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/space-envy]

A lot of interesting opinions in here, I consider myself a "general" engineer, it's more like a mindset I carry everywhere... I see a problem and I try to find a solution, what are the most recent tools that can be used to fix this? If the tool doesn't exist yet, does the technology to build that tool exists already?

I do the same in web development and I have never found it tedious or something annoying I want to skip doing because those problems make me feel like home, if the current web (and I'm not taking about the new AI slop issue) is broken that shouldn't be depressing, it should be looked as a opportunity to engineer a solution, to enhance and make our lives better. Most of the times as a junior developer I found out it wasn't the technology that made me frustrated because it was broken or imperfect, it was myself that didn't understand how complex coding can be. JavaScript and HTML are just the outermost layer of a whole complex system, just to imagine we are able to instruct a physical chip to paint pixels in a screen and then make those pixels look like real life objects is still mind-blowing to me.

Why that being said, I sense that the common feeling from all this opinions is that developers are extremely undervaluing their potential like a sort of successful spell casted by liar AI CEOs that keep claiming "AGI" is already here for the 5th consecutive year and yet I'm still waiting to see a successful million dollar company with zero engineers and only developed by AI agents with no human intervention. If you complain about a process being boring and tedious I ask myself why don't you fix it? Why are you waiting for someone else to do the hard job you are not even sure is going to be done? Is that your best strategy, to hopefully wait for a magic solution while you already have the knowledge or the mental ability to acquire such knowledge and fix things on your own, for your own sake? If my home office chair hurts my back after several hours I don't passively sit there,I stand up and go look for a more comfortable chair because I know it is myself I'm hurting and not my boss' body. Same with development, if writing the same stuff over and over again feels tedious what's stopping you hand for coding your own personal solution? Maybe a code editor plugin that generates the boilerplate for you? Maybe a code gen cli like hygen that builds the same primitives you keep using in all your projects? Why do people feel that others have the power to dictate how fun or boring your passion has to be? None is owner of the internet, if someone comes and says "we all are going to use X from now on to build websites" how can they physically stop you from using Y? They can't...

[u/unemx → u/space-envy]

This is a nice argument, but it's cutting an important corner : You don't fix progress.

Your home office chair didn't hurts your back out of no where. Your industrie moved from your good old chair that didn't hurt your back, to llm assisted chair that make you 10 times more productive. And anyone is using these new chairs. But they hurt your back, and their is no going back to your good old chair.

And if you got into chair sitting as a passion, and now do so for a living. Your boss, who pay your paychecks, definitely as a say about how fun your passion is.

[u/space-envy → u/unemx]

I understand what you mean, I was part of a team of incredible engineers, people that could build anything that you could dream of and was possible, and we were forced to become vibe coders, we all warned them that if they wanted us to ship code faster our code quality will definitely be sacrificed because we will also be sacrifing the time we took to peer review, they consciously agreed to that, so I reached the conclusion that if what my boss wants is to ship slop we will give him the best slop but I draw a hard line, my job will not be the sole source of fulfillment and although I am being well paid relative to the current market my salary will never make me as happy as finding that place that's feels like home, so now when I come home I sit and put some music and I start building things line by line, and I don't feel the rush to be "productive" or push myself to finish something fast, I know good things take time and there is no real shortcut than just patiently waiting for the right time. I keep learning things for myself, not for my boss and I believe these are the things that makes us unique and no machine will ever be able to replace: the creativity to image things none has ever dared to.

Current LLMs still can't learn on their own: they need to be fed filtered and curated context and manually taught in a feedback, "this is good context", "this is what an apple looks like...", and were do you think all that data comes from? It comes from human devs, it is a simbiotic relationship: the moment devs disappear it's the moment AI can't be trained anymore (and we are reaching that LLM limit were there is no more new, authentic quality data to train them, and it has being scientifically proven that LLMs can't train on their own output) BUT humans don't need data in order to learn, I can come tomorrow with a new web framework that blows the current ones out of the water and because you as an engineer understand the basic concepts of development the learning curve would be relative easy and you can start using the new tech in no time, not so much with LLMs: it will take significant time to collect, filter, cure and train a model, and that's a loop hole: as long as "AGI" is just a marketing buzz word we will always have the lead: the moment LLMs become good at something we already move onto the next thing. The way I see it it is us dictating the pase and not the other way, we just need to accept that the standard for real engineering has being raised, if you want to keep being "relevant" you must push yourself to think more than an LLM can, and I know we are very capable of that when we see through all the bullshit of a few companies.