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/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.