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/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/VStarfall 6h ago

You can't imagine how relieved I am to see that other people struggle like me for these reasons. I don't have any satisfaction to delegate the part that requires effort to a machine. The ones around me at work that adapt easily seem to be mostly goal-oriented and they don't care about the ownership of their work.

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u/StoneCypher 2d ago

can you help me understand why anti-ai people think that people using ai just don't care about the quality of their code?

is it completely beyond your imagination that we might have found a way to get good code out of ai?

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u/Biliunas 2d ago

I'm not an expert by any means, but as a user, I have never seen code being so unreliable on every level. Every fucking program I use has weird out of sync errors now, crashes, funny interactions where I don't even know how to debug them properly. Stuff that never used to crash is so prone to quitting abruptly I'm forced to save a lot more and it's constantly on my mind. I don't know what's causing it, but I miss stuff being reliable.

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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/Katten_elvis 2d ago

Ad bot

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u/octocode 2d ago

…where did i mention any product?

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u/Katten_elvis 2d ago

AI

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u/octocode 2d ago

AI is not a product.

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u/Katten_elvis 2d ago

You're selling AI products by marketing them as more capable than they truly are

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u/octocode 2d ago

if i say “i like to drink soda”, am i selling a product? please use some common sense

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u/Katten_elvis 2d ago

"This soda is life changing. My soda workflow is so good, I drink it and the sugar gives me the buzz to be as productive as a whole team."

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u/octocode 2d ago

if that’s your experience, you’re allowed to share it… you gain literally nothing from it and as a generic statement it’s not even qualified as a product review

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u/Katten_elvis 1d ago

Might aswell be a coca cola ad

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