I coded stocky.cl for my friend.
A “solution” for his family business that was running on spreadsheets, WhatsApp photos of stock counts, and that classic organized chaos that kept daily operations going, but at the start of every month made them feel like things could be improved.
Stocky is an inventory management application that is simple, fast, and ordered. It centralizes all inventory information in a single platform and automates stock movements, reducing errors dramatically. It lets you create and manage multiple warehouses, register products, control stock in real time, manage entries, exits, and transfers between locations, handle multiple users with different permissions, and keep a complete history of every movement.
Just a real problem that needed to be solved.
When I was 15 years old with my first Windows computer, my hello world was written in C# with a book next to me.
It was around 2005. If you coded back then, you remember how different everything felt.
Windows XP. A noisy beige tower that took 5 minutes to boot. Visual Studio 2005 had just come out, that massive, gray, sacred IDE that let you build C#, VB.NET, C++ and J# all under one roof. It was the era of .NET Framework 2.0 and C# 2.0, released in November 2005, when generics were the brand new hot feature.
There was no Stack Overflow, it wouldn’t exist until 2008. There was no GitHub Copilot, no ChatGPT, no YouTube tutorials that solved everything in 8 minutes. You had a thick book from the bookstore, maybe a copy of Professional C# 2005, and the offline MSDN Library. The most common way to learn was to let Visual Studio generate a basic project and then add your own code to it, or if you were stubborn like me, you opened Notepad and compiled it by hand from the command line:
csc First.cs
This was my code:
using System;
class Program
{
static void Main()
{
Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
}
}The happiness I felt seeing that text in my terminal was absurd. Pure, stupid, disproportionate joy.
Hello, World!
It worked. I made the computer speak. On a small, flickering CRT monitor in my room, the machine obeyed me. I remember leaning back in my chair and feeling this rush… not pride, exactly, but possibility. If I could make it say this, what else could I make it do? Could I make a game? Could I make something my dad would use at work? Could I build something that lives beyond my computer?
It was the feeling of the future opening a door just a crack, and the light coming through was mine.
But… what is a romance?
I looked it up because we use the word so lightly, and after reading its definition in a few places and still feeling unclear, I’m quoting Wikipedia here:
romance: In psychology, romantic love is considered to be a motivation or drive, which is distinct from (but related to) the concept of attachment…
… an intensity and idealization of a love relationship, in which the other is imbued with extraordinary virtue, beauty, etc., so that the relationship overrides all other considerations, including material ones.
It’s about excitement, mystery, and idealization. An obsession. Doing something not because it’s optimal, but because you love it purely.
The romance of being a human writing code is not about productivity. It’s not about lines per hour. It’s about the love affair between a person and a machine that shouldn’t make sense, but does.
AI can generate Stocky in an afternoon now if I give it the right prompt. And that’s amazing, truly.
But when I gave my friend access to the repository and showed him how to chat with Claude so he could start making the changes he wanted, a few hours later I got two notifications. Two pull requests. His first ever. And a message right after:
“I just had the best time of my life… I’m so happy, like I just won a Grand Slam.”
Similar words to mine. Same rush. The exact same stupid, disproportionate joy I felt at 15 watching Hello, World! appear on that flickering CRT.
Only his “Hello World” wasn’t text in a terminal. It was a real code fix for stock transfers in his family’s actual business, and it worked.
Writing code is a connection with the machine. It’s the search for efficiency. It’s idealized and pure and a little bit obsessed.
And maybe… AI will keep the romance alive.
meta.ai was used for grammar correction and punctuation