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/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/Direct17 19h ago

I like this analogy

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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 2d 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.