Loving the Work We’re Trying to Reduce

On developer toil, judgment, and making the right thing easier

Lately, a lot of my thinking has centered on developer toil.

How we define it.
How we measure it.
How we reduce it without losing something important along the way.

What makes this complicated for me is that some of the work most often labeled as developer toil is the work I have always loved most.

What we mean when we say developer toil

Developer toil is the work that keeps software upright. It is the debugging, the maintenance, the fixes that do not ship new features but prevent things from breaking. It is essential work that rarely gets celebrated.

That definition often shows up in conversations about productivity, morale, and burnout. Often with good reason.

A lot of toil is unnecessary friction. Repetitive steps. Manual processes. Paper cuts that accumulate until even capable teams feel worn down.

But not all work that looks like toil feels the same from the inside.

The hunt

In one role, I was handed a bug ticket.

I started by digging into telemetry. Millions of rows. At first glance, nothing obvious.

But then I saw something that did not look right. Not broken enough to trip alarms. Just slightly off.

So I kept looking.

I followed that pattern through the data and then into the code. Eventually, I found a strange corner case that only showed up under very specific conditions.

When I brought it to the product owner, they looked at me like I had two heads and asked, “How did you find that?”

The honest answer was that I stayed with it. I let the system tell me its story. I trusted that if something felt off, it probably was.

That moment, that quiet click when the pieces line up, is the part of engineering I love most.

Instant gratification

I love debugging.
I love fixing bugs.
I love security fixes.

I call bug fixes instant gratification.

Not because they are easy, but because they are tightly scoped. You can see progress quickly. You can reason from evidence to cause.

You do not have to hold twenty hypothetical customer journeys in your head at once and imagine all the ways things might go sideways.

I can do green field development. It just has never been my favorite.

Part of that is temperament. I want to do everything, and I want to do it all yesterday. The bounded nature of maintenance work suits how my brain works.

There is a problem.
There is a system.
There is a path from red to green.

That does not mean the work is trivial. Often it requires deep understanding. But the feedback loop is clear.

Where AI fits naturally

Because of that, using AI to help with this kind of work feels natural to me.

I love writing small scripts to automate changes.
I love collapsing a sequence of manual steps into something repeatable.
I love watching a dashboard move from red to green.

In my current role, I think of the work less as replacing effort and more as building systems that make the right thing easier.

AI can help reduce unnecessary friction in the fiddly bits. It can help surface patterns faster. It can help with the parts of the work that are repetitive, without stripping away the judgment that actually matters.

For me, this is not about avoiding the work. It is about clearing space to do it well.

Making room for different kinds of engineers

Not everyone enjoys this kind of work.

Not everyone wants to dig through telemetry or chase down a corner case that only reproduces once a week under a full moon. Some people thrive in green field spaces. Some people love designing new abstractions and exploring what could be.

That diversity of preference is a strength, not a problem.

If we can reduce friction in maintenance and corrective work, we get two wins at once. We end up with more secure, more reliable systems. And we make it easier for people to focus on the kinds of work that energize them most.

Reducing toil is not about devaluing this work. It is about making sure it does not require unnecessary suffering to get it done.

Thinking backwards

When I was in college, a professor once told me that I think completely backwards from the rest of the world.

At the time, I did not know what to do with that observation. Now, I see it more clearly.

That different way of thinking, the one that enjoys the hunt, the maintenance, and the small corrective acts, might be useful here. Not because it is better, but because it is different.

If that perspective helps make the lift a little easier for others, then it feels like the right place to spend my energy.