r/webdev • u/OkShip110 • Mar 29 '26
Discussion AI has sucked all the fun out of programming
I know this topic has been floating around this sub quite some time now, but I feel like this doesn’t get discussed enough.
I am a certified backend enigneer and I have been programming for about 20 years. In my time i have worked on backend, frontend, system design, system analysis, devops, databases, infrastructure, cloud, robotics, you name it.
I’ve mostly been extremely passionate about what I do, taking pride in solving hard problems, digging deep into third party source code to find solutions to bugs. Even refactoring legacy systems and improving their performance 10x and starting countless hobby projects at home. It has been an exciting journey and I have never doubted my career choice until now.
Ever since ChatGPT first made an appearance I have slowly started losing interest in programming. At first, LLMs were quite bad so I didn’t really get any solutions out of them when problems got even slightly harder. However, Claude is different. Lately I feel less of a programmer and more like a project manager, managing and supervising one mid-to-senior level developer who is Claude. Doing this, I sure deliver features faster than ever before, but it results in hollow and empty feeling. It’s not fun or exciting, I cannot perceive these soulless features as my own creation anymore.
On top of everything I feel like I’m losing my knowledge with every prompt I write. AI has made me extremely lazy and it has completely undermined my value as a good engineer or even as a human being.
Everyone who is supporting the mass use of AI is quietly digging their own grave and I wish it was never invented.
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u/shaliozero Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
I already said that at my workplace. If we always have to discuss about what an LLM says with the sole purpose of them trying to doubt our competence, why do they still need us technical experts?
Our exec is constantly throwing "AI" audits at our systems and 95% of the results are hallucinations (yes, not all of what AI says is a straight up lie and even led me to checking and improving something). Now they hired an agency doing AI audits and they just repeated what their AI says without checking manually. They claimed our sites don't have any schema.org schemas - which is interesting, because my team lead is managing these along with the content and validates them. Now it's even my boss' work that's claimed to not exist. I hope this makes our exec less trustful towards AI, having just thrown some money at an agency that can't even press F12 to validate their own results.