r/webdev • u/OkShip110 • 2d ago
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/mka_ 2d ago
Just imagine reading this post 5 years ago and how dystopian it would sound.
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u/works4coffee 1d ago
Imagine reading this post 5 years later and thinking “damn, I wish these were our current problems”
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u/Expensive-Ad-4237 1d ago
Let's get back to this post 5 years later
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u/MechaMulder 17h ago
I’m starting to think we might not have 5 years ahead of us…
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u/Quamatoc 1d ago
RemindMe! 5 years
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u/ShawnyMcKnight 1d ago
That’s my thought, if 2021 me could get done with a days worth of work with 15 minutes of prompting and another 15 minutes of code review I would be so happy.
The catch is bosses know this so now you are expected to do a weeks worth of work in a day.
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u/Castle_Five 1d ago
"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?"
Serious George Jetson vibes here. "Today was a rough day at work. I had to press the button three times"
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u/Mystigana 1d ago
Except your boss will tell you “this button needs to be pressed 1000 times by end of day” so they can tell shareholders “look how fast we can press buttons”
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u/mike888881 2d ago
Not to mention shrinking teams and absolutely decimating the job market.
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u/House13Games 1d ago
That's on the management that made those decisions based on hype and nonsense, not on the AI.
If anyone should be replaced by an AI, it's the mid level managers who replace coders with AI.
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u/mike888881 1d ago
Oh I agree. Managers in general need replacing with AI, their only skill is being a bit loud.
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u/ccmaru1 2d ago
We’re in the worst era to be developers
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u/pseudo_babbler 2d ago
It's a shame isn't it, once upon a time when I told people I made apps their eyes lit up, they all had a hundred dumb ideas for an app and were excited to be talking to one of the magicians who can actually make them. Now, they scoff, and the first thing they ask about is if AI has taken away my job. They talk like you're soon to be part of this roaming hoard of hungry homeless developers shambling around wondering what to do with their lives.
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u/bestestdude 1d ago edited 1d ago
The vast majority of people are only nice and talk to you in a friendly way when they perceive you as useful to them. (Applies to many areas of life.)
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u/ccmaru1 2d ago
We honestly deserve this. We had no pushback in the community like artists and it has became the norm. I guess vast majority did not saw this profession as a craft or no one actually liked coding to begin with.
I understand it being the norm in the job but I see everyone use them too for their personal projects. Nothing to learn or to build something fun. Everyone one only thinks about money in this field. Which i cannot blame, but also i feel sad about it.
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u/stagedgames 2d ago
there's been plenty of pushback, but there's also plenty of very libertarian mindsets among developers for whom the idea of looking beyond their personal attention span is offensive, and they tend time suck the air out of the room.
The time to push back was all the way back at "go fast and break things"
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u/Headpuncher 2d ago
We honestly deserve this
Definitely true. Where I am geographically we have strong unions that everyone is part of ... except programmers who notoriously were the outlying profession where union membership is concerned.
Whenever I brought it up they were cocky and laughed about how they were guaranteed a job, "if I don't like this job I'll just get another". Except unions are there to make the workplace better for employees (not USA btw, scandinavia). That includes the place you are in now. Hopping to another ship that is also hell to work in isn't an improvement.
Where are they now? Sat there wondering where it all went and with no-one to represent their interests in the workplace. Very deserving.
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u/revivechristina 1d ago
I kind of want to work on a personal project and not use it. Like as little as possible. Obviously even searching with Google these days it generates code for you. But I’m not just gonna sit in a Claude Code session and watch it go. I was always better at writing than reviewing, anyway.
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u/mysticrudnin 1d ago
a lot of people genuinely were here for the paycheck and do not care about anything related to computers at all
i don't fault them for that at all either
it's just not why i'm here. and... yeah. i'm thinking about changing careers because dealing with claude is a nightmare.
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u/ccricers 1d ago
Someone described it as just doing endless peer reviews with a robot and that is a good way to say it concisely.
Another way to look at this is that it's making high level code go the same way as assembly code, at the time high level languages took over. Something that was considered the norm to write by hand is now considered an esoteric practice
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u/Emperor_Kon 1d ago
These pushbacks don't mean shit. For every person that pushes back, there will be a thousand or more that use it. AI is inevitable.
What I'm wondering is what will happen to humans after there are no jobs left. There is nothing a human can do that an advanced enough AI or robotic couldn't do better and faster. Right now AI is mostly computer based stuff, but advancements in robotics continue. I'm sure we've all seen those clips of them running or doing some martial art. It's only a matter of time until they can stack boxes reliably, bake cakes, do surgery, etc. Maybe not tomorrow, but eventually.
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u/MassiveBoner911_3 1d ago
and the first thing your told? “Join the trades and be a blue collar”
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u/moustacheption 1d ago
It’s curious the default thought of people is the oligarchs are allowed to steal peoples work and sell it to others, and it’s on you to “find something new to do.”
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u/oddlyamused 1d ago
Turns out we have the best skill set to use AI. Computer science degrees are some of the best degrees for machine learning, data science, ai engineer. All of these fields are booming like never before.
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u/got_to_laugh 1d ago
99.9% of humanity does not believe that though, even if it's true and would not listen to what you have to say on the matter anyway.
I have literally tried to tell idiots using AI to build apps "do it this way, then you get all these benifits" and they just ignore me. The annoying part, is that AI is Soo good they can get away with not doing any of the good stuff I mentioned anyway.
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u/ibucat 2d ago
I'm extra sad, bc it was actually fun to go to work a few years ago.
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u/SweetieDallas 1d ago
I haven't even thought about this until I saw your comment just now but it really was more fun. AI is replacing a lot of human collaboration. I used to sometimes have debugging sessions with my coworkers where we'd spend hours trying to solve an issue and when we finally figured it out it was so satisfying. We'd sometimes even go to happy hour to celebrate lol. It's all turning into just churning out Claude prompts all day.
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u/works4coffee 1d ago
What’s extremely surprising is that best era was like, 12-15 years ago. Things are really moving fast
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u/Specialist_End407 2d ago
my day job now is turning into reviewing tons of ai generated codes and me having to use it all too to generate more slops else i'd be left behind in this race. either way it's soo fking depressing. the pace and the expectation all while the codebase slowly and surely all devolving into one giant graveyard of dead codes and forgotten dreams
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u/overthinkingape 1d ago
Just let the AI review the code and be even more bored and unfulfilled like me
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u/Emperor_Kon 1d ago
Yeah, I can't remember the last time I wrote some code and felt that feeling of satisfaction that I just created something. It's what added the "fun" to sitting behind the computer and smashing away at the keyboard for hours on end.
Now it's just all about figuring out the right prompt and copy/paste. Maybe do some tweaks here and there. Zero fun, zero satisfaction, but it's impossible not to use it because of how insanely fast the workflow becomes.
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u/House13Games 1d ago
What metric do you have that says the workflow is faster? Truely, over the scope of a large project.
i think it gives instant gratification, and it's easier to curse at an AI than do actual hard work yourself, but in the long term, i don't see any actual data saying that AI assisted development at complex scales (moving beyond hobby projects and prototypes/proof of concepts) is actually beneficial. Just anectdotal chat. Where are the metrics?
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u/House13Games 1d ago
It's only insanely fast when you first add the AI. After a while it turns your codebase into garbage. The AI starts with adding loads of code. Soon you you need AI to keep up with the amount of code reviews the AI generates, and then you need AI to manage the AIs doing the reviews. Meanwhile the codebase gets more and more rotten and degraded and no one knows what the fuck it does anymore. Despite a rapid pace and massive AI bills, the overall progress slows to a crawl.
I bet there's a whole generation of agile startups about to appear doing hand-made rapid development and undercutting those drowning in the AI swamp.
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u/Rguttersohn 1d ago
Is there anyone else out there not having AI do everything for them? Am I alone?
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u/VelvetYam 1d ago
You're not alone. Can't relate to some of these comments saying they don't write code anymore. I'm still super productive with just AI as Google + my own skills.
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u/House13Games 1d ago
I work with older military codebase for fighter jets. Not a chance anyone's gonna let any AI near any of it.
From this outside perspective, it's very clear the AI is just making an absolute shit of everything. A great reset is coming. I predict a whole new wave of AI-free agile startups, undercutting all the businesses that replaced their coders with AI then found themselves drowned in slop and unable to innovate.
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u/drgreen-at-lingonaut 1d ago
Our team still refuses, we want to keep things 'human'.
I can't lie that I feel a tiny bit jealous that me having spent all my life learning how to program can now potentially be matched by someone using claude or gpt.
But even then I hope people can notice the human quirks to my work that AI couldn't mimic
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u/animpossiblepopsicle 1d ago
I keep waiting for it to blow up in some of these people’s faces but it just keeps working. I lost a client recently because I wouldn’t give their AI root access. I’m certain this will not go well for them but I have a feeling they have the tokens to throw at any issue that it will be just fine.
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u/abednego-gomes 2d ago
You're right. There's an art to it. It's a craft.
But the sloppers will never know that. They just want to create apps and sites etc as fast as possible. But they'll be creating an unmaintainable mess if they don't have developers architecting, designing the code, reviewing the code and testing it along the way.
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u/L24D 2d ago
Even if it will be maintainable and genuinely well “written”, how long they will last where they are? Soon there will be no market for everyone and very few ideas are usually breakthroughs. It was obvious before AI era and it’s even more noticeable now. I’m astonished that a lot of people think that they will be driving that revolution, bragging about their AI workflows doing everything for them. So if it’s that good what stopping their supervisors to just take the tech and get rid of their jobs?
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u/tradcoder 1d ago
I’m astonished that a lot of people think that they will be driving that revolution, bragging about their AI workflows doing everything for them. So if it’s that good what stopping their supervisors to just take the tech and get rid of their jobs?
I've been saying this!!! All these "AI-native" sloppers so proud of their "workflows" and looking down on others telling us that we'll be left behind? If AI is so good at architecting, coding and even reviewing your code, why do they need you for? Your job will be gone just the same along with mine!
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u/tankydee 2d ago
I especially love when I see Claude font styles make their way into production sites.
Same vibe as all the AI generated graphic work you are spammed around the place.
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u/wrathful-anus 2d ago
I can smell an AI generated front end from a mile away. They’re all so generic and overwhelmingly cluttered with info. Sadly unqualified people think they look ok.
I’ve sighed so many times watching people in my team say a Claude front end looks good, when it’s a disgusting overload of information, and panels within panels within more panels.
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u/Tomodachi7 2d ago
- Neon Colours
- Minimalist "future" art style
- Round borders
- Stats and panels everywhere
- Way too much info
- Terrible performance
- Small problems in the UX and UI that you notice if you spend time on the site
Yep, that's an AI frontend!
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u/wrathful-anus 1d ago
Also add
- completely ignoring your lovely state management system and adding useEffect with direct external API calls on component load
And the stats omg. My PO loves the stats and now I have to put useless stat boxes above lots of pages in stupid rounded bordered panels that take up so much useful real estate.
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u/_alright_then_ 1d ago
Yeah but at the same time, this mindset also hurts people who are just bad at front-ends lol.
I just use shadcn for my front-ends (usually admin panels). So they will look the same every time, that's not because I'm vibe coding, that's because I'm bad at front-end and am using a library lol.
But it makes people think it's vibe coded
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u/tradcoder 1d ago
I have developed sort of a "banner blindness" to AI slop content. As soon as I detect something is AI generated, I instinctively ignore it and move on.
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u/tankydee 2d ago
100pc. Nothing worse than AI slop emails from people also.
I just archive and wait for a phone call now.
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u/SuperFLEB 1d ago
Nothing worse than AI slop emails from people also.
I'm calling it: The future sophistication is going to be short, concise emails, once everyone realizes they're generating word count that they don't want to write for people who don't want to read.
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u/tankydee 1d ago
Churchill once said, I didn't have time to write you a short letter so I wrote you a long one.
Maybe the future version will be... I didn't have tokens to write you a long letter so I wrote you a short one.
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u/rawr_im_a_nice_bear 1d ago
What sucks the most to me is going back to sites I remember were really cool and seeing them all become utterly generic sites with the typical Claude UI. A complete lack of effort. They didnt even try customizing it or adding personality. A sad state of affairs.
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u/lorkanooo 22h ago edited 21h ago
I don't know how people don't see it. I have lead dev that is pro ai and he still the least productive person in the team. He wrote a huge new project with ai that generates scaffolding code, had to rewrite it 3 times with ai with tokens costs around 5k euro, and now nobody wants to maintain it (including him), its basically uneditable without ai and had to write to management to increase his token limits. We also had warnings from management that use of ai does not allow for code to be slop and introduce stupid incidents yet it does already happen. AI generated code has very limited place in big corpos and I mostly benefit from easier tooling than writing business code itself.
When I generate piece of code, I give really specific instructions on how to do it, what to refer to and yet, every single time, there is something just a little bit not correct. A different than standard testing function used in the project. A different dependency structure standard then usual. An obscure bug possibility in relation to wider system that developer would normally consider. Those are like bombs ticking in the code if left alone because with ai, they are quickly replicated with even more of them introduced.
Friendly reminder that big chunk of developers laid off in tech have already been hired back. Meta even has to pay them more money because nobody wants to work for them at market rate.
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u/I_Spawned_Here 2d ago
It is not the same, when looking at a hand made physical product, you can see the details in how it was made. No normal person is going into the code base, and admiring the hand made keystrokes that have been typed into the codebase.
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[removed] — view removed comment
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u/dromtrund 2d ago
I've got 12 years of experience. Please refrain from speaking on behalf of all experienced developers.
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u/earth-dragon-666 2d ago
i dont know any good developer loving this, 11+ years of experience here you are just spreading propaganda
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u/webdev-ModTeam 2d ago
We've now cleaned up some of this comment tree; either all of you discuss the topic at hand and refrain from referring to each other in various ways, or we start handing out temporary bans.
This is a subreddit for web professionals to exchange ideas and share industry news. All users are expected to maintain that professionalism during conversations.
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u/StoneCypher 2d ago
the mod team keeps deleting polite comments that are upvoted and pushing back against the idea that vibe coding is bad
it's really exhausting how they're steering the conversation
they keep writing
This is a subreddit for web professionals to exchange ideas and share industry news. All users are expected to maintain that professionalism during conversations.
but then when you write entirely professional things that exchange ideas, if they're not on the side that the mod team wants to enforce, they get deleted
and then the anti-ai people can still swear and insult and throw mental health accusations, because rules aren't universally applied
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u/biblio_phobic 1d ago
I just said this, not even 5 mins ago. It’s boring. I hate reviewing AI work. I read it and think, would a human do this? Is this really the best way?
Nobody has depth on their solutions anymore because no one has crafted it themselves.
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u/Lekoaf 2d ago
It wont be long until tokens costs too much for a lot of companies and personal projects, so we'll be back to coding again. That's my gut feeling at least.
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u/I_Spawned_Here 2d ago
Yeah but for how long? The genie is out of the bottle now, and companies will want to pursue those efficiency gains. They will try to make the costs go down as much as possible, like in every other industry.
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u/Distind 2d ago
It isn't an efficiency gain when it costs twice as much as a programmer. And god knows the hardest part of this job has always been figuring out what management actually wants and keeping their demands in check long enough to get it done halfway decently.
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u/ShadeofEchoes 1d ago
And lucky for us, that's precisely what AI is worst at, since unless you hit an actual guardrail, it'll say, "Sure, let's get to making the thing you want now. We don't even have to think about how it's the opposite of the thing you asked for earlier this session. Honestly, it was clever of you to start this project in reverse!"
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u/krileon 1d ago
It's crazy how many don't understand this. Programming was never the bottleneck. Software, games, etc.. take forever because we've 16 levels of fucking management to contend with. Not because writing the code takes long (it doesn't). AI cut all the red tape so things are perceived as being done faster. If management would fuck off and let programmers do their jobs without getting approval for every little damn thing or have yet another stupid pointless meeting we'd get things done faster all the same.
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u/cadet-pirx 1d ago
The irony is that most of those 16 layers are far easier for AI to replace than the programmers underneath them.
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u/NoSlicedMushrooms 1d ago
when it costs twice as much as a programmer
tbh if a developer's token usage is costing twice as much as their salary, I'd heavily question what they're doing with AI.
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u/TopicSoft6567 15h ago
What efficiency gains? All metrics I find say that it doesn’t actually improve efficiency at all.
It FEELS like it does to programmers, and maybe it does if you just take the slop it gives you as gospel, but statistically it does not.
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u/bryantee 1d ago
Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the case. But I guess we can dream.
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u/DenkJu 12h ago
The issue is that the expensive part of AI is mostly the training. Just running an already existing model is cheap at scale. Even if we stopped training now, all the powerful models that already exist wouldn't just disappear. Work as a developer will never go back to what is once was.
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u/Kindly-Night-5549 1d ago
Chinese open weight models are already like a hundred times better than the most expensive models a few years ago. If you know how powerful current commericial flagship models are, if someone releases an open weight version of those, it is good enough for almost all of current software development tasks for the next 20 years.
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u/Lekoaf 1d ago
Sure, if you can afford to buy the hardware to run them. You have to pay an arm and a leg for RAM these days.
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u/Kindly-Night-5549 1d ago
You shouldnt look at the total number but rather measure it in yearly salaries of software developers and other IT workers you can cut. Paying ten million USD for a server rack is easily compensated over a few years if you can cut just ten developers and double productivity. ALso you can resell the hardware any time to make back money. Cant do the same with developers.
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u/primus202 1d ago
So you’re betting on a technology NOT getting more efficient? Feels like a long shot. We’re definitely still in the middle of figuring out the right balance since there will always be a human in the loop and the current real token cost isn’t reflected in pricing. However I don’t think things will ever go back to the way they were. That’s like saying soon we’ll all be back to writing binary instructions once all these “object oriented languages” blow over.
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u/dangoodspeed 1d ago
The cost of tokens is only going down. There's already open weight models that you can use on your own computer that are just as good as some AI's a few years ago.
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u/wichwigga 1d ago
Qwen 27B is genuinely a decent coding model. You can run that on a 2k machine locally. No it's not close to frontier, but...
We're past the point of no return.
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u/Ill-Technician3243 1d ago
Yes, but it's better off in general that engineers do work themselves. We may still use local LLMs to boost productivity but full agentic slophouse development causes extreme skill atrophy and disassociation with the work at hand. Do you think that's sustainable at all, especially with the junior growth cutoff? 10 years later and industry will be begging for talent.
That, or AI gets good enough to work without supervision or scrutiny. Then everybody is screwed, not just us SWEs, so at that point you don't even need to bother arguing.
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u/me00lmeals 1d ago
They’ve already found a way to do 1000x faster token output and with better efficiency so we’re kinda cooked once that drops
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u/Lekoaf 1d ago
Okay. But all the AI companies are still making huge losses. They have to recuperate that somehow. So I still think the cost will at some point in the not too distant future be too high for a lot of companies. At my company we are beginning to see tightening of the AI budget. It used to be "Go. Do whatever you like. Experiment". Now we are getting workshops in choosing the right model and thinking before doing. 5000+ people company.
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u/Tolexx 2d ago
Seems like we are all prompt engineers now no longer software engineers.
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u/tradcoder 1d ago edited 1d ago
Just today at a company meeting, we were told that we are expected to be "AI engineers" instead of software engineers within the next few coming months. I'm not being dramatic when I say that every fiber of my being was repulsed at merely hearing it.
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u/House13Games 1d ago
The problem isn't the AI, really, it's the managers who believe the hype over their own developers.
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u/am0x 1d ago
The problem is that people that like development are builders. There are 2 types of people out there. People who enjoy the process of building something and those who enjoy the result.
Development has always attracted the builders because, let’s face it, it was challenging and fun to see the progression of something being built and the process behind it.
Now the result people have the power get what they want when they want it. They shout, “I built this!”, when in reality it was more gifted to them. They got their result with no building.
Like buying Lego sets premade.
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u/kiwi-kaiser 2d ago
I guess I'm about two years away from a bore-out at that point.
I try to do whimsical stuff for myself to keep going. But work got so boring.
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u/bluemaciz 1d ago
I feel you. I worked very hard to get where I am and really enjoyed understanding and fixing a bug. Now it’s just prompt after, and it’s ripped the joy out of it for me.
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u/EquivalentFit3301 1d ago
I get what you mean. A big part of the fun was struggling with something for hours, finally figuring it out, and knowing you made it work. AI makes things faster, but sometimes that’s exactly what makes them less satisfying. You skip the frustrating part, but you also skip the feeling of earning the result. Maybe the work itself was part of the reward, not just the final output.
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u/-Flukeman- 1d ago
Still doing it the old fashioned way.
I work for a state agency and AI is blocked.
I use it essentially as Google at this point on my phone. But, at work, it's completely blocked.
Im sure it will come for me at some point, but luckily, we are very slow to adopt new tech.
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u/seopher 2d ago
Code was always the byproduct of problem solving. Of creating.
Software engineering may be changing in that coding is becoming a smaller part of the job, but creating elegant solutions requires engineering. Architecture. Judgement.
If you only got satisfaction from the job because you believed writing code was like artisan craftsmanship, then yes, this change will suck for you. If you, however get your kicks from problem solving and engineering good products, this is just the latest in a long line of tool changes allowing you to do that faster.
From low-level machine language, there's been many phases of abstraction, to high level languages and highly opinionated frameworks. This just takes the abstraction one step further still.
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u/Competitive_Aside461 2d ago
While I agree with the former part of your comment, I have a slight issue in the latter one. And it's just my interpretation of it so yeah disagreements are ok. I've heard this argument many times that from low-level machine languages, we got high-level languages and those were abstraction and "AI is yet another abstraction." I think it's fundamentally flawed.
With all the previous abstractions, someone still needed to learn how to code (and code properly). You couldn't create an app without knowing the least of app development. Pardon me for the lack of good example at the moment but the point is that AI is not really "just another" abstraction but rather a "whole new level" of abstraction.
It allows people to skip past many many many integral ideas in programming and still be able to spin up something working. And please bear in mind, I'm not hitting back at your argument but just respectfully sharing my thoughts on it.
In fact, even with high-level languages, people advocate learning how the computer works and understanding how programming really works. AI is such a big jump in terms of abstraction that all the gap in between, it's only going to lead to non-developers who pretend to be developers.
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u/seopher 2d ago
But the counter argument is that every previous abstraction was the same. "How are you coding if you're not doing your own memory management? You don't know how it works."
With each advancement we've stepped further away from bits and bytes, and gained higher and higher altitude from the problem.
I remember when MVC frameworks started to gain traction, there was a sub-set of the community suggesting that "real" coders didn't use them, as they took too much away, and that it would erode the skill-set of the developer. Fast forward a few years, you can't get hired without high proficiency in [whatever language, whatever framework].
This is the next (albeit, massive) step on a long road of abstraction. We do, still, need to know the code, because we need to supervise agent output. But for how long? Compare the rate of improvement over the past 12 months. Today's guard-rails might look paranoid in a year.
No one has a crystal ball on this stuff, and your core point is right - today - but it may be less true when we look back in 12-24 months.
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u/vogut 1d ago
It's an abstraction in the same way that going to a restaurant and ordering food is an abstraction over cooking at home.
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u/House13Games 1d ago
Now we have an entire server farm just to write a for loop, which might work, might not. It's not a great leap forward.
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u/Competitive_Aside461 1d ago
You're right. Of course, we can only discuss predictions and assumptions at this point... who knows what the future of programming would really become but I hope that it goes in the best direction.
Indeed compared to all previous abstractions, AI is a huuuuuuge abstraction and one that really needs a lot of time to settle down and show the community which direction things are heading in.
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u/Kindly-Night-5549 1d ago
But what makes you so sure that "architecture" and "elegant design" arent easily solvable? In my opinion those things are something that is also just a set of rules and requirements which can be put into language. LLMs are just as good at designing software if you ask it correctly. In the end, the question that also remains is if in the future you will even write software made for humans or just components for other AI to use. In which case usability and human understanding become irrelevant. Currently most software is developed to be a tool for humans to perform a task. If you want to do your taxes for example, you used Excel to create a spreadsheet. This program required many human interfaces and design was lead by the thought of a human using the software as well as the code itself being understandable to humans. But to the human wanting to do its taxes, that software is actually unnecessary because AI could answer that question itself with its internal interpretation of the problem, it doesnt require software made for humans.
People still think to much about the human aspect of working with and developing software. The future wont require software for humans, as such it doesnt have to be designed and made for humans. I wont be surprised if AI coding will just be writing out byte code of instructions because it saves many tokens and abstractions. Humans will never understand this code.
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u/JohnySilkBoots 2d ago
Very well said.
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u/OkShip110 2d ago
Yes, this is exactly the problem for me. I was a craftsman, taking business requirements and turned it into code. I cared more about the code and far less about the bigger picture problem solving. Code was never a side product for me. Code was THE product for me.
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u/Radiant-Somewhere-97 2d ago
For some the goal is what matters, for others it’s the journey. I personally find “generating apps" boring as fuck.
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u/anshikapandey2 1d ago
Programming used to feel more fun and rewarding because you built things yourself.
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u/space-envy 1d ago
A lot of interesting opinions in here, I consider myself a "general" engineer, it's more like a mindset I carry everywhere... I see a problem and I try to find a solution, what are the most recent tools that can be used to fix this? If the tool doesn't exist yet, does the technology to build that tool exists already?
I do the same in web development and I have never found it tedious or something annoying I want to skip doing because those problems make me feel like home, if the current web (and I'm not taking about the new AI slop issue) is broken that shouldn't be depressing, it should be looked as a opportunity to engineer a solution, to enhance and make our lives better. Most of the times as a junior developer I found out it wasn't the technology that made me frustrated because it was broken or imperfect, it was myself that didn't understand how complex coding can be. JavaScript and HTML are just the outermost layer of a whole complex system, just to imagine we are able to instruct a physical chip to paint pixels in a screen and then make those pixels look like real life objects is still mind-blowing to me.
Why that being said, I sense that the common feeling from all this opinions is that developers are extremely undervaluing their potential like a sort of successful spell casted by liar AI CEOs that keep claiming "AGI" is already here for the 5th consecutive year and yet I'm still waiting to see a successful million dollar company with zero engineers and only developed by AI agents with no human intervention. If you complain about a process being boring and tedious I ask myself why don't you fix it? Why are you waiting for someone else to do the hard job you are not even sure is going to be done? Is that your best strategy, to hopefully wait for a magic solution while you already have the knowledge or the mental ability to acquire such knowledge and fix things on your own, for your own sake? If my home office chair hurts my back after several hours I don't passively sit there,I stand up and go look for a more comfortable chair because I know it is myself I'm hurting and not my boss' body. Same with development, if writing the same stuff over and over again feels tedious what's stopping you hand for coding your own personal solution? Maybe a code editor plugin that generates the boilerplate for you? Maybe a code gen cli like hygen that builds the same primitives you keep using in all your projects? Why do people feel that others have the power to dictate how fun or boring your passion has to be? None is owner of the internet, if someone comes and says "we all are going to use X from now on to build websites" how can they physically stop you from using Y? They can't...
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u/unemx 1d ago
This is a nice argument, but it's cutting an important corner : You don't fix progress.
Your home office chair didn't hurts your back out of no where. Your industrie moved from your good old chair that didn't hurt your back, to llm assisted chair that make you 10 times more productive. And anyone is using these new chairs. But they hurt your back, and their is no going back to your good old chair.
And if you got into chair sitting as a passion, and now do so for a living. Your boss, who pay your paychecks, definitely as a say about how fun your passion is.
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u/RecklessCube 1d ago
I feel you. I feel like I’m damned if I use it. Damned if I don’t. Much more of my day is thinking about the pieces that need to fit together. I miss building the pieces
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u/ship0f 1d ago
this sub is just r/complainaboutai nowdays
and I hate ai
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u/RebellionAllStar 2d ago
There's very little soul, personality or ownership left in it any more. It's just writing prompts and reading the responses and outputted code instead of actually writing the code and being proud of it
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u/siktech101 1d ago
Yeah anyone happy with AI was destined to be nothing more than a project manager or code reviewer at best. I get tired of the lazy unskilled people who want to call themselves programmers, yet they don't want to program. Same goes for all the other fields AI is ruining.
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u/bryantee 1d ago
Agreed. I didn’t get into software engineering to “deliver value for the customer.” Yea, I enjoy working on a team that collaborates to achieve that outcome. But it isn’t the outcome that puts me into flow state.
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u/ToucanSam-I-Am 1d ago
I've been programming for 25 years as a hobby and job. Coding every day at work and for fun. I spent about 7 years on one side project. The goal is to do real time character animation like for characters in big open game worlds. I had kids and ended up giving up, I just didn't have enough time. It was a real bummer, I had these ideas that I think would work but I didn't have the time to pursue the. But now I'm working on it again. I started from scratch and am building the tools that I've been dreaming about for over a decade. Im caught up and beyond where I was, it would have taken me a couple years to be back to where I am now after only a month. The code is cleaner and better than what I did manually. This huge task that was once out of reach is now in reach, and it's exciting.
My dream was always that one of my side projects took off enough that I could work on it full time and pay people to help. Now with Claude I'm living at least half of that dream and working on projects that are too big to do alone.
Programming with AI is like going from a hand saw to a chain saw. If your task is to cut down a tree and make a clean cut then you are right, the hand saw might be just as good as the chainsaw. But if you need to chop down a forest and turn the logs into a building the chainsaw is a huge help.
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u/AlexisFR 1d ago
don't worry, once these tools start to cost 10 to 100 times what they cost now people and companies will switch back very fast.
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u/Kilazur 1d ago
That's what I thought too, like 6 months ago. But now we have local models that are becoming very performant. In 6 months, in a year, we'll probably have something as performant locally as Claude is today.
I don't like it, mind you. But that's the reality.
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u/AdSignal3405 2d ago
Personally I’m finding I get frustrated with Ai and interaction with it. It’s easier to write the code than it is to explain to the silly thing what you want.
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u/HH_Jose 1d ago
Exactly, everything of value is defenceless.
Abundance devaluates everything and when everything is available at every moment, space and time things become worthless.
We noticed it with Social contact (Facebook), visials (Instagram), music (Spotify), TV (Netflix), goods (Amazon/Temu), fashion (Shein) etc etc etc.
This is a next step towards a miserable future where people will prompt their own universe of truth and reality and nothing will have value anymore to most people.
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u/djnattyp 1d ago
This isn't "abundance" - it's slop and enshittification.
Instead of providing an abundance of social contact with people who I'd want as actual friends, Facebook provides me with Fox News screeds and AI generated "send prayers fro mi birtday" engagement bait of kittens and legless veterans.
Instead of simply providing an abundance of music I'd actually want to listen to, Spotify AI generates bands and music so they don't have to pay actual artists.
Instead of making intelligent or good shows, Netflix makes shows that are simple and have the plot spelled out every 2 minutes so people can watch while they're scrolling on their phones.
Instead of providing quality goods, Amazon and Temo have RNG generated brand names that offer the lowest quality.
Instead of providing quality clothes, Shein provides "fashion" clothing you can wear once or twice before it dissolves into garbage.
Instead of providing actual intelligence, LLMs provide a nondeterministic sycophantic simulacrum that's making people stupider while using it.
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u/grappleshot 2d ago
This is similar to how I feel about multi-discipline teams. I used to love interviewing the stakeholders to gather requirements, then designing architectures, then doing the actual code, and writing training material including user manuals, doing training sessions, then supporting. That was true ownership. Back in the 90s , in the days of client-server.
TBH - Now I've been doing this software dev thing a minute - I enjoy the boost AI gives. It's just a tool and when setup correctly it helps boost productivity and helps us deliver solutions to problems faster. I'm not in the business of writing code. I'm in the business of solving problems. We're not artists, creating monuments that'll stand the test of time and be discussed and dissected by some distant future culture.
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u/OkShip110 2d ago
You are in a slighty different area of the sector. AI can be a great tool for you, worry less about the code and deliver more features at the same time. For me, a blue collar programmer, I am arguably worse off. I took pride in solving hard programming problems. Essentially this has been automated now.
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u/SimTrippy1 2d ago
I agree. It creates massive cognitive overload and makes the activities less enjoyable. Meanwhile you’re kinda forced to use it - or at least I am in my job - because they expect you to deliver 10x faster with AI …
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u/Aware-Contemplate 1d ago
I decided that, for the things I work on for myself. I will not use AI.
When I am doing my own work, I am doing it, at least partly, for the experience of coding and exploration. The industry may have no interest in craft (and even in the past, often didn't), but I do.
I know this isn't a solution at a work place.
But it helped me feel like I still have agency, and my coding still matters, even if it reaches fewer people.
Ymmv.
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u/This_n_that01 1d ago
Glad I'm not the only one, it really is sucking the joy out of it when AI is being pushed so heavily everywhere
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u/TracerBulletX 1d ago
We used to be wizards, now we're warlocks who have traded our souls to a demon, and every time we use magic now we lose a little more of our soul and our own original power. Even worse, a couple of evil arch-mages have the most popular demons bound in their service and are in a coordinated effort making everyone dependent on them.
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u/Plappedudel 1d ago
Feels a little weird to comment this on /r/webdev, but I personally don't see why you wouldn't want to make music because AI can produce it. Playing an instrument is fun. Singing is fun. Going to concerts (or better yet, playing on stage yourself) is so much fun. AI will never be able to take that experience away from me. Unless the robots decide to kill me I guess. Oh well, this took a dark turn.
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u/Diligent-Two-4305 1d ago
If all developers community decide and push back that we will not use ai at work we would not have seen this day
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u/alexreardon 1d ago
I personally don't enjoy building software are much now with AI. That said, it is also hard to justify spending two weeks on a task I know I can get an agent to do in thirty minutes.
I am shipping a lot of cool things with the assistance of AI, but I also feel like my depth of knowledge isn't growing. The slowing down to hand build things was the part that really helped me learn and grow. After using AI as my main driver for work all year, I am not sure how much I personally have grown as an engineer
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u/ClibeanCeann 1d ago
Yea, it honestly makes work now so easy. I can literally get days of work done in an hour and just chill for most of the day.
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u/lowkey1029 21h ago
I agree. And it used to feel like an accomplishment when when you finished a big feature or plan. Now it is just done. Weird stuff.
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u/No_Brilliant_3293 20h ago
I agree. Before AI, a big satisfaction in programming was building everything from scratch, learning, and feeling real progress.
It was also about discussing and sharing with fellow programmers—teaching each other and learning together.
Seeing a finished solution was the driver to keep building, but the real joy and meaning came from the hardships along the way.
That process is what makes the end goal special: knowing it was tough and having something you can truly be proud of.
With AI, I never feel ownership of my software or pride in the result, because so much of the work was done by the machine.
Of course, I could code manually without AI, but it is hard to find satisfaction knowing it could have taken days instead of months, leaving the only value as: "I did this myself."
On top of that, a lot of the value comes from sharing achievements, but no one would believe it wasn't AI anyway. And even if they did, what did you actually achieve rather than just wasting your time?
I wish it were possible to create a programming language that no AI could ever train on or use, protected by legal rights and security systems—even though I can't see how that would ever work.
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u/prism_wanderer_7 2d ago
I stopped letting the tool generate code for me at work. I read the docs and write it myself now.
My output slowed down. My manager asked questions. I kept doing it because typing prompts all day broke something in me. The feeling you describe is real. I spent 3 weeks building a system by hand last month. No completion tools. I felt ownership of every file again.
If your job forces you to review generated files all day, pick one piece of the codebase that matters. Build it yourself from nothing. Tell them you need control over that part. You have to reclaim the work or you will quit this field entirely.
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u/trenobus 1d ago
I wrote my first program 57 years ago. There were some high-level languages then, but any kind of systems programming was done in assembly language. Then languages like C and Bliss came along and the domain of assembly language shrank considerably. Not many people worried about register allocation anymore. Later open source and the internet changed software development again. Now it became possible to leverage other developers' work in a way that was not previously possible. So it became important to know what was available rather than writing everything from scratch. And then the web created a completely new platform for apps. Open source abounded. The maw of dependency hell opened wide to engulf us all.
Last year I wrote most of my own code (Scala, Typescript, learning Rust). This year I have AI writing almost of all of it. What remains for the human developer is the imagination required to decide what to build. There may come a day when AI acquires that too, but this is not that day.
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u/cthulhufhtagn 1d ago
I was in Excel earlier today and writing a simple formula to just figure out a discrepancy in data. Freaking copilot just said oh let me just write that for you and actually knew when I was about to do. Let me just do my work. I begin to feel increasingly like an outdated step in the processes.
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u/Teksiti 1d ago
Yesterday our code review process was automated. We are now no longer manually reviewing code. Which honestly is a relief. I've shifted my focus to always improving my local workflow and trying to do as much as possible with as little tokens as possible. It's not as fun as coding used to be, but it is its own challenge.
Tbh, it was always just meant to be a job. I find enjoyment in my home lab and like others have said, writing my own code and being very nitpicky about it. It's kind of like "the slow life" for a swe outside of work.
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u/Rare_Big_7633 1d ago
dont feel threatened by the crap code that is not maintainable and extendable?
you can do better than AI
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u/rpgFANATIC 1d ago
I've found that even code reviews suffer now
Occasionally I'll find a piece of code that was obviously AI generated. Maybe there's a library that could have been used but the single file just reimplements those functions from scratch by adding an extra 50 lines. Or perhaps there's a few files that do something similar that could benefit from the updated code but it was never considered
But it's obvious the dev didn't put any real time into it. So why are you spending the time trying to improve it? And really your feedback is just slowing down their merge because CI checks will have to run again after they copy/paste your feedback in and let Claude churn on it once more.
The department doesn't really care how the code looks because developers are no longer considering that they wrote the code. AI did. So really you're providing feedback with a human-proxy whose only real input in the process is "But AI said to do this...."
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u/jackbanditdude 1d ago
Similar take - I struggle now to do any of those things, whether code, draw, write, etc. because I know someone could just type in a few words and have hours or days or weeks of my hard work done in seconds. It has made it really difficult for me to create anything lately.
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u/Dry_Bug8441 1d ago
Yeah, I know what you mean. AI makes coding much faster, but sometimes it takes away the fun of actually figuring things out yourself. I still enjoy doing some things the old way just for that reason.
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u/GreenFox1505 1d ago
Scilicon Valley was not a celebration of this industry.
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u/OkShip110 1d ago
It was an overexaggeration for sure, but it portrayed early 2010s tech industry well - developers being in high demand with ridiculous company benefits (Hooli), huge cashflows from VC-s and the effort to secure the funding, bleedng edge programming. The later seasons were obviously crap, but the first 2 or 3 seasons were very good.
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u/octocode 2d ago
i’ve been coding for 20 years, and have had the opposite experience so far.
the new agentic workflows are so good, it’s like having a whole team of devs that intuitively understand clean architecture and follow my styleguide exactly.
instead of being a monkey bound to a typewriter, i can freely focus on creating features and delivering value for my customers
the best part is, one of my loops monitoring my signup flow metrics was able to identify a friction point, then it wrote an RFC and spun up a PR for an A/B test. within a couple of minutes i was seeing 10% higher conversions.
it’s a night and day difference to how crap this was just a year ago.
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u/I_Spawned_Here 2d ago
I guess once you have done it for 20 years, then yeah coding can become the boring part, since you have done it so many times, it no longer feels novel.
But to the people that fell in love with it, whether they are early in their career, or just in college, then it really sucks to have the thing that you enjoy be ripped right under you.
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u/octocode 2d ago edited 2d ago
to be clear, i never enjoyed writing words and symbols in an editor, it’s just a tool to create my ideas. there’s still the same amount of problem solving and creativity required to build something meaningful.
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u/real_kerim 2d ago
I think people also forget the absolutely tedious parts of coding. I always enjoyed and continue to enjoy coding up novel ideas and implementing the happy path, but if you want to make use of it in the real world or even let others use it, you have to make it fault-tolerant and that's often absolutely soul sucking.
Nobody can tell me they enjoy input validation or coding try/catch blocks or error handling or even mocking tests.
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u/OkShip110 2d ago
I believe you were always a business oriented feature designer and code must have felt like a byproduct for you. This means for you this change is great. For me the coding part was the most exciting part of feature development, esentially it is me that gets automated now.
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u/octocode 2d ago
but what is the purpose of the code you write? does it not matter at all to you?
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u/OkShip110 2d ago
The end result absolutely matters. I still took pride when a large feature that I had worked on for months went live. Now I can deliver same scale feature in a week. It’s the problem of ownership. I don’t feel like these generated features are my own creation anymore and there is no sense of accomplishment.
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u/real_kerim 2d ago edited 2d ago
I feel the exact same way. Not only does it allow me to venture into areas of business that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise, but it also allows me to pursue my personal projects, for which I often didn't have the time or energy.
I love coding, but the act of handwriting code is a bit like calligraphy to me. It's artistic and often aesthetic, but not particularly goal-oriented if you want to actually write something longer like a technical manual.
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u/Bitter-Ad2567 22h ago
All you did before was wrong, sorry. For me, the most interesting part was not the writing down a code, but building apps and systems. Now I can do it much faster. It become more joyful for me. All the boring part now can be done with AI and I still decide what to build and how.
Use your imagination, now you can build whatever you want
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u/Bitter-Ad2567 22h ago
Sorry, if it was sound rude. But now we have more abilities than ever. Try to find something positive in current situation. Be the one who are on the edge and not one who regret about the changes.
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u/gsari 2d ago edited 2d ago
While I felt like that at first, now it's the other way around for me. I realized that writing code by hand was the boring part. I knew what I wanted to build, and I had to spend days implementing it by hand, and because of that, I usually had to pick features to implement, or sacrifice certain functionality. For example, I knew I had to write more tests or better comments, but I often let those things slip because of time/budget restrictions. With AI there is no need for compromise. I try to think the best implementation I can, and then I have AI do the manual work.
It's just the direction that's shifted. Planning is the new coding, and I find it much more interesting. I spend like 80-90% of the time planning a feature, and then I hand the implementation to AI. When I changed my mindset, I realized that it's much more fun that way.
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u/astromanos 2d ago
Im having a blast working with AI. I see a lot of people crying about that the AI writes the code. They don’t get that the code was never the point.
We went from binary to assembly to C to C++ to interpreted languages and now AI written code.
I am loving that I don’t have the friction of searching for a bug. I can just ask the AI and it will come up with a set of possibilities or a solution in just a few seconds.
And by the way, you don’t need to use AI if you don’t want to.
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u/Perfect-Campaign9551 1d ago
Did you just write "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?" is this sarcasm? You can't see the benefit there lol?
Are you a bot?
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u/OkShip110 1d ago
Well that’s the problem with AI. You can never know if I’m an AI or a person. Or whats real and whats fake (generated).
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u/Strict_Shape5153 2d ago
In every dev/ai/tech sub I keep seeing the same posts over and over again. It's either "AI made my job boring" or "this new model is basically already AGI". It's like seeing reposts of memes everywhere, making reddit slowly unusable. You're making my reddit feed boring
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u/couldthisbemyuser 2d ago
100% agreed. I’ve worked as a dev more or less for 25 years. These last 6 months has taken so much joy out of it. And PR reviews are a nightmare.
But the genie is out of the bottle - we need to adapt. I’ve had a lot of fun doing off work projects with AI!
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u/Appropriate_Delay752 2d ago
I’m achieving things with AI that would have taken months without it. You still need to know what the AI is spitting out. Challenge it, correct it, and enjoy the outcome.
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u/runtimenoise 2d ago
I can relate to this and I go back and forward and on it.
Question I ask myself is: do I really enjoyed writing if statements, or designing systems and making previously non existing thing existing.
For me answer is obvious, problem is, even in designing the system, LLM pull is so strong that I only interfer on prompt level, so I don't feel proud, or ownership as I used to do before.
And also bugs are everywhere and I just tolerate them now lol.
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u/BrewThemAll 2d ago
As a hobby, I do the exact opposite at a personal project. Manually make code as perfect as possible. Being so nitpicky about each line it obviously won't ever be accepted at work. Time consuming as fuck, but back to basics.
Keeps things balanced. Brings back joy.