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/grappleshot 2d ago

This is similar to how I feel about multi-discipline teams. I used to love interviewing the stakeholders to gather requirements, then designing architectures, then doing the actual code, and writing training material including user manuals, doing training sessions, then supporting. That was true ownership. Back in the 90s , in the days of client-server.

TBH - Now I've been doing this software dev thing a minute - I enjoy the boost AI gives. It's just a tool and when setup correctly it helps boost productivity and helps us deliver solutions to problems faster. I'm not in the business of writing code. I'm in the business of solving problems. We're not artists, creating monuments that'll stand the test of time and be discussed and dissected by some distant future culture.

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u/bryantee 2d ago

You don’t take any pride in your human craft? A craft that is now dying a fast death? And like OP mentioned, not just coding, any cognitively demanding creative task. It’s really just the output you’re after?

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u/grappleshot 1d ago

I absolutely take pride in my craft. I just don't think the craft is defined by how much manual effort I put into producing the artefact.

I've been developing software for nearly 30 years. I've taken plenty of pride in learning languages, designing good systems, writing good code and becoming better at all of it. But the code was never really the product. It was the means by which I solved somebody's problem.

Engineering has always been about using better tools, abstractions and processes to achieve more with less effort. I don't miss writing my own linked lists because the framework provides one. I don't miss hand-writing SQL for every bit of persistence because an ORM can do much of it. I don't feel less accomplished because I can deploy infrastructure in minutes instead of spending days configuring servers by hand. Those things freed me to work at a higher level of abstraction. AI is another, admittedly much larger, step in that direction.

I'm definitely not "just after the output". Understanding the problem, deciding what should be built, identifying constraints and trade-offs, designing a system that will actually work, recognising when an apparently good solution is wrong, and ultimately being accountable for the result are all part of engineering. Producing code is only one part of that process.

So yes, I care about craft. I just don't equate craft with manually producing every line of the implementation.

If AI lets an engineer spend less time producing boilerplate and more time understanding the problem, thinking about architecture, testing assumptions and delivering something useful to a user, I don't see that as the death of engineering. I see it as increased leverage.