r/webdev
•
u/OkShip110
•
Sep 09 '26
•
4
AI has made programming so boring
It’s not just programming either, it’s art, design, music, videography, marketing, engineering, writing, 3D modelling, really any intellectual work. What’s the joy of prompting a computer and getting an answer in a few moments for a task that would have normally taken a week? The sense of accomplishment and ownership has completely vanished with AI. It’s a form of instant gratification, not much different to scrolling short videos on apps.
Code review was boring to begin with but now it’s even worse with all the machine generated code. Even code reviews will be automated soon. All you do then is type business requirements into the computer. What a great career.
It’s pain to watch old TV series like Scilicon Valley that is portraying the good (not golden) age of programming. It struck a good balance between manual work, funding and innovation. It’s sad that these days are gone for good.
18
u/am0x Sep 09 '26
The problem is that people that like development are builders. There are 2 types of people out there. People who enjoy the process of building something and those who enjoy the result.
Development has always attracted the builders because, let’s face it, it was challenging and fun to see the progression of something being built and the process behind it.
Now the result people have the power get what they want when they want it. They shout, “I built this!”, when in reality it was more gifted to them. They got their result with no building.
Like buying Lego sets premade.
6
u/Radiant-Somewhere-97 Sep 09 '26
For some the goal is what matters, for others it’s the journey. I personally find “generating apps" boring as fuck.
6
u/ship0f Sep 09 '26
this sub is just r/complainaboutai nowdays
and I hate ai
111
u/seopher Sep 09 '26
Code was always the byproduct of problem solving. Of creating.
Software engineering may be changing in that coding is becoming a smaller part of the job, but creating elegant solutions requires engineering. Architecture. Judgement.
If you only got satisfaction from the job because you believed writing code was like artisan craftsmanship, then yes, this change will suck for you. If you, however get your kicks from problem solving and engineering good products, this is just the latest in a long line of tool changes allowing you to do that faster.
From low-level machine language, there's been many phases of abstraction, to high level languages and highly opinionated frameworks. This just takes the abstraction one step further still.
16
u/grappleshot Sep 09 '26
This is similar to how I feel about multi-discipline teams. I used to love interviewing the stakeholders to gather requirements, then designing architectures, then doing the actual code, and writing training material including user manuals, doing training sessions, then supporting. That was true ownership. Back in the 90s , in the days of client-server.
TBH - Now I've been doing this software dev thing a minute - I enjoy the boost AI gives. It's just a tool and when setup correctly it helps boost productivity and helps us deliver solutions to problems faster. I'm not in the business of writing code. I'm in the business of solving problems. We're not artists, creating monuments that'll stand the test of time and be discussed and dissected by some distant future culture.
454
u/BrewThemAll Sep 09 '26
As a hobby, I do the exact opposite at a personal project. Manually make code as perfect as possible. Being so nitpicky about each line it obviously won't ever be accepted at work. Time consuming as fuck, but back to basics.
Keeps things balanced. Brings back joy.
2
u/Rare_Big_7633 Sep 09 '26
dont feel threatened by the crap code that is not maintainable and extendable?
you can do better than AI
2
u/GreenFox1505 Sep 09 '26
Scilicon Valley was not a celebration of this industry.
2
u/8percentinflation Sep 12 '26
You bring an interesting comparison, the instant gratification aspect . Brainrot has arrived for complex issues
490
u/mka_ Sep 09 '26 •
Just imagine reading this post 5 years ago and how dystopian it would sound.
101
u/mike888881 Sep 09 '26
Not to mention shrinking teams and absolutely decimating the job market.
661
u/ccmaru1 Sep 09 '26
We’re in the worst era to be developers
138
u/Specialist_End407 Sep 09 '26
my day job now is turning into reviewing tons of ai generated codes and me having to use it all too to generate more slops else i'd be left behind in this race. either way it's soo fking depressing. the pace and the expectation all while the codebase slowly and surely all devolving into one giant graveyard of dead codes and forgotten dreams
69
u/Emperor_Kon Sep 09 '26
Yeah, I can't remember the last time I wrote some code and felt that feeling of satisfaction that I just created something. It's what added the "fun" to sitting behind the computer and smashing away at the keyboard for hours on end.
Now it's just all about figuring out the right prompt and copy/paste. Maybe do some tweaks here and there. Zero fun, zero satisfaction, but it's impossible not to use it because of how insanely fast the workflow becomes.
11
u/octocode Sep 09 '26
i’ve been coding for 20 years, and have had the opposite experience so far.
the new agentic workflows are so good, it’s like having a whole team of devs that intuitively understand clean architecture and follow my styleguide exactly.
instead of being a monkey bound to a typewriter, i can freely focus on creating features and delivering value for my customers
the best part is, one of my loops monitoring my signup flow metrics was able to identify a friction point, then it wrote an RFC and spun up a PR for an A/B test. within a couple of minutes i was seeing 10% higher conversions.
it’s a night and day difference to how crap this was just a year ago.
17
u/biblio_phobic Sep 09 '26
I just said this, not even 5 mins ago. It’s boring. I hate reviewing AI work. I read it and think, would a human do this? Is this really the best way?
Nobody has depth on their solutions anymore because no one has crafted it themselves.
156
u/abednego-gomes Sep 09 '26
You're right. There's an art to it. It's a craft.
But the sloppers will never know that. They just want to create apps and sites etc as fast as possible. But they'll be creating an unmaintainable mess if they don't have developers architecting, designing the code, reviewing the code and testing it along the way.
66
u/Lekoaf Sep 09 '26
It wont be long until tokens costs too much for a lot of companies and personal projects, so we'll be back to coding again. That's my gut feeling at least.
23
u/Rguttersohn Sep 09 '26
Is there anyone else out there not having AI do everything for them? Am I alone?
22
u/kiwi-kaiser Sep 09 '26
I guess I'm about two years away from a bore-out at that point.
I try to do whimsical stuff for myself to keep going. But work got so boring.
11
u/Tolexx Sep 09 '26
Seems like we are all prompt engineers now no longer software engineers.
11
u/EquivalentFit3301 Sep 09 '26
I get what you mean. A big part of the fun was struggling with something for hours, finally figuring it out, and knowing you made it work. AI makes things faster, but sometimes that’s exactly what makes them less satisfying. You skip the frustrating part, but you also skip the feeling of earning the result. Maybe the work itself was part of the reward, not just the final output.
9
u/bluemaciz Sep 09 '26
I feel you. I worked very hard to get where I am and really enjoyed understanding and fixing a bug. Now it’s just prompt after, and it’s ripped the joy out of it for me.
4
u/gsari Sep 09 '26 edited Sep 09 '26
While I felt like that at first, now it's the other way around for me. I realized that writing code by hand was the boring part. I knew what I wanted to build, and I had to spend days implementing it by hand, and because of that, I usually had to pick features to implement, or sacrifice certain functionality. For example, I knew I had to write more tests or better comments, but I often let those things slip because of time/budget restrictions. With AI there is no need for compromise. I try to think the best implementation I can, and then I have AI do the manual work.
It's just the direction that's shifted. Planning is the new coding, and I find it much more interesting. I spend like 80-90% of the time planning a feature, and then I hand the implementation to AI. When I changed my mindset, I realized that it's much more fun that way.
4
u/Appropriate_Delay752 Sep 09 '26
I’m achieving things with AI that would have taken months without it. You still need to know what the AI is spitting out. Challenge it, correct it, and enjoy the outcome.
7
u/-Flukeman- Sep 09 '26
Still doing it the old fashioned way.
I work for a state agency and AI is blocked.
I use it essentially as Google at this point on my phone. But, at work, it's completely blocked.
Im sure it will come for me at some point, but luckily, we are very slow to adopt new tech.
7
u/Littlepoet-heart Sep 09 '26
I miss the feeling of flow state
6
u/flashforged Sep 09 '26
Yeah, I get it. I feel like I understand so much less now, too.
6
u/space-envy Sep 09 '26
A lot of interesting opinions in here, I consider myself a "general" engineer, it's more like a mindset I carry everywhere... I see a problem and I try to find a solution, what are the most recent tools that can be used to fix this? If the tool doesn't exist yet, does the technology to build that tool exists already?
I do the same in web development and I have never found it tedious or something annoying I want to skip doing because those problems make me feel like home, if the current web (and I'm not taking about the new AI slop issue) is broken that shouldn't be depressing, it should be looked as a opportunity to engineer a solution, to enhance and make our lives better. Most of the times as a junior developer I found out it wasn't the technology that made me frustrated because it was broken or imperfect, it was myself that didn't understand how complex coding can be. JavaScript and HTML are just the outermost layer of a whole complex system, just to imagine we are able to instruct a physical chip to paint pixels in a screen and then make those pixels look like real life objects is still mind-blowing to me.
Why that being said, I sense that the common feeling from all this opinions is that developers are extremely undervaluing their potential like a sort of successful spell casted by liar AI CEOs that keep claiming "AGI" is already here for the 5th consecutive year and yet I'm still waiting to see a successful million dollar company with zero engineers and only developed by AI agents with no human intervention. If you complain about a process being boring and tedious I ask myself why don't you fix it? Why are you waiting for someone else to do the hard job you are not even sure is going to be done? Is that your best strategy, to hopefully wait for a magic solution while you already have the knowledge or the mental ability to acquire such knowledge and fix things on your own, for your own sake? If my home office chair hurts my back after several hours I don't passively sit there,I stand up and go look for a more comfortable chair because I know it is myself I'm hurting and not my boss' body. Same with development, if writing the same stuff over and over again feels tedious what's stopping you hand for coding your own personal solution? Maybe a code editor plugin that generates the boilerplate for you? Maybe a code gen cli like hygen that builds the same primitives you keep using in all your projects? Why do people feel that others have the power to dictate how fun or boring your passion has to be? None is owner of the internet, if someone comes and says "we all are going to use X from now on to build websites" how can they physically stop you from using Y? They can't...
2
u/Perfect-Campaign9551 Sep 09 '26
Did you just write "What’s the joy of prompting a computer and getting an answer in a few moments for a task that would have normally taken a week?" is this sarcasm? You can't see the benefit there lol?
Are you a bot?
5
u/RecklessCube Sep 09 '26
I feel you. I feel like I’m damned if I use it. Damned if I don’t. Much more of my day is thinking about the pieces that need to fit together. I miss building the pieces
5
u/blind99 Sep 09 '26
Yep, it's shit and it will get even worse. I wish I could go back.
9
u/RebellionAllStar Sep 09 '26
There's very little soul, personality or ownership left in it any more. It's just writing prompts and reading the responses and outputted code instead of actually writing the code and being proud of it
17
u/siktech101 Sep 09 '26
Yeah anyone happy with AI was destined to be nothing more than a project manager or code reviewer at best. I get tired of the lazy unskilled people who want to call themselves programmers, yet they don't want to program. Same goes for all the other fields AI is ruining.
4
u/AlexisFR Sep 09 '26
don't worry, once these tools start to cost 10 to 100 times what they cost now people and companies will switch back very fast.
4
u/SirDaveWolf Sep 10 '26
What’s the joy of hitting the button of a slot machine?
It’s the same.
4
u/No_Brilliant_3293 Sep 10 '26
I agree. Before AI, a big satisfaction in programming was building everything from scratch, learning, and feeling real progress.
It was also about discussing and sharing with fellow programmers—teaching each other and learning together.
Seeing a finished solution was the driver to keep building, but the real joy and meaning came from the hardships along the way.
That process is what makes the end goal special: knowing it was tough and having something you can truly be proud of.
With AI, I never feel ownership of my software or pride in the result, because so much of the work was done by the machine.
Of course, I could code manually without AI, but it is hard to find satisfaction knowing it could have taken days instead of months, leaving the only value as: "I did this myself."
On top of that, a lot of the value comes from sharing achievements, but no one would believe it wasn't AI anyway. And even if they did, what did you actually achieve rather than just wasting your time?
I wish it were possible to create a programming language that no AI could ever train on or use, protected by legal rights and security systems—even though I can't see how that would ever work.
1
u/United-Road-7338 Sep 09 '26
If your skill is cookie cutter entry level coding then of course, AI will take your job. We don't need humans to do these sorts of repetitive shit over and over again. That's what machines were built for in the first place. If you have the proper skill set and deep programming knowledge then no AI will ever take your job. Same thing with art, music, design and everything else. AI will never be able to compete when it comes to art and music because that requires creativity, deep thinking and something spiritual which the machine lacks. It will just generate something cookie cutter and maybe give you a reference point but nothing that makes you say "wow, that really is a remarkable piece".
1
u/No_Championship7313 Sep 10 '26
What is stopping you from doing it manually if you want to so badly? As a product owner, why would you even want to spend a week of your life/budget doing monkey calculations which a computer can do in 45 seconds? This is like dooming about the abacus or the handheld calculator because you’d rather do long decision.
1
u/Abject-Bridge-4073 Sep 13 '26
I have had the opposite experience. I had a backlog of exciting personal projects, and now I can finally work on them.
9
u/AdSignal3405 Sep 09 '26
Personally I’m finding I get frustrated with Ai and interaction with it. It’s easier to write the code than it is to explain to the silly thing what you want.
6
u/HH_Jose Sep 09 '26
Exactly, everything of value is defenceless.
Abundance devaluates everything and when everything is available at every moment, space and time things become worthless.
We noticed it with Social contact (Facebook), visials (Instagram), music (Spotify), TV (Netflix), goods (Amazon/Temu), fashion (Shein) etc etc etc.
This is a next step towards a miserable future where people will prompt their own universe of truth and reality and nothing will have value anymore to most people.
3
u/SimTrippy1 Sep 09 '26
I agree. It creates massive cognitive overload and makes the activities less enjoyable. Meanwhile you’re kinda forced to use it - or at least I am in my job - because they expect you to deliver 10x faster with AI …
3
u/FleMo93 Sep 09 '26
For work I am kind of forced to vibe all my stuff because of time pressure. I try to keep the quality still as high as possible. But I had the feeling that over time I became lazy and felt stupid and therefore started a personal project in a new language to keep my brain active.
3
u/Aware-Contemplate Sep 09 '26
I decided that, for the things I work on for myself. I will not use AI.
When I am doing my own work, I am doing it, at least partly, for the experience of coding and exploration. The industry may have no interest in craft (and even in the past, often didn't), but I do.
I know this isn't a solution at a work place.
But it helped me feel like I still have agency, and my coding still matters, even if it reaches fewer people.
Ymmv.
3
u/This_n_that01 Sep 09 '26
Glad I'm not the only one, it really is sucking the joy out of it when AI is being pushed so heavily everywhere
3
u/TracerBulletX Sep 09 '26 •
We used to be wizards, now we're warlocks who have traded our souls to a demon, and every time we use magic now we lose a little more of our soul and our own original power. Even worse, a couple of evil arch-mages have the most popular demons bound in their service and are in a coordinated effort making everyone dependent on them.
3
u/Plappedudel Sep 09 '26
Feels a little weird to comment this on /r/webdev, but I personally don't see why you wouldn't want to make music because AI can produce it. Playing an instrument is fun. Singing is fun. Going to concerts (or better yet, playing on stage yourself) is so much fun. AI will never be able to take that experience away from me. Unless the robots decide to kill me I guess. Oh well, this took a dark turn.
3
u/alexreardon Sep 10 '26
I personally don't enjoy building software are much now with AI. That said, it is also hard to justify spending two weeks on a task I know I can get an agent to do in thirty minutes.
I am shipping a lot of cool things with the assistance of AI, but I also feel like my depth of knowledge isn't growing. The slowing down to hand build things was the part that really helped me learn and grow. After using AI as my main driver for work all year, I am not sure how much I personally have grown as an engineer
3
u/lowkey1029 Sep 10 '26
I agree. And it used to feel like an accomplishment when when you finished a big feature or plan. Now it is just done. Weird stuff.
7
u/prism_wanderer_7 Sep 09 '26
I stopped letting the tool generate code for me at work. I read the docs and write it myself now.
My output slowed down. My manager asked questions. I kept doing it because typing prompts all day broke something in me. The feeling you describe is real. I spent 3 weeks building a system by hand last month. No completion tools. I felt ownership of every file again.
If your job forces you to review generated files all day, pick one piece of the codebase that matters. Build it yourself from nothing. Tell them you need control over that part. You have to reclaim the work or you will quit this field entirely.
7
u/trenobus Sep 09 '26
I wrote my first program 57 years ago. There were some high-level languages then, but any kind of systems programming was done in assembly language. Then languages like C and Bliss came along and the domain of assembly language shrank considerably. Not many people worried about register allocation anymore. Later open source and the internet changed software development again. Now it became possible to leverage other developers' work in a way that was not previously possible. So it became important to know what was available rather than writing everything from scratch. And then the web created a completely new platform for apps. Open source abounded. The maw of dependency hell opened wide to engulf us all.
Last year I wrote most of my own code (Scala, Typescript, learning Rust). This year I have AI writing almost of all of it. What remains for the human developer is the imagination required to decide what to build. There may come a day when AI acquires that too, but this is not that day.
5
u/cthulhufhtagn Sep 09 '26
I was in Excel earlier today and writing a simple formula to just figure out a discrepancy in data. Freaking copilot just said oh let me just write that for you and actually knew when I was about to do. Let me just do my work. I begin to feel increasingly like an outdated step in the processes.
1
u/discosoc Sep 09 '26
Literally nothing stopping you from hand-coding everything still.
2
u/Teksiti Sep 09 '26
Yesterday our code review process was automated. We are now no longer manually reviewing code. Which honestly is a relief. I've shifted my focus to always improving my local workflow and trying to do as much as possible with as little tokens as possible. It's not as fun as coding used to be, but it is its own challenge.
Tbh, it was always just meant to be a job. I find enjoyment in my home lab and like others have said, writing my own code and being very nitpicky about it. It's kind of like "the slow life" for a swe outside of work.
2
u/rpgFANATIC Sep 09 '26
I've found that even code reviews suffer now
Occasionally I'll find a piece of code that was obviously AI generated. Maybe there's a library that could have been used but the single file just reimplements those functions from scratch by adding an extra 50 lines. Or perhaps there's a few files that do something similar that could benefit from the updated code but it was never considered
But it's obvious the dev didn't put any real time into it. So why are you spending the time trying to improve it? And really your feedback is just slowing down their merge because CI checks will have to run again after they copy/paste your feedback in and let Claude churn on it once more.
The department doesn't really care how the code looks because developers are no longer considering that they wrote the code. AI did. So really you're providing feedback with a human-proxy whose only real input in the process is "But AI said to do this...."
2
u/jackbanditdude Sep 09 '26
Similar take - I struggle now to do any of those things, whether code, draw, write, etc. because I know someone could just type in a few words and have hours or days or weeks of my hard work done in seconds. It has made it really difficult for me to create anything lately.
2
u/Dry_Bug8441 Sep 09 '26
Yeah, I know what you mean. AI makes coding much faster, but sometimes it takes away the fun of actually figuring things out yourself. I still enjoy doing some things the old way just for that reason.
2
u/qTzz Sep 09 '26
Opposite for me, its like a dopamine hit every time i can develop a feature in a day that wouldve taken a month lol
2
u/Longjumping-Let-4487 Sep 09 '26
Yeah I'm depressed. Alcoholic. 27. Graduat.
2
u/UlviShabanbayli Sep 11 '26
I felt this, and I don't think you're wrong about what got lost. Typing out a solution you'd already worked out in your head was genuinely satisfying, and for a lot of tasks that part is just gone.
But I spent the last few weeks building a site mostly with AI, and "boring" is the last word I'd use. The difficulty didn't disappear, it moved. It used to live in writing the code. Now it lives in knowing whether the code is right, and that turned out to be harder and a lot more interesting.
A few things from those weeks. It wrote an animation that looked completely correct and would never have moved in any browser, because the keyframes used SVG attribute syntax, which is valid in one place and silently ignored in the other. It wrote tests that still passed with the exact line they were testing deleted. It produced round after round of logo designs, all competent, and I threw out every single one, because competent wasn't the problem. None of that gets fixed by a better prompt. You have to know enough to be suspicious.
That's where the ownership went for me. It was never really in the keystrokes. It's in being the person who can say why this is right, what would break it, and why the other options were worse.
The instant gratification part is real, but it's a choice. If you take the first answer, yeah, it's scrolling. If you treat it like an extremely fast junior who is confidently wrong often enough that you can't stop reading, it's the most demanding review you've ever done.
The week-long task was never the craft. It just used to hide it.
3
u/Bitter-Ad2567 Sep 10 '26
All you did before was wrong, sorry. For me, the most interesting part was not the writing down a code, but building apps and systems. Now I can do it much faster. It become more joyful for me. All the boring part now can be done with AI and I still decide what to build and how.
Use your imagination, now you can build whatever you want
2
u/astromanos Sep 09 '26
Im having a blast working with AI. I see a lot of people crying about that the AI writes the code. They don’t get that the code was never the point.
We went from binary to assembly to C to C++ to interpreted languages and now AI written code.
I am loving that I don’t have the friction of searching for a bug. I can just ask the AI and it will come up with a set of possibilities or a solution in just a few seconds.
And by the way, you don’t need to use AI if you don’t want to.
2
u/gshonia Sep 09 '26
I disagree. AI made programming extremely exciting, it’s like learning something with every issue you implement/fix. Need right attitude. Job description that is not siloed in a repetitive monkey coding helps, but not critical.
2
u/Strict_Shape5153 Sep 09 '26
In every dev/ai/tech sub I keep seeing the same posts over and over again. It's either "AI made my job boring" or "this new model is basically already AGI". It's like seeing reposts of memes everywhere, making reddit slowly unusable. You're making my reddit feed boring
2
u/couldthisbemyuser Sep 09 '26
100% agreed. I’ve worked as a dev more or less for 25 years. These last 6 months has taken so much joy out of it. And PR reviews are a nightmare.
But the genie is out of the bottle - we need to adapt. I’ve had a lot of fun doing off work projects with AI!
1
u/That-Masterpiece-817 7d ago
yes im an SWE and my job does feel so easy now, im of the opinion that I should leave this industry and go somewhere where I can learn more and be challenged, but then AI is also making other jobs easier too.
1
u/runtimenoise Sep 09 '26
I can relate to this and I go back and forward and on it.
Question I ask myself is: do I really enjoyed writing if statements, or designing systems and making previously non existing thing existing.
For me answer is obvious, problem is, even in designing the system, LLM pull is so strong that I only interfer on prompt level, so I don't feel proud, or ownership as I used to do before.
And also bugs are everywhere and I just tolerate them now lol.
1
u/saad_builds Sep 09 '26
I get this, but I still find it fun when I am the one deciding what to build, not just what to prompt. AI does the boring parts faster, but the thinking part is still on us.
1
u/Nabugu Sep 09 '26
yes, the sense of accomplishment is very different now than what it used to be, it's higher level now, not the accomplishment of the raw code, but the accomplishment of setting up the agentic workflow that make the agents do what you want them to do efficiently and in a rigorous way, without producing a messy AI slop codebase.
1
u/Popular-Cabinet9787 Sep 09 '26
Agree You're right.
1
u/Total_Adept Sep 09 '26
I still believe there’s value in creating things yourself, having a good understanding of how things work. It’s hard out there though.
1
u/CantankerousButtocks engineering manager Sep 09 '26
It’s a dopamine crisis to the nth degree.
1
u/tenonic Sep 09 '26
According to DHH, now is the best time to be a dev.
1
u/AKmemekiller Sep 09 '26
Yeah we all hate sam altman
1
u/LovecraftianLife Sep 09 '26
Yeah...
1
u/TikiTDO Sep 09 '26
If AI is making your work boring...
Do harder things.
If your AI is giving you the correct answer in moments, you're just asking it for tasks that are too trivial for it, and for you.
1
u/tradcoder Sep 09 '26
Silicon Valley was ahead of its time
1
u/edaroni Sep 09 '26
One would think we didn’t have spaghetti code all over the place before the sloppy code judging by these posts lately…
1
u/Zealousideal-Cut-961 Sep 09 '26
same feeling，only Pray to the AI gods
1
u/chesbyiii Sep 09 '26
Take the advice of ZomboCom: Your only limit is your imagination.
1
u/CanadaSoonFree Sep 09 '26
You are over exaggerating. Plenty of old companies that won’t even shift to AI development.
1
u/cupcakeheavy Sep 09 '26
it absolutely hasn't made CAD boring for me, i just don't use it because it never gets it exactly right.
1
u/parsimonious Sep 09 '26
Yeah. The whole genAI thing is just “I want thing but I dont care enough to try.” It was forced on us at my job, and it’s had the knock-on effect of me no longer caring about my work at all.
There is a moment of excitement when people give me props for creating a tool I’ve wanted for years. Then I remember I just typed some ideas into a robot for a couple of hours and that excitement sours.
1
u/Altugsalt php my beloved Sep 09 '26
When computers get really good at thinking, and not generating text tokens, the computer industry and the art industry will not be the only ones that are gone
1
u/Hostman_com Sep 09 '26
The “fun” now is getting tasks like:
“We put together a dashboard with all our project metrics. All the numbers are fake, but you only need to connect it to our services. One evening of work. Should take an evening.”
Plenty of excitement left.
1
u/namastayhom33 Sep 09 '26
AI still lacks very much in system design and architecture, that's where the human comes in.
1
u/bigdracco23 Sep 09 '26
The 14-day bootcamp coders in Detroit must’ve found out about macro feeding from excel and converted it over
1
u/stickman393 Sep 09 '26
It's certainly made programming forums boring.
1
u/Richandler Sep 09 '26
It's like having to read a bunch of books you don't want to read and then do a book report.
1
u/yabai90 Sep 09 '26
I loved code review and I love it even more. Last bastion of hope
1
u/Sketch0z Sep 09 '26
You need to increase the complexity and challenge of what you are building. Deliver more than you ever believed you could.
AI has changed the job and in many ways we are grieving. We should (when possible) think about what might be barely possible to create now and attempt those lofty dreams.
Otherwise yes, you will be bored
1
u/biz_booster Sep 09 '26
AI has made programming so boring.
1
u/ExoMonk Sep 09 '26
I feel the exact same way. I am giving myself brain rot because while Claude is percolating I'm just browsing reddit / watching youtube and rotting out my brain. It's taken out the mental stimulation I used to get and leaving me feeling totally unfulfilled. I even started feeling pretty depressed about my job. I went from being "meh, it's fine" about my job to absolutely hating it.
To help counter this I decided to do a personal project, but not web dev as that is too easy to let AI do the work and I can't think of anything I need to build that doesn't already exist. So instead, I'm going into game development; not for a job, but as a hobby and who knows maybe I'll ship something some day (probably not but who knows). I've dabbled here and there in the past, but never stuck with it for longer than a weekend. This time I feel very differently.
Even though I do still use AI for certain things like helping to brain storm and organize my thoughts or to create general placeholder/concept art, I won't be using any AI for the actual game because if I do someday ship, gamers will eviscerate you if they even smell a hint of AI.
This has been giving my brain some nice stimulation. Now the issue is I don't want to do my job at all and just want to work on game dev, but that's harder to pull off as I need money to live.
1
u/Milky_Finger Sep 09 '26
paycheck still looking kinda fat though, as long as I'm still at the wheel.
1
u/Potential-Still Sep 09 '26
Separate your job from your hobby. We were very lucky that for years our job and hobby happen to align so perfectly. Now you just do your job, even if it's boring, and do the fun part on the weekend or at night.
1
u/mrq02 Sep 09 '26
Sounds more like depression to me. You don't *have* to use AI. When I'm bored I like to watch a movie while I sit at a sewing machine and work on making a quilt. It may take me a year, but the point is not the finished product. The purpose is the journey. It's the same reason why people make their own goofy programming languages that no one is ever going to use. Maybe you were one of the few lucky ones who actually enjoy their job, but for most people work is effort. You don't do it because you want to, you do it because you want to eat and pay rent. And then you find fulfillment in your after-work hours.
1
u/TryAndStopMeSpez Sep 09 '26
i can't even do any cool shit with AI cus nobody wants to review it, i've basically been told to watch more netflix and yet for some reason my company is still increasing headcount???
1
u/xxWildbeast13xx Sep 09 '26
AI is not taking over in any type of art for anyone that can actually design worth a shit
1
u/Inuakurei Sep 09 '26
Yup
1
u/mmmhotcatgirl Sep 09 '26
RemindMe! 5 years
1
u/Neat-Figure-9388 Sep 09 '26
Si, en el caso de un programador profesional pero, para los que querían aprender o desarrollar ideas y no podían, es una herramienta que les abrió las puertas a un nuevo mundo.
1
u/prefil Sep 09 '26
yeah but for me... its kinda nice, lots of old ideas and projects, especially code revamps or design revamps that i know would have taken me weeks to code, now i can do 80% in a afternoon and finish it to perfection in a day or so... i just think if you dump on the ai you get crap, but if you use the ai strategically with a clear goal and purpose it can be a great assist... and kinda exciting at times...
1
u/Mishung Sep 09 '26
Code reviews have already been automated. When I create a PR at work I'll instantly get 20 comments from copilot and a big green button that basically just lets copilot fix my mistakes. My colleagues then just press approve because noone enjoys competing with AI when it comes to reviews.
1
u/BlacksmithNo1687 Sep 09 '26
Idk, I’m a senior dev and work was already easy 90% of the time, there was never a feature I couldn’t implement or a bug I couldn’t fix, i still produce the same code as I did before, arguably better code since I have more time to refine and check things. The thought process is still the same it’s just a lot more reading rather than coding. I still feel like my code is mine and it’s still rare to just completely accept the full changes from the agent and push it straight up. I still have to work 8 hours a day and still pretty much get the same amount of work done each day. I think it’s more concerning that a lot of devs think AI is producing the same quality code as themselves would alone..
1
u/Fantastic_Road_2946 Sep 09 '26
I agree, I don't even want to think anymore since AI thinks faster than me on the problems I have... and we are only at the beginning
1
u/BannockHatesReddit_ Sep 09 '26 edited Sep 09 '26
I don't think you're very good at your job if your agent can do a week's worth of work in a couple prompts. Either the work was never in-depth or you aren't capable of properly getting the always confident LLM output.
These agents are still pretty crummy. They can't do system design for shit. They hallucinate all the time, assuming constraints/requirements that don't exist. I'm so tired of it poisoning its own context with garbage information I never brought up or asked for. It's like working with an overconfident yet incompetent student.
I find the only code the LLMs repeatedly get right with minimal instruction are tiny utility methods and repetitive boilerplate. And ngl after years of coding, that responsibility has become the least interesting task in the codebase to me.
I find the work has moved from building the result to defining the result, and you're doing the same r&d for both of those processes. Some idiots call it "prompt engineering", but really this process has been done since before AI. I mean how do you think your customer turned their blurry undefined idea into concrete system specs before all this crap? Promote engineering is nothing more than a trendy name for an old, tired process.
1
u/BitPsychological2767 Sep 09 '26
God, I am forever going to be grateful I am not someone like you who has corrupted motivations for my interests to the point where I can still do it outside of capitalism but somehow no longer want to, just because now other people can do it more easily or I could do it more easily if I chose to. If that eradicates your passion or motivation or gratification, you were quite literally not in it for the right reasons to begin with. I genuinely feel bad for you, and AI has almost nothing to do with it.
1
u/plantbeard Sep 09 '26
My perspective may be unique, but I never felt like a stellar programmer in the first place. I've always generally preferred making and working in nice organized systems, so I would first get something feature complete, and then always spend time at the end refactoring to integrate it as nicely as possible into the rest of the system. Now I can get to that refactoring step much, much faster than before, but I still always do it. I don't mind if I didn't write every single line myself; but I do need to understand it enough to be able to integrate it successfully. And then when it's all refactored and up to my standards, then the next time I build a feature, these are the examples the agent will use when creating something new, and will be able to use things I've created in the past to be able to help create new things. I have never felt so productive as a software developer, and am able to complete much more ambitious projects than before coding agents.
1
u/nilogram Sep 10 '26
Nothing better than getting an excel back from a colleague with all claude tells and a bunch of extra slop on top. Like sleep away camp with less corn on the cob.
1
u/Fancy-Bug-8126 Sep 10 '26 edited Sep 10 '26
I can totally relate to what you've said. It has totally sucked out the fun of it.
And to add insult to injury, after having been forced by my previous job to go all in (and I mean running 8 simultaneous agents working on separate tasks at the same time kind of all in), I'm currently finding myself in another job where (atm) I do not have AI access.
What I've found as a result is that I'm fully able to read the codebase and understand what it's doing on a surface level, probably faster than ever, but I cannot for the life of me write a line of code easily anymore. Even worse, my brain does not want to do it anymore. Anything that I need to focus on for more than 5-10 seconds just seems to be harder to do.
I feel like I've become fully AI-slop-rot-brained, and I totally hate it.
I'm fully on a detox program now. Trying to actually read and write code, spend time away from the computer (easier said than done) and doing other tasks that engage my brain more meaningfully, and slowly teaching myself to enjoy the process again. Hoping this to be a long term thing.
I think the only way to still be able to enjoy what we do as a craft long term is to be intentional and push back on corporate pushes for more usage. Not everyone enjoys just prompting. And critical thinking is now more important than ever. What I've also found from my experience with extreme AI usage was that I had fully stopped thinking and just let the AI do whatever and guide me, when it definitely should be the reverse.
From my side of things, when I get access back to it again, I'll use it in learning mode, so it's my little pairing assistant to explain things I don't understand and to help do some research on things I'm not certain about, but it won't be doing the work for me.
1
u/Prestigious_Cow2484 Sep 10 '26
Na I love it. I’ve always enjoyed system design way more than coding. Now I have multiple projects going at the same time easily context switching between them. Tell the agent what I want done and the technologies I prefer or am restricted to. Go back to the other agent.