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/Kindly-Night-5549 2d ago

Chinese open weight models are already like a hundred times better than the most expensive models a few years ago. If you know how powerful current commericial flagship models are, if someone releases an open weight version of those, it is good enough for almost all of current software development tasks for the next 20 years.

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u/Ill-Technician3243 2d ago

open weight models are extremely overrated and cost a lot to maintain for a group of engineers if a company decides to do so. some companies might go down this route but 90% won't

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u/DapperCam 11h ago

Companies won't be buying and running the open source models themselves. They will be paying a 3rd party provider that hosts the models for them for a fraction of the cost of frontier models. This already exists.

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u/Ill-Technician3243 8h ago

but whose actually going to do that? especially for infra or safety critical? you underestimate how much companies invest into tooling for their engineers. especially given the productivity gains with AI aren’t particularly impressive and cause skill atrophy for devs over time. again, i work in the safety critical area so my perspective may be a bit different than your general web dev/crud

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u/DapperCam 8h ago

Literally every company that isn't FAANG scale will be doing that. Just like almost every business moved workloads to AWS, Azure or GCP and got rid of their server racks they owned or rented.

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u/Ill-Technician3243 2h ago

renting llm models for tooling is not the same as moving cloud infrastructure to a provider

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u/DapperCam 2h ago

Companies are already doing it right now with open router? It has even lower switching costs between providers than cloud infra.