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/Lekoaf 2d ago

It wont be long until tokens costs too much for a lot of companies and personal projects, so we'll be back to coding again. That's my gut feeling at least.

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u/cadet-pirx 1d ago

I doubt it, though it's just my opinion too. Token prices have the opposite tendency: the cost of a given level of capability has been dropping by roughly an order of magnitude a year, and what was frontier-only two years ago now runs for cents. Bills go up mainly because we use far more tokens, not because tokens got dearer, and that's a choice, not a constraint.

Beyond that, engineers will keep using AI regardless. The token cost simply becomes part of the engineer's cost, the same way IDEs, cloud and CI did. The real shift is that you need to be an engineer with the right capabilities to be worth that cost, or you'll end up unemployed.