AI has sucked the joy out of coding for me - I talked about this in an (immensely popular, thank you!) YouTube video.

I won't repeat all the details I shared in the video - but in a nutshell, I always enjoyed the part of digging into a codebase, entering a flow state whilst writing code by hand, and having the gratifying feeling of solving a hard problem myself (!) at the end of a day. With AI, that's gone. Sure, I can still work on problems with AI (and I do - I do use coding agents like Claude Code or Codex every day) but the flow state, the gratifying feeling - that's all gone.

So, over the last weeks I thought a lot about my way forward. How can I get back that joy?

And here's what I came up with: I'll start some new initiatives / projects and divide my time into three core pillars. Two of them already existed (but will also change), one is brand-new - and that's the one I'm most excited about (probably not surprising ;-)).

Pillar 1: Game Dev [NEW]!

This is a big one for me. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I wanted to build my own games since ... I don't know ... I was 12? Or 10?

I've been a gamer my entre life. Long before it was cool (it is cool now, right?). I spent endless hours in Age of Empires, No One Lives Forever, Warcraft 3, Diablo 2 + LoD, World of Warcraft, Baldur's Gate and many, many other games. And to this day, I love playing videogames - on PC, PS5, my Switch 2, or the Steam Deck. Obviously, now as an adult, I have way less time than back then as a child, but I still enjoy every minute I can find for this hobby.

Well, I never got into game development before though.

And that's changing now!

I'm not becoming a fulltime game developer though - I will continue creating courses and working on projects. Just like in the past (more details below!).

But I will try my best to take a few hours on most days, and also take some dedicated times on my weekends & evenings, to pursue my goal of building and releasing (!) a game. And I'll build it all from scratch, without using AI art (even though art is my weak part... but I'll get there), and, of course, without vibecoding or letting AI take the driver's seat.

If you want to learn more about my journey, progress, and the game I plan on building - watch the first episode of my brand-new GameDev Devlog.

Pillar 2: Courses [CHANGES]

What do these GameDev plans mean for my main job & business (and still also passion - that's really important for me to emphasize here!)?

What about creating and sharing courses and tutorials?

That's not going anywhere. As mentioned above, I won't be doing GameDev as a fulltime job. I'll mostly do it in my spare time.

I love creating courses and tutorials. I thoroughly enjoy sharing videos on my YouTube channel and the Academind YouTube channel. And I'll keep those courses coming, too!

And I got many exciting course plans for this year - about Systems Design, Software Engineering Fundamentals, Bun, Effect, the Pi coding agent, CloudFlare, and also some course updates. I can't promise that I'll be able to create all those courses since a high quality matters to me, but the ideas & the passion to create those courses is here!

Pillar 3: Build Projects With AI [CHANGES]

Now GameDev and courses aren't everything I do. Surely, it would be more than enough, but, of course, I build courses based on my own practical experience.

In the past (especially in my early days as a developer), that was mostly based on client projects. Nowadays, it's mostly internal projects or side businesses like BuildMyGraphic or MaxedDraw.

I spend most of my days building stuff. Fun projects, real projects, internal tools, and more. That's how I learn, and that's something I enjoy.

That's also the part where AI sucked lots of joy out of it, though.

So here, in this area, I'm fully embracing agentic coding, and I try to grow as a developer. Not as a vibe coder! But instead as an agentic engineer (or whatever you want to call it).