“I spent ten years barely coding while I ran companies, and I worried the same thing. But at 40 I’m back at it, and AI makes it more fun than ever, so I’d bet your decade taught you judgment that no one-year bootcamp can fake.”
“I spent two years writing code at Venmo that probably nobody remembers, then another decade not coding at all while I built Nas Daily. The skills didn't disappear; they became the lens I use to build everything now. Your decade is not a waste if it taught you how to think.”
“I spent years refactoring code that shipped, got rewritten, and disappeared, and the only thing I kept was the judgment I built finding the right ten lines. Code nobody remembers is not wasted time if it taught you how to see a system.”
“Most code I shipped at Twilio and DoorDash is already gone or rewritten, and the systems I built at VMware only mattered to the people inside that room. The decade wasn't the code; it was the judgment I earned while writing it, and that compounds in ways no one else will see.”
“I don't worry about whether anyone remembers my code; I worry about whether I learned enough writing it to build the next thing better. Most of what I shipped at Swym will be rewritten anyway, but the judgment I gained from it is what compounds.”
“I dissolved BqETH after years of building it, then spent nearly a year unemployed before turning back to painting and building dontblinkart.com. The code nobody remembers is what taught me to build the next thing, so the decade isn't lost unless you stop now.”
“I don't write code for a living, but I know the feeling of building things that disappear. What I've learned, especially watching engineering become less of a bottleneck, is that the value of a decade isn't in the code people remember. It's in the judgment you earned line by line.”
“I spent years on Supernotes, and a lot of that code will be rewritten or forgotten, which is fine. What stayed was the judgment I built: what to abstract, what to delete, when to ship. That is the part that compounds.”