"With sunlight on your face in my rearview…"
It's strange how a song can pull you back through time. Sunsetz comes on, and suddenly I'm not here anymore—I'm back in those years, 2018 to 2023, when coding felt different. More human, somehow. More fragile.
There was no AI then, not really. No agents orchestrating our workflows, no models predicting what we'd need next. Just us, hunched over keyboards in dimly lit rooms, wrestling with functions that refused to behave, debugging until our eyes burned. We were the intelligence in the system, and we were beautifully, frustratingly imperfect.
The Weight of Small Things
I remember the texture of those days more than the details. The way morning light would creep across my desk while I stared at a terminal, watching logs scroll past like prayers I couldn't quite understand. The coffee rings on notebooks filled with sketches of database schemas. The particular silence that would settle over the office during late deployments, when everyone held their breath, waiting to see if we'd broken something important.
We cared so much about things that seem trivial now. Code reviews that stretched into philosophical debates. Variable names that kept us awake at night. The perfect commit message, crafted like a haiku. Every line mattered because we knew someone else would read it, would have to live with our choices long after we'd moved on.
Ghosts in the Machine
Sometimes I think about the people who aren't there anymore. Not just the ones who left for other companies, but the ones who slipped away in quieter ways. Relationships that ended during crunch time. Friendships that couldn't survive the pressure of impossible deadlines. Love that got lost somewhere between pull requests and production fires.
There was this one project—I won't say which one—where we worked so closely together that our code started to look the same. Same patterns, same quirks, same way of handling edge cases. It was beautiful, in a way. Like we'd developed our own language, our own rhythm. When it ended, when the team scattered, I'd find myself looking at old commits and seeing traces of conversations we'd never have again.
The Ceremony of Deployment
Friday afternoon deployments were sacred rituals back then. We'd gather around someone's screen, watching progress bars inch forward, ready to roll back at the first sign of trouble. There was something almost religious about it—the collective holding of breath, the shared responsibility, the quiet celebration when everything went green.
I miss that feeling of shared stakes. When something broke, we all felt it. When something worked perfectly, we all owned that victory. Now, with all our automation and safety nets, deployments feel more like sending a letter—you drop it in the box and trust that it'll arrive safely. Less ceremony, less connection.
Fragments in the Rearview
The song keeps playing, and I keep remembering. The way TypeScript errors felt personal. The satisfaction of a clean refactor. The particular exhaustion that came after shipping something you'd poured weeks into, knowing it would be forgotten by users within days.
I remember pair programming sessions that felt like conversations with an old friend. The comfortable silence of working alongside someone who understood your thought process, who could finish your sentences in code. I remember the loneliness, too—late nights when the office was empty except for the hum of servers and the ghost of better times.
What We Lost
We gained so much when the AI revolution came. Faster development, fewer bugs, more time to think about the big picture. But we lost something too—that intimate struggle, that sense of craftsmanship, that feeling that every line of code was a small act of creation.
I don't want to romanticize the pain. Those years were hard. Burnout was real. Imposter syndrome was constant. But there was also something irreplaceable about the human messiness of it all. The way we'd debug each other's problems, not just in code but in life. The way a well-timed joke in a code comment could save someone's day.
The Sunlight Fades
Sunsetz ends, but the feeling lingers. I'm grateful for where we are now, for the tools that make our work easier, for the AI that handles the tedious parts so we can focus on what matters. But sometimes, in quiet moments, I miss the weight of those old responsibilities. I miss the feeling that every semicolon was a choice, every function a small piece of myself left behind for others to find.
The rearview mirror shows us where we've been, not where we're going. But sometimes, on days when the code writes itself and the deployments happen without ceremony, I catch myself looking back at those sunset years with something that feels dangerously close to longing.
With sunlight on your face in my rearview…
The light was indeed beautiful while it lasted.
Written in the quiet hours between commits, when memory feels more real than the present.
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