Digital Needlepoint

Finger on the trigger of a SELECT FOR UPDATE Five mornings bleeding into pre-work haze Sketching on paper, wrestling the locks Read vs Share, I'm chasing the right taste Used to feel like virtue, a quiet war I'd win Building character slow, letting the lessons sink in Now there's a voice underneath every honest try Whispering low: "Why the fuck you wasting time?" "What the fuck are you doing? Prompt it, don't think, just move Ten side projects running, agents in the groove You're becoming irrelevant, old man in the code While the future's 100x'ing down the road" Sitting with discomfort, now it feels like shame Every refactor hurts with a brand new name Before the machines, this was joy, this was flame Now I'm just doing digital needlepoint again Digital needlepoint... wasting time in the rain Digital needlepoint... watching my soul go down the drain Wrote eight hundred words on row-level locking pain Three more mornings carving meaning from the strain Who the hell reads blogs when the agents just ingest? Markdown for the machines, optimized for their quest I could've prompted this whole damn thing in two minutes flat Better AEO, higher rank, no human heart attached But I'm still here bleeding ink like it's 2009 While the zeitgeist calls it suicide by design "Why aren't you multitasking? Why you sitting there alone? Sherry Turkle tried to warn us, now we're marrying the drone Being alone was sacred, now it's just antique Like learning how a database actually speaks" Sitting with discomfort, now it feels like shame Every deep dive tainted by this stupid game Before the machines, this built the man I became Now I'm just doing digital needlepoint again Digital needlepoint... pretty patterns in the code Digital needlepoint... watching real craft erode I miss the beautiful agony The long road to maybe The taste that you can only earn When you fight the thing that breaks you Now everything's a shortcut Everything's a lie And I'm ashamed for wanting to still... try Sitting with discomfort, now it feels like sin The hissing never stops, crawling under my skin I just wanted to get better, not fast, not loud, just in But I'm stuck here doing digital needlepoint again Digital needlepoint... "Waste of time... waste of time... irrelevant..." Time to get back to my digital gardening... Or whatever the fuck they'll call it When the last real craftsman finally logs off.