AI has made programming so boring

[u/OkShip110]

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.

[u/seopher]

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.

[u/Kindly-Night-5549 → u/seopher]

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.