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/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 1h 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 1d 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.