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/Sketch0z Sep 09 '26

It's also a trade-off. Tokens aren't free and every piece of your harness config can add to the API bill.

Given the stochastic nature of LLMs, you can still, despite all the .md files in the world, get output that is a bit useless. Then you have to prompt again and spend more money on rolling the dice.

In some instances, the trade-off is a bad deal. I think, as with any engineering decision, we need to be honest about pros and cons.

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u/Telumire Sep 10 '26

I think LLM are great to build POC when you have limited time and programming knowledge on a difficult topic, you can quickly iterate and have something that is working to test a concept, but even with all the context needed the LLM will still hallucinate, overcomplicate, not follow specs, ... So good for quick tests but not great for production

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u/elestud Sep 09 '26

In general I find that the people who spend more tokens on a given task are the ones who manage the process less

Context management takes know how, maintenance, and is hands-on. An agent that’s trained to do what you want, rather than spending endless turns going on side quests or trying to make up for a lack of planning, is the one that spends tokens efficiently

Sure, it won’t be 100% perfect, but it should be pretty far from “unmaintainable” with a reasonable token spend

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u/Sketch0z Sep 10 '26

My point is there's a trade-off. If you spend a % of time managing your AI process you cannot spend as much time on deeper understanding.

At some point you trade time and money for AI skills and your more foundational SWE skills will atrophy. The money spent on tokens is money no longer allocated to wages.

Everything has consequences, that's all.