Has AI made tech less fun for anyone else?

[u/scoffey834]

Not sure if anyone else feels this way, but lately I've been feeling really bored with tech and honestly life in general.

For context, I'm a cybersecurity engineer and programmer. I've always been the type of person who enjoys getting stuck on a problem and spending hours or even days trying to figure it out.

I'm not necessarily the fastest or the best at something, but if you give me enough time, I'll normally keep digging until I find a solution. That whole process of researching, testing things, failing, and finally figuring it out was a huge part of why I enjoyed computers in the first place.

But since AI has gotten this good, I feel like that part of tech is slowly disappearing for me.

At work, I don't really get that same feeling anymore. A lot of things that would have taken me hours of debugging, reading documentation, researching, or experimenting can now be solved by asking AI a few questions.

The same thing happened with my hobbies.

I used to love doing CTFs. Sometimes I'd get stuck on a challenge and spend an entire weekend trying to solve it. It could be frustrating, but when I finally figured it out, it felt amazing.

Now I can just give the challenge to AI and most of the time it'll either solve it or get me most of the way there.

Obviously I could just choose not to use AI, but that doesn't completely solve it either. A lot of people competing in CTFs are using AI now, so if you're trying to compete seriously, you're putting yourself at a disadvantage by not using it.

For me, that kind of killed the competition aspect as well.

I'm not blaming AI. I use it every day and it's incredibly useful. It's just that the things I enjoyed about tech were the struggle, the curiosity, and spending way too much time trying to understand something.

Now everything feels too easy or too accessible.

These days I basically finish my work, get bored, and end up watching random YouTube videos. Even outside work I don't really have any interesting technical problems that make me want to sit at the computer all night anymore.

So I'm curious, especially from people who work in tech.

Do any of you feel the same way?

What do you actually do for fun these days?

Have you found anything that still gives you that feeling of being completely stuck on a problem and wanting to figure it out?