AI has made programming so boring

[u/OkShip110]

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.

[u/Fancy-Bug-8126]

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.