Thoughts On Why I Create

Sometimes I forget… not how to create, but why I create in the first place.

Why build instead of buy? Yes, of course I’m saving money, but sometimes the building in itself is the joy… and I often overlook it in face of the capitalistic society we live in today. I create to tell stories, of my characters, of my own; I write to make sure I keep track of them, and know my own thoughts better instead of letting it slip away at the next thought; I draw to showcase the beauty and symbolism of elements in life, the representation of people when looking upon the world, perception itself at my fingertips.

In the same vein, cinematography, photography, and videography connects these stories and clips and sounds together too, so that the viewer can truly (or as close as they can get) live the experience and draw out the emotions behind it.

In the end, creating is what draws out our humanity: our emotions, our endurance, our strengths and weaknesses laid bare across the tapestry of our creation. It could be the soul of the object, the ownership you feel after you’re done and being proud of the work no matter the results… it’s this special spark that I think is the reason we should create in the first place. Just a thought.

I used to remember back in the days before AI, where even writing python text based games brought me joy. Nowadays the magic of coding is kinda lost on me, on a lot of people these days. The joy of truly creating something, with every line you input being displayed on screen as a monument of your progress.

These days, the past monuments of systems and syntax are but a mere silhouette of a cityline on a journey passing by, a sight where each peak holds its own story, and yet blended all together into forgotten history of the days gone by. Slowly, we write less and less lines by hand, instead opting for performance and shipping ability, meeting KPIs and deadlines — an unsurprising trade in this modern day where we battle against not just our peers, but against the fact of possibly being replaced by something not even human (inspired by We Mourn Our Craft).

Now, this might seem a tad poetic for talking about the process of creation, but isn’t that the fun of it too? The limitless ways we could convey our message, the journey of even figuring out where to start in the first place — the joy of truly creating… something. Anything.

Figure 1. Princess Bride CLI Intro Screen

The other day, as I was creating a valentine’s gift for my partner in crime (she’s pretty awesome btw), creating a fun little program going through the story of Princess Bride with some fun in-person challenges, I wanted to use AI coding tools as little as possible, no ChatGPT, no Claude, no Cursor, just my IDE and Google, and handcrafted love.

I realized through this that out of all the things I’ve made recently, this was the one that I was the most proud about, not the multimodal agentic systems or the CMS (content management system) I’m developing, but the slightly shabby CLI python story I had created, with the most enjoyable part being searching up "python cli big font" and discovering PyFiglet fonts.

Figure 2. PyFiglet Fonts (They’re kinda cool)

It made me remniscent as I looked into the coding projects of the past, and compared them to how they were today. The handcrafted love that went into the projects of the past are something I feel like we should remember more often, and use it to help guide ourselves to a brighter (hopefully less B2B SaaS/ChatGPT Wrapper/Unicorn Statup vibes) future.

Their stories should not be lost on us as we face the inevitability of AI changing the way we approach problems and creation — as we strive to tell a story that’s truly our own.

Thanks for reading :)

“Create something today even if it sucks.” ― Unknown.