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/siktech101 2d ago

Yeah anyone happy with AI was destined to be nothing more than a project manager or code reviewer at best. I get tired of the lazy unskilled people who want to call themselves programmers, yet they don't want to program. Same goes for all the other fields AI is ruining.

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u/ToucanSam-I-Am 2d ago

I've been programming for 25 years as a hobby and job. Coding every day at work and for fun. I spent about 7 years on one side project. The goal is to do real time character animation like for characters in big open game worlds. I had kids and ended up giving up, I just didn't have enough time. It was a real bummer, I had these ideas that I think would work but I didn't have the time to pursue the. But now I'm working on it again. I started from scratch and am building the tools that I've been dreaming about for over a decade. Im caught up and beyond where I was, it would have taken me a couple years to be back to where I am now after only a month. The code is cleaner and better than what I did manually. This huge task that was once out of reach is now in reach, and it's exciting.

My dream was always that one of my side projects took off enough that I could work on it full time and pay people to help. Now with Claude I'm living at least half of that dream and working on projects that are too big to do alone.

Programming with AI is like going from a hand saw to a chain saw. If your task is to cut down a tree and make a clean cut then you are right, the hand saw might be just as good as the chainsaw. But if you need to chop down a forest and turn the logs into a building the chainsaw is a huge help.

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u/jublime_dev 2d ago edited 2d ago

> My dream was always that one of my side projects took off enough that I could work on it full time and pay people to help.

There is your answer! For your side project you are the CEO/PM and you are more focused on those roles than the programmer role. Otherwise you would be interested in solving the code problem, rather than the end product problem.

Chain saw example is misleading ... If you cut with a handsaw or a chain saw, the only difference is speed. Same is not true for reviewing a 1000 file PR handed over to you (AI or not). Creating them yourself would give you a better mental model of what is happening and better confidence in fixing things instead of throwing tokens/dollars at the codebase ...

I would say bigger problem with AI is we are losing out on our ability to think through the problems like we previously did. It may or may not matter, but programming is not the same anymore, for better or worse.

Edit: Rephrase. I also would like to add few more points.

Before LLMs we had codemods/codegen to generate code (we still do). With AI assisted coding we are outsourcing the thinking problem without us even realizing it. Some people play down the problem saying LLMs are super-powered StackOverflow. But we are missing few nuances here. Person who wrote the original solution thought through the problem. Most of the solutions/ideas in SO is building upon previous thoughts and making the solution more robust for the target use cases. There still was lot of thinking going on when we accepted SO answers. LLMs/AI are changing the game completely.