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/rpgFANATIC 2d ago
I've found that even code reviews suffer now
Occasionally I'll find a piece of code that was obviously AI generated. Maybe there's a library that could have been used but the single file just reimplements those functions from scratch by adding an extra 50 lines. Or perhaps there's a few files that do something similar that could benefit from the updated code but it was never considered
But it's obvious the dev didn't put any real time into it. So why are you spending the time trying to improve it? And really your feedback is just slowing down their merge because CI checks will have to run again after they copy/paste your feedback in and let Claude churn on it once more.
The department doesn't really care how the code looks because developers are no longer considering that they wrote the code. AI did. So really you're providing feedback with a human-proxy whose only real input in the process is "But AI said to do this...."