The death of “the click”
I think every programmer has noticed it. There used to be something special about the moment when a problem just “clicked”. There was a shining moment of insight where the solution laid itself in front of you. I used to race to do my CS homework for exactly this reason. I was addicted to thinking through and fighting through problems, just for that feeling of solving them in the end. I loved just staring at my computer for hours, looking at logs, even drawing the problem on paper.
But now we have a shortcut. I don’t think I need to go into it.
Well, maybe a little: This might be a hot take, but I think using AI is also extremely fun and addictive. I genuinely love working with Claude. Yes, “working with Claude”. I can’t believe I’m even saying it like that.
But, as productive as I am now, as fun as “vibe coding” is, it doesn’t scratch the same itch.
Leetle [dot] app
At the very end of 2024, when I was a senior in college, slightly inspired by Advent of Code, I built (with AI help, in age of Sonnet 3.6), a website called Leetle to help me with my interview prep. At the time, I couldn’t get myself to prepare for technical interviews, so I was failing them. I had the programming knowledge and the DSA knowledge, but I didn’t have the reps in solving problems under pressure.
So, I built Leetle, maybe obviously, as a play on LeetCode and Wordle. Every day, there is a new, simple coding challenge that you have 6 attempts to solve.
This was a side project for me that was good for my Twitter clout and for my portfolio, but I built it with the intention of actually doing the challenge myself every day. I think this is a project that only makes sense to even build in this transition period between the old world and the new one. I could have LLMs generate and verify the challenges, then do the challenge myself, completely blind to it. It’s a moment when I still needed to do LeetCode to pass my technical interviews, but I could use AI to build my own LeetCode. One that was more gamified and worked on mobile.
But shortly after I built Leetle, I did get a job.
It’s pretty undeniable that Leetle helped me land this job, both as a portfolio project and as a way to practice. But a side effect of getting a job was that I stopped playing the Leetle daily challenge. Once I got a job I decided I hated Leetle and LeetCode, DSA and practicing coding. I just wanted to build. All of this made me get lazy and forget to even tell Claude to generate new challenges for months at a time. I all but abandoned Leetle as a project.
Coding circa 2026
It is now March of 2026. More than a year after I built and launched Leetle. And for the first time since I was deep into job apps and technical interviews, I find myself playing Leetle again.
I don’t think of Leetle as mainly an interview-prep tool anymore. Ironically I think it’s closer to what I originally intended it for it: Wordle, for programmers, for me1. The problems aren’t hard, but it’s a small place for me to really think through a problem, type code by hand, and try out solutions myself. With Leetle now I can feel just a little bit of that “click” before jumping back into the trenches with Claude.
I spend all day at work coding with Claude. When I come home, if I have a side project idea, I can spin it up in an instant with Codex or Claude Code. I know if I really cared about coding, then I should build the old-fashioned way without LLMs! But, to me, there is a joy in building with LLMs. I genuinely do like it. And I’m not nostalgic for the old times all the time. In fact, I have been iterating on and upgrading Leetle more than ever thanks to LLMs. I’ve added features that would have taken me months, in hours with LLMs.
But sometimes I miss the “click”. And so I enjoy Leetle in a way that I never did before. I actually play Leetle like Wordle. Coding, for fun.
Coding, for fun
The point here isn’t Leetle itself, this is just my project and my outlet.
But I used to enjoy coding for coding’s sake, not for building’s sake. Write code on paper. Crack open the old LeetCode account. Open up a Codepen and center a div. Have Claude build you your own Leetle. Hell, play Monkeytype with the language set to Python. I think you’ll be surprised by how fun it is.
I am comically bad at Wordle. Like it really doesn’t make sense how bad I am.