Did I really build this?

Lately I’ve been thinking about the things we build with AI. And I keep landing on the same question. Did I really build this? Or did I just foresee it being built?

Chapter 1 — Confusion

The steps are always the same. I get an idea, or I see something online and think “I bet I could make that, or at least put my own spin on it.” New project, Neovim, agent pane on the side.

And then I sit there.

I stare at the empty screen and the blinking cursor for a while, and eventually I give in and explain the idea to Claude Code, and watch it try to build something out of a prompt I hadn’t really thought through yet.

While it Ponders and Ruminates, I get this vague feeling. Am I the creator of this project? Can I say it’s mine? I’m in the passenger seat doing the directing, sure. Making the calls on what goes in and what stays out. But at what point do I stop being the creator, or even the orchestrator, and start being the approver of a machine’s output?

Some of you will say that’s just the nature of coding with AI now. Less about writing code, more about understanding the system behind it. Fair enough. An agent writes more code in a minute than I could in thirty and I’m not going to sit here and argue with that.

I started learning to code at a funny time. I was working my way through The Odin Project, getting to grips with web development, and ChatGPT was released at the end of that same year. The ground shifted while I was still figuring out the basics.

I remember being away on holiday, four hours into a flight with no internet, working on a Christmas-themed programming assignment. I spent the whole flight trying to simulate the mechanics of falling snowballs and get the engine working under the hood, while also questioning why our professor had us learning Java in BlueJ of all things. Still haven’t figured that one out.

I remember that project to this day. The frustration and the satisfaction in equal measure. Five years later I can still recall the exact feeling of getting it to behave the way I wanted, and how completely mine it felt.

Chapter 2 — Connection

That flight wouldn’t be a problem now. It would be a Wi-Fi purchase.

I’ve shipped more in the last year than in the two or three before it combined. Things that used to sit in a “someday” note get built on a Saturday. And most of them work. I want to be clear that this isn’t a complaint about quality, because the code is usually fine. Sometimes it’s better than what I’d have written on my own.

But I notice I don’t feel much about them.

For a while I assumed that was about understanding. That if I read the diffs properly, if I could hold the whole system in my head the way I used to, the feeling would come back. So I tried it. Reviewed one project line by line like I was being paid to do it, and by the end I understood it completely.

It still felt like something I’d found rather than something I’d made.

So it wasn’t understanding I was missing. It was connection to the thing. And the connection came from the hours.

I keep coming back to that phrase, hours in the saddle. Pilots log them. Riders log them. Nobody logs how much of the manual they’ve read, because reading the manual isn’t the thing. The hours are the thing. You put the time in and slowly you stop thinking about the machine and start thinking through it.

That’s what those four hours on the plane bought me. Not knowledge about falling snowballs, which honestly I could have got off one page of documentation. A feel for that specific program. By the end of the flight I knew where everything was because I’d put it there. I knew which part was held together with tape because I was the one who taped it. When something broke I didn’t really debug it so much as reach for it, the way you reach for a light switch in your own house in the dark.

I don’t have that with the projects I’ve built this year. I know where the files are because I looked. I know how the auth flow works because I read it back. It’s all correct and none of it is in my hands.

And it isn’t credit I’m after, or authorship, nothing that grand. It’s just the ordinary familiarity that comes from spending long enough with something that it stops being separate from you.

You can be handed an understanding of a system. Nobody can hand you a feel for one.

Chapter 3 — Now what

I don’t have a good ending for this, which is part of why I wanted to write it down.

The obvious answer is to go back to doing it all by hand, and I don’t buy that. I’ve seen what I get done now compared to three years ago and I’m not giving that up to feel more authentic about it. The hours weren’t precious in themselves either. Plenty of them went on things I’d happily never do again.

So I’ve been trying things instead. They’re all the same question asked in different ways: what do I keep for myself.

Writing the first version myself and letting the agent take it from there, on the theory that the early hours are the ones that stick. Picking one part of each project, the part I actually care about, and refusing to hand it over. Going slower on the things I intend to keep and fast on the things I don’t. Going back to something I don’t recognise and rewriting a piece of it by hand just to get dirty in it, even though the code was fine as it was.

Some of that helps. Though I can’t tell yet whether it helps because it works, or because it makes me feel better, and I’m suspicious of anything I can’t tell that about.

Maybe the feeling doesn’t come back in the same form. Maybe it moves somewhere else, into problems rather than programs. That would be fine, I think. I’d just like to know.

For now, the honest answer to did I really build this is: some of them, yes. Some of them I watched get built.

I’m still working out how to tell which is which before I start, rather than a month after I’ve finished.