[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":132},["ShallowReactive",2],{"writing-\u002Fwriting\u002Fweve-re-entered-the-era-of-play":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"date":124,"description":12,"extension":125,"meta":126,"navigation":127,"path":128,"seo":129,"stem":130,"__hash__":131},"writing\u002Fwriting\u002Fweve-re-entered-the-era-of-play.md","We’ve re-entered the era of PLAY",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":120},"minimark",[9,13,16,19,22,25,28,31,39,42,45,48,55,58,61,64,67,70,73,76,79,82,85,88,91,98,101,108,111,114,117],[10,11,12],"p",{},"That’s it. That’s the post.",[10,14,15],{},"I’m kidding, but we have really, haven’t we?",[10,17,18],{},"Back when I just started web development in about 2007 or so we were only just coming out of the era of TABLES. Remember those? Rounded corners were a section of a sprite, spacer gifs lived on your desktop and CSS was the absolute wild west of coding.",[10,20,21],{},"But you know what we did? We played around with stuff.",[10,23,24],{},"Then, perhaps I grew up, or maybe the industry did I’m not sure - but I feel like everything got more serious. Harder. No more just FTPing files to the server - now we have CI pipelines and test suites. We have abstractions and build processes. Frameworks and frameworks and more frameworks. Environments and env vars.",[10,26,27],{},"Lots of this is good, I think. We save ourselves from that classic “I think I just deleted the prod database” (yes, I did that in my first week in my first job ha).",[10,29,30],{},"But somewhere along the way we forgot how to play. Or, at least I did.",[10,32,33,34,38],{},"So focussed on uptime, reliability, scalability and making sure we built the ",[35,36,37],"em",{},"right"," thing we lost the fun of mucking around until it worked.",[10,40,41],{},"That process of faffing with the thing produced some wonderful surprises. I still remember the delight when I first figured out CSS animations. I was just trying to rotate a background shape and it was taking me hours to figure out, digging through stack overflow not knowing what I was looking for. I came across something that looked vaguely similar and ended up making it spin slowly around and around.",[10,43,44],{},"How brilliant! It made me change the boring static design I had in front of me and brought it life.",[10,46,47],{},"Electric!",[10,49,50,51,54],{},"This what coding with AI feels like to me now - I keep discovering things I didn’t know existed. I mean, I can see the output of them in apps or websites, but I stopped wondering how they were done because frankly everything felt so ",[35,52,53],{},"hard",".",[10,56,57],{},"Faced with “how do I scale a socket server” a year ago I’d have girded myself for a 2 day reading session before plumping with low confidence on something and hoping for the best.",[10,59,60],{},"I’m not a huge theory type of person, I like to try things out and see if they work instead. But as I found throughout my career so far, that has limits when you’re dealing with sensitive data or credit cards etc. So you slow down, and read more, then very carefully assemble something and really hope it works.",[10,62,63],{},"Both methods are good - and I’d argue both are critical to successful, stable software. But I felt like in the past few years I was doing more overly cautious research and less building and trying things out. The balance had shifted so far away from the mucking around line that I’d lost sight of it.",[10,65,66],{},"AI has given that back, to me at least.",[10,68,69],{},"I can play again.",[10,71,72],{},"I can try out 5 different ways of doing something and then delete them all and try again. I don’t need to spend a week learning the intricacies of canvas to see if that’s the right approach, Claude can just mock it up for me and I can dig in.",[10,74,75],{},"This is how I learn best - tearing apart other things to see how they work. Faced with a blank canvas and I’m usually lost. I need to get messy, fast, and then out of that usually comes something worthwhile.",[10,77,78],{},"This is absolutely not to say that we stop running tests, or having governance and controls over what code ships to prod. I’m not insane. But in the lab, we can go wild. Prototyping weird shit is back in fashion.",[10,80,81],{},"Knowing what to build, and why, is still an art form though and I don’t think that will ever change.",[10,83,84],{},"Design is not dead.",[10,86,87],{},"Coding isn’t either.",[10,89,90],{},"It’s just changing, and to me it seems more like the fun version it used to be. Democratic, accessible to anyone with some tokens. *",[10,92,93,94,97],{},"I should note it’s taken me years to get to this point. I absolutely did ",[35,95,96],{},"not"," even look at AI seriously until the noise was deafening. I was 100% sceptic until I finally did due diligence and used Cursor for a month. Then Claude Code came along, and with it The Awakening.",[10,99,100],{},"It’s here to stay in some form or other. It’s quicker to build things with, and with that comes the cost of reviewing and understanding the output. The cost of bugs no human created and thus some poor human has to try and understand at speed (deep joy).",[10,102,103,104,107],{},"But we ",[35,105,106],{},"also"," get an insane amount of creative freedom to make wild shit. **",[10,109,110],{},"I am absolutely here for that upside.",[112,113],"hr",{},[10,115,116],{},"* OK so not quite fully democratic. Tokens cost money, but there are increasingly affordable options if you break away from the big boys (👀 Claude).",[10,118,119],{},"** Honestly sometimes the output is so wild you have to laugh. Divs are not buttons. Who knew flex col was so popular over vertical margins. But thankfully AI is a tool, and you can give it boundaries and standards to stick to which help with this level of insanity.",{"title":121,"searchDepth":122,"depth":122,"links":123},"",2,[],"2026-05-08","md",{},true,"\u002Fwriting\u002Fweve-re-entered-the-era-of-play",{"title":5,"description":12},"writing\u002Fweve-re-entered-the-era-of-play","yOFhD0yt3JAY7IbluBNCPBItGG3gvAknGi1Psip1UzM",1791393950057]