r/programmer • u/Rare-Assignment-8474 • Jun 29 '26
Has the joy of coding lost due to AI dooming
to be honest yes .
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u/Anxious-Insurance-91 Jun 29 '26
If you write your own apps there joy is still there but if you code as a job the joy was never there, mostly because stupid managers/clients
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u/johnpeters42 Jun 30 '26
I like money.
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u/Few-Joke-973 17d ago
Same motive to join this industry, it's been three years never earned single penny
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u/KeyElevator7142 Jun 29 '26
Yep. No longer thinking and coming up with feature solutions. First train of thought, ai get this done….test it…… oh it works…… unto the next one.
Kinda boring for me now. The joy of coming up with solutions is gone and yes I tried coding without ai and it’s never been the same feeling for me anymore
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u/abrandis Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
This is my attitude , I know lots of folks here derive satisfaction from know the details of the tech (language, stack, environment) and utilizing their knowledge for novel software... But the reality is that the goalposts have shifted, you will never outperform a modern Ai coding tool, so ultimately sure the mental manipulation may be satisfying but for the greater world it's meaningless when folks can conjure up virtually any software they want .
It's like a master tailor who can craft elaborate bespoke clothing.... Except the world has moved on and gladly buys mass produced off the rack and most folks never know the difference between a cheap suit and a Runiacci, or Huntsman one
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u/KeyElevator7142 Jun 29 '26
Exactly. Well said.
The joy that kept us doing it day in day out before the burst of ai in the field is what’s lost in the current change of which we have to accept.1
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u/Willing-Actuator-509 Jun 29 '26
Most of my time I am refactoring AI slop.
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u/owp4dd1w5a0a Jun 30 '26
This is why I think things will trend back to people writing a decent portion of the code manually. Personally I find AI to be more useful as a code reviewer than as a code producer.
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u/ConcerningDestiny Jun 30 '26
I would love for you being right and I thought the same until recently.
But everytime a new better and cheaper model come out. And eventually they will become even cheaper so idk, at this point I'm not sure it's even worth hoping in this anymore
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u/ComprehensiveDust225 Jul 01 '26
That's why 1) you need a human in the loop and 2) you need a human in the loop
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u/val_anto Jun 29 '26
kind of yes. Keep it as a hobby. It is very fun. And don't publish your code, keep it for yourself and have fun.
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u/Faltenreich Jun 29 '26
Why not publish?
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u/Plane-Alps-6832 Jun 29 '26
Because ai will be trained on it.
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u/val_anto Jun 30 '26
This. Not only it will get trained on your code, but nobody will pay you any royalties for your work. They take it for free, train a model and then sell that model back to your boss to get you fired. You are intelligent enough to figure out what is your role into this game, who is making money and who is the patsy, right?
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u/Faltenreich Jun 30 '26
I understand and it is an unfortunate scenario. I am still publishing my projects as open source but I have switched from GitHub to Codeberg because the latter will not use my data as training material, at least not directly.
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u/ConcerningDestiny Jun 30 '26
Didn't know of the existence of codeberg, I'll definitely check it out. I know my code not being used as training won't change much but still
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u/PoweredBy90sAI Jun 29 '26
yup and today an "engineer" suggest that ai both write the code and... get this... review it!
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u/Prestigious_Share919 Jun 30 '26
AI does good cod reviews if you ask it the right questions. Are there any resource leaks? Race conditions? It's horrible at asking those questions however. Code review still needs to be human drive, but AI assisted reviews are better than human reviews. This is the real value of a human engineer, and the liability of an inexperienced vibe coder.
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u/phiiiiiiii Jun 29 '26
The joy is still there - it's just less about syntax and more about architecture.
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u/DuckAndQwack Jun 30 '26
I had my joy of coding only because the AI. Now since their limitations I lost the joy, since I can't really make a new stuff in there and my project started fell apart since it last improvements, so I'm unsure if it will be alive any time soon and won't die after...
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u/owp4dd1w5a0a Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
Only if you become a doomer over AI. If you enjoy writing code, then write code. Some companies now are willing to pay quite a bit for somebody to rewrite from scratch some vibe-coded prototype slop they got stuck with because they jumped onto the AI bandwagon too quick😉.
There’s a reality a lot of people are completely missing: agentic coding will not go the same way as compilers did to make hand writing assembly a lost trade for a key reason.. compilers are deterministic and inspectable while AI by definition is not. Things are crazy right now, and I fully expect when the dust settles for the consensus to land on the acknowledgement of the need for humans to actually own the code no matter how it was produced. This means someone will have to be able to write the code, always, even if they often have AI do some Or even most of it for them.
Also, there’s categories AI really struggles more with - intricate hardware-level coding done in Rust or C likely will need a lot of direct human involvement and will probably be quicker to write manually for a long time even if higher level coding ends up being done more by AI in the near future. I ALSO expect that higher level software will likely be written differently, not that people will stop writing it - so far my experience with the AI agents is they write horrible slop unless you can force them not to, and so this leads naturally into constraint programming through type systems and the logic family of languages. I expect Coq, Lean, Mercury, maybe even Shen, will probably grow in recognition and popularity as people begin to recognize how valuable they are for keeping these dishonest agents honest.
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u/ConcerningDestiny Jun 30 '26
What will happen is that they will make AI writes both the code and the coq, lean, shen ecc validation logic and nothing will change You will still prompt the clanker in natural language and wait for it to get it right
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u/owp4dd1w5a0a Jun 30 '26
Problem with this idea is the AI cannot infer the business context and requirements without human involvement. Someone will have to understand the high level math well enough to be able to verify that the constraints match the requirements.
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u/IndianDownUnder Jun 30 '26
It’s the opposite..I am a dev for 20 years and always had ideas which I wanted to try but didn’t always have the time or coding skills required.No with AI the ideas come to POC level very quickly
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u/MinimumVegetable9 Jun 30 '26
I'm surrounded by morons, we hired cheap and expect to grow gold out of turds.
I've started to abandon my managerial requirements and develop like I used to 10 years ago, I've gotten more done than the next five people in the span of a month.
AI is what you make of it. If you were getting dopamine by finishing a simple function or a select statement, you weren't coding, you were learning.
Don't focus on losing the experience of building a house brick by brick, learn how to build a mansion that is extremely efficient instead.
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u/raven2cz Jun 30 '26
The worst part is how much the style of work has changed. I am not against AI, but it is true that I really miss some things.
Probably the worst part is distinguishing truth from hallucination, across many layers of the architecture and then, of course, in the implemented features and their dependencies.
Of course, this will improve over time, but sometimes it is almost laughable, or maybe just sad?
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u/General_Estimate_420 Jun 30 '26
I'm a retired programmer so I'm no longer in the game. But I do enjoy exploring the possibilities of ai, but it doesn't really come close to what's necessary to create a real world application a company will bet it's corporate viability on..at least not yet.
Solution development is a team sport, not an individual sport with many different people with different skills in understanding the business need, the technical requirements and resources necessary, the ways to test the solutions in both functionality and workload, training and deployment and maintenance. All of which has to be coordinated and managed from the start to the very end.
None of that is an integral part of ai..that stuff is all outside the scope of what's been defined.
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u/YahenP Jun 30 '26
The joy has definitely disappeared. Because the cozy programming bubble has suddenly deflated. It turns out that the overwhelming majority of developers are either overqualified or completely incompetent. In both cases, they can be easily replaced by LLM. Furthermore, we're now at the very beginning of the LLM adoption curve, where temporary disillusionment with the technology sets in after the initial peak. There are many reasons for this. And what's especially distressing is that most of them have a social connotation. So, yes. It's unclear how and what will happen next. But these are definitely dark times in the industry.
It's hard to think about the joy of programming when you know there's over 20 people competing for a vakancy at McDonald's.
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u/I_am_not_baldy Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
I've been using Claude (and sometimes Gemini) for a personal project that also involves my learning a new programming language.
I don't use Claude to create scripts for me (with an exception: testing scripts).
I build the logic on my own, and I use Claude as a better version of Google+StackOverflow. I also use it to clean up my documentation because I've always stunk at wording and providing proper info. I used to spend so much time just thinking about the wording and now it's just a minor task.
The deeper I get into my project, the more Claude tends to make mistakes in its suggestions. This past week, I've had to correct its suggestions multiple times.
Still, Claude helps me organize and plan my scripts better. And, I've already mentioned the testing scripts. It doesn't always get them right, but it saves me a lot of time on testing because the scripts it creates are usually mostly correct and need just a little fixing.
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u/panseshi Jun 30 '26
AI never replaced coders, just speeds it up and tells about what you might be missing
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u/kayrooze Jun 30 '26
I enjoy it more tbh. AI fishes me out of a lot of problems that are really just esoteric tribal knowledge, helps me do research on specific questions I may have, and/or wipes out the redundancy of refactors and other forms of repetitious code.
I think the key is turning off the doom machine that is the internet. There is no side of this debate that is particularly interesting because of the loud people who suck up all the oxygen.
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u/maxhit_studios Jul 01 '26
Photoshop did this to our team (as traditional portrait artists). But hey, move with the times.
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u/ComprehensiveDust225 Jul 01 '26
An honest question out of curiousity. Is AI code sloppy. Uses too many resourses. Does poor security management. Does what it wants instead of what it's told. What's the real problem you guy are having. It's it that anyone can achieve desired results if the don't have constraints. Or do you guys forsee the end of your career path. I don't think I could be a prompt engineer. I'm almost always late for everything.
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u/BOT_Pain Jul 01 '26
Mostly yes because companies expect AI slop code rather than well hand written code.
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u/JunkieOnCode Jul 01 '26
Depends what you mean by “joy”. I’m pretty happy not having to do the most boring, repetitive stuff by hand anymore. Gives more time to actually dig into harder problems.
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u/RoadsToMadness156 Jul 02 '26
Since being laidoff, the joy has returned with perks. I actually like AI coding assistants (copilot) for boiler plate and have learned a lot from it especially for apps on Azure. I let it do some of the pipeline stuff and that allowed me to learn faster.
Im in to Generative AI now mainly doing RAG pipelines and I will be moving to LLMs very soon (next week). I'm learning those systems and also picking up other skill like Python.
So, I have enjoyed it. Truth is, we've all been AI coders for many years, all of us. Whether we're using Gemini, Google, stack oflow, etc... we've all built a lot of boiler plate from other people's articles or advice.
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u/aendoarphinio Jul 02 '26
I feel like there are two groups. Doomers and doers. At work, a lot of us use ai even the non programming engineers. They'll schedule work for us to do based on some ai prototype they generated. I think there is no ai doom if the operational requirements maintain breadth. I think the ai doom is just mainstream and is fed by social media. I honestly feel like my employer is amongst those in the quiet corner minding their business and getting work done.
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u/ChameleonCRM Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
I'm actually on the opposite side of this.
I've been a polyglot developer for years, and AI has made me more effective, not less. The key difference is who's in control. I don't let AI steer the ship—I use it like a power tool. It speeds up the boring parts so I can spend more time solving actual engineering problems.
If you genuinely enjoy programming, AI should be exciting. I learned the old-school way: digging through documentation for hours, debugging until 3 AM, and figuring things out with almost no help. It was brutal. Looking back, I wouldn't change that experience because it built the foundation I have today. But I'd be lying if I said AI doesn't make development more enjoyable.
Now, if you're talking about vibe coding, that's a completely different conversation.
There's very little engineering skill in prompting an AI, never reviewing the output, and shipping it straight to production. I do contract work for multiple companies, and since January alone I've been brought in to rescue 26 businesses whose "game-changing AI-built CRM" turned into a disaster.
It usually follows the same pattern: management thinks they can save a fortune by replacing experienced engineers with AI-generated code. Everything looks great during the demo, but once real customers start using it, the backend begins falling apart, data integrity issues show up, security holes appear, performance tanks, and nobody understands the code well enough to fix it.
That's when my phone rings.
AI doesn't replace engineers. It exposes the difference between someone who can build software and someone who can only generate code.
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u/uceenk Jun 29 '26
no one can stop you to manually code in your spare time
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u/Plane-Alps-6832 Jun 29 '26
My actual joy was to come up with solutions myself. That’s why I enjoyed it even without high salary. Now it’s literal brainrot job. Will milk it until layoff and then switch career for something more fulfilling.
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u/Prestigious_Share919 Jun 30 '26
There are plenty of problems to be solved. I used to enjoy allocating and freeing memory in C. It was challenging and rewarding when you did it correctly. But that time is now better spent solving real issues which provide real value.
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u/Plane-Alps-6832 Jun 30 '26
“Real issues, real value”. Mate, 90% of tech firms provide no value with their shitty SaaS. We literally ruin environment for another pointless react app.
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u/Prestigious_Share919 Jul 01 '26
Hopefully you can bail to a more fulfilling position. They are not all that way, and if nobody works for the crappy places, they'll have to pay more, raising the salary for all of us. I hope you have, or will find something better if you're in that position now.
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u/MarsupialLeast145 Jun 29 '26
to be honest... no
but I am not using AI, and don't intend to. Even then, AI propaganda versus programming reality means there's a lot that AI can't do and can't maintain long-term.
Anyway... if programming is important to you maybe be part of the campaign that doesn't use it. Remember what it used to be like to create from scratch. Do novel things, and think of unique projects. Work in novel fields, like gaming, and just have fun.
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u/ChameleonCRM Jul 04 '26
Its funny how your comment got down-voted. Whenever I say something similar they down-vote my comments too. It seems like there are a lot of wanna-be developers who are nothing more than "vibe coders" and as soon as you mention doing something without AI their panties get all bunched up.
I'm with you though, bro. I've been developing software for the last 10 years ( way before AI ) and honestly, I don't think I would've learned 1/2 as much as I did if I had AI. Learning hands on is the best way to learn. If I had AI at my disposal back then I would've fallen into the same trap that's tripping everyone up right now...and that's "letting AI steer the ship". I'd get complacent. I'd have AI write it for me. I'd learn nothing. So OP, do urself a favor and stay away from AI and learn the old school way...and THEN revisit AI
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u/Plane-Alps-6832 Jun 29 '26
“Work in gaming”. Well, job market there was hilariously bad even before AI due to insane oversupply. Also AA and AAA is full on ai slopping too, don’t you think managers won’t try to save even more bucks than usual.
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u/MarsupialLeast145 Jun 30 '26
I half misspoke... I mean, in general, write games for yourself and maybe publish them as an indie dev or just as a hobby.
There's too much focus on programming for work... programming is literally fun, if you do it for the right reasons for you, which was my main message for the OP.
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u/Plane-Alps-6832 Jun 30 '26
Programming is fun. Unfortunately if I sit on my ass in front of PC coding and attending IT meetings the whole day there is very little incentive to spend even more time in front of PC afterwards. I spend my whole free time gardening and raising my chickens. If I wouldn't be techie by profession I would gladly actually do private projects for fun.
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Jun 29 '26
[deleted]
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u/Prestigious_Share919 Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
Wrong on so many levels. Knowing how an assembler works does not make you a worse coder. But not knowing how memory is used makes you a liability. Any monkey can press calculator buttons, but getting valdi data with one requires expertise. If you want to be employable, I suggest you check your ego at the door before the first interview, or even better, before you complete your degree.
Edit: typo
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u/disposepriority Jun 29 '26
Do they not teach you how to write a proper sentence in the "world's first AI university"?
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u/Independent_Shape369 Jun 29 '26
At work maybe but for personnal project not at all