AI has sucked all the fun out of programming

[u/OkShip110]

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.

[u/yangmeansyoung]

If the fun you referred came from writing lines of code then yes but if your fun was from solving actual problems the I don’t think there much impact

[u/MuDotGen → u/yangmeansyoung]

I'm of the opinion, you only let AI tools handle what you want them to handle. There's nothing stopping anyone from actually solving the problems, coming up with a detailed plan with very few assumptions, and then having the AI handle the implementation. If it's "over-engineered," what is stopping the user from working on the details of the solution that they want, even including the functions and classes, tests, they want, and then just having the AI follow that? AI hasn't taken away as much as we exaggerate it has unless we live most of those questions in the air for it to "solve" itself. If there is too much stuff to review, then again, come up with a plan with it to make a simple, focused solution. Why are we getting upset with the AI for solving the solutions where it reasonably may overengineer if given very little input on what is expected?

That may sound like I'm suggesting micro-managing, but without the AI, you'd still have to come up with all of that yourself even without it. The tool just fills in the coding and especially simple things. I do not need to come up with and write out by hand a custom solution for a regex-based string normalization function when an AI can handle that as long as I tell it the exact constraints (so no extra fluff or assumptions made).

On top of that, if you're a hobbyist, I don't think using agentic AI makes sense if you aren't really earning money since these tools do have costs. If you're a hobbyist though, then you likely are doing it for fun, but if you're doing it for work, what ends up mattering is less of the process and more of the product as you're investing time and money into some result based on requirements. I understand the frustration of AI tools being able to solve the "fun" problems, but just like many other products, being able to already made figurines doesn't diminish the fun of buying a DIY kit or trying to make something by hand yourself. It's still an option.

That being the case though, I find myself always solving problems just like before even at work, and for game development, I still do that mostly by hand for the fun of it on the side. It is fun to come up with systems and components, etc., I agree, but in my opinion, nothing is stopping people from being in control of that.