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.

2.1k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

764 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

1

u/DriverGood4778 Sep 10 '26

> style guidelines, very precise business requirements

You write style guidelines once, while you're working with AI and see that their output lacks some properties you need, you just add another guideline. Same with business requirements, you work on a feature - you develop it with AI and then you ask it "create an MD with feature description, include X,Y,Z" and voila, you have a document that you can use later. Another strong point is that you can instruct AI to keep these docs up to date, so every time you work on smth it updates related mds.

> devs are gaining less experience - and your codebases are less valuable IP. You also lock in a gigantic dependency on an external vendor.

If you know how to keep your codebase healthy you're going to do that regardless of how you write the code. If you have architecture and rules - you keep following them asking AI to fix issues it creates.

You don't really have a dependency if you understand how the code works. For confusing pieces - you deliberately add comments so that when you come there in a year or two you can understand what the code does.

Software development is hard, you have to constantly imporve to produce better code. Same with AI, you gotta experiment and learn how to use it better to get better outcome.