)

Technical debt. That TODO: refactor this later from four years ago? Later is now. The legacy module everybody was afraid to touch? I touched it. Nothing exploded. Mostly.

Testing. It used to get whatever energy was left after the feature worked. Usually none. Now the agent writes code fast and my job is to prove it's right: edge cases, weird inputs, the user who pastes an emoji into the phone number field. Breaking things is more fun than I remembered.

Meetings. The gift nobody asked for. Now that I'm "so much faster", I have plenty of time for everything my PM and manager love:

• The standup: "I approved stuff, I'll approve more stuff, no blockers."
• The sync before the planning. The planning. The sync after the planning.
• The "quick 15 minutes" that has never once been 15 minutes.
• The meeting about why we have so many meetings.

For ten years, "Sorry, I'm deep in a bug" was my shield. Now everybody knows the agent is fixing the bug. The agent took my code. The calendar took my afternoons.

Don't get me wrong

This isn't a complaint. This new stage is genuinely great.

Every team has a graveyard of ideas killed by two sentences: "We don't have time" and "What if it doesn't work?"

That graveyard is opening up.

Experimenting is cheap now. An idea that used to cost two weeks and a meeting to justify now costs one afternoon and a request. If it works, I show up with a working prototype instead of a slide. If it doesn't, I throw it away and nobody notices. Especially my manager.

"I'm not sure it's possible" used to be the reason not to try. Now it's the reason to try, because finding out is faster than debating it. I'm not just the person who closes tickets anymore. I bring ideas, already working.

The loop, honestly

The loop isn't the enemy. It's fast and it ships. But it only works if the person inside is still thinking. The moment I accept proposals without reading them, I'm not a developer. I'm a rubber stamp with a salary.

The creativity didn't disappear. It moved. Writing a good request is design. Rejecting a proposal is architecture. Deciding what's "enough" is engineering.

Less fireworks, more chess. I still miss the shower moment, though.

Your turn

Are you in the loop too? What are you doing with the time you got back? Fixing tech debt, chasing that idea from the graveyard, or sitting in the sync about the sync?

Tell me in the comments. I'll read them between meetings.