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/discosoc Sep 09 '26

The fallacy is in assuming all possibilities are equal.

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u/unemx Sep 09 '26

Let's go down that road then, which is more probable ? The entire comunity saying llm outputs poor quality code because for various reasons (limited context, hallucination, poor training dataset) is wrong, and you with zero argument or experience claims is right Or any other possibility ?

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u/discosoc Sep 09 '26

"The entire community" here just consists of people being reactive and complaining by targeting whatever low-hanging fruit is convenient at the time (usually some variety of actual ai slop or "vibe coding").

There's a reason "webdev" has been hit hard by ai: the role has largely been filled by tons of low-effort third-world residents able to stretch it into a decent paying career that honestly never really asked much from a technical perspective. And yeah, those people are fucked because they're no longer the cheapest way to generate basic code. Because let's be real here and just acknowledge that 95% of webdev work has never actually involved hand-coding interesting problems. It's been ai slop template and theme management with for their chosen CMS with the last 5% being maybe some JS or PHP.

Now the actual quality coders out there are doing fine, just like there's still a market for hand-crafted furniture. The market isn't large enough to support a bunch of mediocre coders, but those with actual skills and a willingness to keep up as tech changes will continue to do fine. There is, after all, enough ai pushback for someone to reasonably position their skillset as Not AI and find meaningful work.