Comment by jackfranklyn

Relatable story. Stepped away from "proper" development for a few years to focus on other work, and AI assistants have genuinely changed how quickly you can go from idea to something that works.

The key shift for me: I used to spend hours stuck on syntax, fighting with build systems, or searching StackOverflow for obscure errors. Now that friction is mostly gone. The actual thinking - what to build, how the pieces fit together, what edge cases matter - is still entirely human. But the translation from "I know what I want this to do" to "working code" is dramatically faster.

The compound interest calculator is a good example of something that would've felt like a weekend project a few years ago but probably took you a couple of hours. That's the unlock - not that AI writes code for you, but that the tedious parts stop blocking the interesting parts.

What surprised me most was how much architectural intuition I'd retained even after years away. The fundamentals don't decay as fast as the syntax knowledge.