It's 2027. Three of us, after dinner, plates cleared, nobody checking the time.
Tom builds furniture. Actual furniture, chisels, a workbench that eats half his garage. He'd just finished a dining table from a single slab of oak and wouldn't put his phone away until we'd seen every angle.
"You know you can buy a table," I said.
"You can buy a worse one. Less money, none of the fun." He still didn't look up. "That's the whole point."
Lena grows courgettes. A patch of council land twenty minutes from her flat, more vegetables than one person could eat, which is why she brings them to dinners like an apology. Nobody asks why she doesn't just go to the shop. The shop was never the point. The Saturday morning is the point.
So we went round. Tom and his oak. Lena and her courgettes. Then they looked at me.
"I code," I said. "Weekends. Little side things."
Lena laughed before she could stop herself. "That's your job."
Was. It was my job.
"I haven't written a line by hand at work since last spring," I said. "I describe what I want. I check what comes back. I catch the bits that are wrong and ask again. The typing happens somewhere I'm not looking."
"So what do you do all day?"
"Decide things. What we build, why, whether it's good enough to ship. It pays better than it ever has." I shrugged. "I'm just not the one writing it anymore."
Tom finally looked up. "And on Saturdays you write it."
"On Saturdays I write it."
He found this funnier than Lena did. "So why not do that at work?"
Because nobody's paying me to enjoy myself.
The company doesn't buy my keystrokes. It buys the feature that's live on Monday, the bug that never reached a customer, the call on what we build next. Whether the code ran through my fingers or a machine's makes no difference to anyone but me. Same feature. Same Monday.
Picture Tom at a furniture factory. There's a machine in the corner that cuts a flawless tabletop in four minutes, and Tom announces he's hand-sawing every board instead, because he likes the feel of it. He'd be slower. He'd cost more. The table would be the same table. Everyone around him would quietly wonder what he was playing at. Not because hand-sawing is bad. Because the factory isn't where you do the slow thing you love. The factory is where you make tables, as many as you can, as well as you can.
That's me wanting to hand-write a feature on a Tuesday. Taking the long way for my own pleasure while the bill lands on someone else. The one thing I add that the machine can't is judgment. Knowing what's worth building. Catching the answer that looks right and isn't. Deciding when it's good enough to ship. That's what they pay for now, and hand-writing the code is the part that gets in the way of it. Every hour I spend typing is an hour I'm not deciding.
So the craft goes home. Same as Tom's chisels. Same as Lena's spade.
"It's like your tables," I told him. "A hundred years ago, woodworking was just how you got a chair. Then factories made chairs cheap, and the craft didn't die, it moved. Into your garage. Because the doing feels good."
"And the courgettes," Lena said slowly. "Nobody actually needs me to grow courgettes."
"Nobody needs anyone to grow courgettes. That's the whole reason it's a hobby."
She put her glass down. "So coding's yours now. Your hobby."
"Writing it by hand?" I'd never said it out loud before. "Yeah. That's a hobby now."
Nobody spoke for a second. Three people at a table, three things we do with our hands that the world quietly stopped paying us to do.
"It's just happening fast," I said. "Yours took a century. Mine took about five years. Fast enough that I get to watch it over dinner instead of reading about it in a museum."
Tom ran his thumb along the edge of his screen, the photo of the oak table still up.
People say a thing when they touch one of his tables. Someone actually made this. By hand. The slow way. They say it like it means something, because almost nobody does it anymore.
Give it a while. Someone will open a piece of old software, see that a person wrote every line with no machine filling in the middle, and say exactly that.
Someone actually made this. By hand. The slow way.
Will it be better? Not sure. But I hope they had fun doing it.
