You might have heard the saying
"you'll only get so far in life if you don't enjoy the thing you do"
maybe not in these exact words or from someone famous, but the idea itself is incredibly powerful.
Its only recently that I realized how true this phrase really is.
When I chose to pursue computer science in college, I genuinely believed it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I thought that because I enjoyed coding, I would naturally become one of the best in the field. Over time, however, I realized that things do not work that way.
My interest in coding began during the COVID era, when I started building Discord bots for my own server. I was so invested in it that I would often make excuses whenever my friends asked me to play Krunker or Minecraft on Discord.
I genuinely loved building those bots, and looking back, that was probably one of the happiest phases of my life so naturally I assumed the next step was obvious: pursue computer science, continue coding, and I would remain just as passionate and fulfilled.
It took me a while to realize that what I truly enjoy is building things, not endlessly going through theory without any sense of application.
Most of the courses I have taken in college felt disconnected from the kind of projects I actually wanted to build, and over time, that disconnect slowly made me lose interest.
Give me an interesting problem to solve, though, and I will obsess over it day and night.
I used to enjoy the process of figuring things out because every breakthrough left me with a sense of pride and pushed me to go even further.
Whenever I got stuck while building Discord bots, I would spend hours searching through Google, digging through Stack Overflow threads, and sometimes even getting mocked for asking beginner questions in library Discord servers.
As frustrating as it was at times, that process taught me how to think, troubleshoot, and persist.
I miss that grind in the age of AI.
Now, you can simply prompt your way to an answer. In many cases, you do not even have to code anymore. Agentic IDEs can generate entire implementations for you within seconds.
People keep saying coding is dead, and honestly, a part of me finds that deeply saddening.
Recently, however, I found myself reconnecting with that old feeling while building a WebSocket engine completely from scratch without relying on AI.
I spent days reading RFC specifications and MDN documentation, taking notes, going through blogs, and studying how other engineers approached similar problems. I found myself trying to understand and solve challenges around the single-writer principle, server-authoritative state management, backpressure handling and many more.
For the first time in a long while, I genuinely felt happy while programming again.
Alongside this, I also worked on molly. Although my friend Arnav and I relied heavily on AI while building it, the project still genuinely excited me.
Molly is a terminal-native Discord client designed as an alternative to Discord’s bloated desktop experience. Modern Discord feels unnecessarily heavy and resource-hungry, largely because it is essentially a browser wrapped inside Electron, consuming significant system resources just to let people chat.
The idea behind Molly was simple: interact with Discord directly from the terminal without ever needing to open the actual desktop application. Messages would still relay through Discord normally, but the entire experience would remain lightweight, keyboard-driven, and terminal-native.
I have always enjoyed building TUIs, so the moment this idea came to us, I already knew where the next few weeks of my life were going.
Young me thought passion for programming meant endlessly writing code.
What I failed to realize was that the joy never came from coding itself. It came from curiosity. From getting stuck for hours, reading obscure documentation at 2 a.m., debugging impossible issues, and slowly piecing things together until everything finally clicked.
And honestly, I think that is the version of programming I want to hold onto.