Deep Purple performing on a blue-lit stage, seen from the crowd.

Oct 2026

What Was All That Struggle For?

I’m at a Deep Purple concert, and somehow I’ve ended up thinking about programming. Apparently watching a legendary rock band isn’t enough to stop me bringing work into absolutely everything.

Watching them, I keep imagining the hours that went into being this comfortable with an instrument. The years before anybody cared. Repeating something, getting annoyed, trying again. Hearing a sound on a record and having to figure out how the hell someone made it.

My first reaction is that we’re losing something like that in programming. AI is taking over more of the work, and with it, perhaps, some of the intimacy. You can get a lot further without becoming personally acquainted with every stupid thing that can go wrong.

Then I catch myself making the same argument people make whenever something they spent years learning becomes easier for other people.

Which is worth being suspicious of.

Because I don’t actually miss spending an entire afternoon discovering that I misunderstood a configuration file. That wasn’t a sacred encounter with the soul of computing. Sometimes it was just a wasted afternoon, and I would have happily paid someone to give it back.

But occasionally, while trying to fix one thing, I ended up understanding five others. I came away knowing how a part of the system worked that I’d previously been bluffing my way through. Later, that knowledge helped me solve a problem I couldn’t have anticipated.

I wanted the program to work. Learning happened because the program stubbornly refused to cooperate.

A silhouetted figure follows a purple cable from a laptop through a hole in the wall into a vast hidden machine, lighting it with a torch.

Now I can often get past that refusal without understanding much more than I did before. The immediate benefit is obvious. The cost is harder to notice, because nothing appears to be missing. The thing works. I move on.

That does bother me. Although, being honest, I suspect there’s another feeling mixed in.

I liked being able to do something difficult.

I liked having spent enough time with computers that something incomprehensible to someone else made sense to me. When a tool makes that ability less unusual, it’s tempting to turn my bruised ego into a theory about the collapse of craftsmanship.

Maybe I genuinely care about preserving understanding. Maybe I’m also annoyed that the entrance fee went down after I paid it.

I suspect both are true.

A silhouetted figure holds a long receipt marked Paid in years while someone younger enters a doorway with a reduced entry fee.

None of that means the next generation owes me an equally frustrating education. Someone learning today might use AI to explore things I never had time to explore. They might ask better questions, try more ideas, and become better than me. Being born early enough to remember the inconvenience doesn’t entitle me to win.

And the concert does not prove otherwise. What I’m watching are the people who made it. All the people who found learning an instrument miserable and quit are not up there to present their opposing viewpoints.

At a concert, people carrying instrument cases file out through an exit while the crowd watches the band; one silhouetted figure turns to watch them leave.

Still, there’s something encouraging about the fact that these musicians can stand in front of a crowd and remain this good. Their ability hasn’t expired just because other ways of making music exist. Nostalgia may get audiences into the room, but it cannot play the instruments for the musicians.

That’s a more useful takeaway than a lecture about how nobody learns properly anymore.

I don’t need to preserve every difficulty that taught me something. I have to choose, though: what do I care enough about to keep learning when nobody is forcing me?

I might use an AI-generated solution to something I have no interest in mastering. There are only so many hours in a human life. On the other hand, I might spend another hour on a problem already solved because I want to understand why the solution works—and whether I’d recognize a bad one next time.

The awkward part is that I can no longer pretend the choice is entirely outside my control. When getting something done required understanding it, work made that decision for me. Now I have to make it myself, often while looking at a perfectly functional result and wondering whether I can be bothered.

Late at night, a silhouetted figure works on the open circuitry of a guitar amplifier whose power light is still on, its screws lined up beside it.

I’m not worried about running out of difficult things to learn. There are plenty.

I’m more worried about getting comfortable accepting answers and gradually losing the habit of asking good questions.

Watching a veteran rock band still kick ass makes me want to stay good at something for a long time. I’d rather use the new tools to help me do that than spend the next twenty years explaining how hard it used to be.