When Did You Stop Building for Joy?

Why Your Next Side Project Should Solve Exactly One Person's Problem: Yours

I'm sitting across from Patrick at our favorite brewery, the amber light catching the foam on our IPAs. We've been friends for years, both of us CTOs who've climbed the ladder from writing code to managing teams, from building features to building companies. The conversation drifts, as it always does, to the usual topics—team dynamics, technical debt, the latest framework everyone's raving about.

Then Patrick says something that stops me mid-sip. "When's the last time you built something just for you? Not for a company, not for a client, not even for your resume. Just something to scratch your own itch?"

I set down my glass. The question hangs in the air between us like a challenge. I open my mouth to answer, then close it. The truth is, I can't remember. Somewhere between sprint planning and architecture reviews, between managing budgets and recruiting engineers, I've lost something fundamental. I've lost the simple joy of solving my own problems with code.

Patrick leans back, a knowing smile on his face. "I started building again last month," he says. "Nothing fancy. Just a little tool to organize my vinyl collection. But man, it felt good. No product managers, no deadlines, no stakeholders. Just me and the code, like the old days."

The conversation shifts, but his words stick with me. On the drive home, I'm thinking about all the tiny frustrations in my daily life that I've just accepted. The seven taps it takes to get to my favorite playlist in Apple Music. The way my smart home lights never quite remember my preferred evening settings. The scattered notes across three different apps that never quite sync the way I want.

That night, I open my laptop with a different energy. Not the dutiful energy of checking Slack or reviewing pull requests, but something more electric. Something I haven't felt in years. I'm going to build something. Not for my company, not for my career, but for me.

The Great Disconnect

Here's what happens to most of us who become CTOs: we trade our keyboards for calendars. We exchange the immediate satisfaction of solving problems with code for the complex choreography of managing teams and strategies. And somewhere in that transition, we convince ourselves that this is growth, that this is what success looks like.

Don't get me wrong—leading technology organizations is important work. But when we completely disconnect from the act of building, we lose something essential. We lose our intuition for what's possible. We lose our empathy for the developers we lead. Most importantly, we lose the joy that brought us to technology in the first place.

The irony is thick. We spend our days evangelizing innovation, pushing our teams to embrace new technologies, advocating for modernization. Yet many of us haven't written a line of code in months, maybe years. We've become generals who've forgotten what it's like to be in the trenches.

Research from Stack Overflow's 2023 Developer Survey shows that 87% of developers code as a hobby outside of work. But when they surveyed engineering managers and CTOs? That number drops to 23%. We've professionalized ourselves out of our own passion.

Enter the AI Pair Programmer

This is where the landscape has fundamentally shifted, and many CTOs haven't noticed yet. Tools like Claude Code aren't just making professional developers more efficient—they're lowering the barrier for people like us to get back into building.

Let me paint you two scenarios:

Scenario One: The Conversational Approach You open ChatGPT or Claude's chat interface. You describe what you want to build. The AI responds with code snippets, explanations, suggestions. You copy and paste, tweak and adjust, debug and refine. It's like having a patient mentor sitting next to you, ready to answer any question, explain any concept. You're still doing the work, but you have a knowledgeable companion.

Scenario Two: The Claude Code Approach You describe your vision to Claude Code. But instead of just giving you snippets, it builds. It creates files, structures projects, implements features. You're not copying and pasting; you're reviewing, guiding, and refining. It's less like having a mentor and more like having a junior developer who types at the speed of light and never forgets a semicolon.

Both approaches have their place, but for CTOs looking to reconnect with building, Claude Code offers something special: it removes the friction between idea and implementation.