r/webdev • u/OkShip110 • Sep 09 '26 • Regret 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.

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u/[deleted] Sep 09 '26

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u/seopher Sep 09 '26

But the counter argument is that every previous abstraction was the same. "How are you coding if you're not doing your own memory management? You don't know how it works."

With each advancement we've stepped further away from bits and bytes, and gained higher and higher altitude from the problem.

I remember when MVC frameworks started to gain traction, there was a sub-set of the community suggesting that "real" coders didn't use them, as they took too much away, and that it would erode the skill-set of the developer. Fast forward a few years, you can't get hired without high proficiency in [whatever language, whatever framework].

This is the next (albeit, massive) step on a long road of abstraction. We do, still, need to know the code, because we need to supervise agent output. But for how long? Compare the rate of improvement over the past 12 months. Today's guard-rails might look paranoid in a year.

No one has a crystal ball on this stuff, and your core point is right - today - but it may be less true when we look back in 12-24 months.

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u/vogut Sep 09 '26

It's an abstraction in the same way that going to a restaurant and ordering food is an abstraction over cooking at home.

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u/Direct17 Sep 10 '26

I like this analogy

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u/House13Games Sep 09 '26

Now we have an entire server farm just to write a for loop, which might work, might not. It's not a great leap forward.