Look, people are going to pile on and talk about how much they enjoy coding now. Those people have processed this change differently or sooner or later than you have.

This is ok. You will process the change, and you'll come out stronger for having done so. It takes time to decide what you want to do in the world, and even more time to decide how to react to the world changing and moving away from your planned path. And it takes even more time to actually see if the world is moving in a way incompatible with your plans.

It will be tempting to cycle into negative predictions and negative self-talk. This will not help, and will not be productive.

You, ryandvm, built a career around something you love, and that is amazing. You can choose to do it again, to find something you love, to be stalwart about how you work and who you work with, or any number of other options. The thing that nobody can change is your agency.

I struggle with the nature of work every day, and have for months. It has caused me to re-evaluate what I work on, why I do it, how I structure my finances, where my kids go to school, literally everything. Still the ship turns, as it must.

Reach out if you want to chat.

Writing code was the "downtime" for me, it existed between boughts of intense problem solving. With AI agents my time is shifting heavily towards solving problems and I have less downtime as a result.

I worry about burnout.

> I don't know that anyone suggested it wasn't OK to enjoy programming.

Outside of LinkedIn Lunatics and social media engagement bait, I agree that nobody is saying you can't enjoy programming.

Of course we can all still enjoy programming. I still do some personal projects manually. It's fun and it also keeps my skills sharp.

It also makes you realize how much non-optimal stuff slips into entirely AI written codebases if you're not paying attention to the code. I can push on Opus 5.5 or Astra all day and get output that works, but when I get into the code and start processing it myself I ask a lot of questions that result in "You're absolutely right!" responses followed by having the LLM clean up what it did.

The sad part is knowing that the golden window or programming job enjoyment has closed. We had a relatively small window where software jobs paid extremely well to do work we enjoyed. My happiest career memories were working with small teams at startups where we would sit in a room together and be focused on coding for hours.

I'm sad for a second reason: The years before AI took over, my jobs had been trending away from that focused coding time for other reasons. The trend in the industry was to stuff companies full of roles like product owner, scrum master, cross-functional project managers, and other roles. These are highly valuable in small quantities with the right people in place, but at some point it got out of control. Most of the companies I was with felt like a constant circus of meetings and debates over what to build, with little time left for that focused coding work anyway. I still cringe when I remember a meeting with a CTO who explained his target ratios for engineers to designers to product managers to engineering managers to project managers where we realized software engineers were becoming a small minority on the software engineering teams. I disliked it at the time, but now I'm extra sad that my last window of possible focused paid-to-code time was spent mostly in meetings and Slack debates.

I'm not sure what this is all about.

If anything, I enjoy programming more now with AI assistance, not vibe-coding. The depth and breadth of my work has increased greatly (yes, I still read and write a lot of code and documents, that the agents build on); I'm like a kid in a candy store.

Projects that would have seemed too daunting now seem feasible to tackle. I could even get started on implementing my dream language, or a knowledge management system for agents, or ... the possibilities are endless.

Now, my software engineering is for my own company, maybe that makes a difference. There is no one breathing down my neck to use more AI where it does not make sense, or to use AI this way or that. I am in the driver's seat, and I only delegate to AI what I need it for, and what it is good at. There is still much that is required of me that the AI cannot do, not anytime soon.

How strange.

Ever since AI reached a certain level of quality, I haven't been able to stop (vibe) coding. I've discovered that I really enjoy designing and building products, more than tinkering; occasionally, I come across algorithms or other technical details that I find interesting, and I switch to manual mode.

At some point in my career, I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks, and AI is a "solution" to that.

Cynically, this could be seen as plumbing, but there's an art to designing efficient and usable products, that I personally enjoy very much.

I think blog author's point was that even if AI is faster and better at coding, it's still okay to write code yourself - at least as a hobby - because that's something you enjoy.

I'm much more on your side personally though, because first, when you know there's a better and faster way to do something it does take away from the enjoyment of doing it the old way. Some of the enjoyment for me came from being unusually good at something vs. everyone else.

And second, even my hobby projects are always something that I want to make real, more than they are something that I want to do just for the fun of working on them. Even though I enjoyed the programming and puzzle solving process, the end product is still the main goal. So I'll be using AI at home as well (and it is nice to reify projects faster than before).

And all this also ignores the fact that even "only" losing your enjoyment of paid work, and not your hobby work, still sucks!

Having said all that, I recently read Use Of Weapons (1990) by Iain M. Banks and this passage encouraged me about the future:

  "Can’t machines build these faster?" he asked the woman, looking
  around the starship shell.
  "Why, of course!" she laughed.
  "Then why do you do it?"
  "It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors
  for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people
  on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think,
  I helped build that.
  The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact
  that it was you who actually did it."
  
  "Hmm," he said.
  "Well, you may 'hmm' as you wish," the woman said,
  approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship,
  where a few other construction workers were standing, 
  pointing inside the model and talking.
  "But have you ever been gliding or swum underwater?"
  "Yes," he agreed.
  The woman shrugged. "Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish
  swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?"
  He smiled. "I suppose not."
  "You suppose correctly," the woman said.
  "And why?" She looked at him, grinning. "Because it’s fun."

> excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code)

AI excelling beyond a human at writing code is not an objective truth.

I would say even without AI, a manager telling a developer what to code or how to code, will never be better than that engineer themselves being the driver and the developer.

For me personally, quality code has a strong human component. Only I know what's best for the code, based on:

1. my deep understanding of the long history of the organization and of its mission and concepts 2. my intricate personal relationships with the users and the other developers 3. all of my hundreds of unique, personal experiences troubleshooting problems, which are always a combination of code and interpersonal relationships, the open source community, and opposing stakeholders.

Until AI becomes AGI (and that's a big if) and you can train it on 43 years of experience, it will just be an approximation of a true person's holistic engineering pedigree. It will always be asymptotic to true competence. It will always be second-best, even with a human driver.

I’m in a similar boat, though I’ve found some solace in that AI development (for me at least) has also made other kinds of work more enjoyable. Previously, since I enjoyed programming, problem solving, and learning more than the end product, I tried to work on projects where I would learn as much as possible which had interesting problems to solve that would make me a better software engineer.

Now I can work on much larger and much more challenging projects where I care more about the end result than learning little details.

Something has certainly been lost, but I’ve at least gained something else in return. I can also do use an empirical approach now, like testing whether a big change would be beneficial without having to map it out and try to estimate the effect. This has made what I try to work on more research-like than engineering-like; I’m trying to figure out if something is possible rather than how to best implement something I know is possible.

I still worry that soon there won’t be any way to contribute economically, that the machine will eventually be better at everything, but this is a much broader problem than just software or even engineering.

It really depends, it seems. Through my coding career I always had interesting, and maybe a bit too big ideas for consumer software, bogged down by the fact that I like to code interesting algorithms but not business processes and interfaces. And in that sense AI is really a miracle for me - I no longer need to get bogged down by tedious work, I can focus on architecting the software and interesting algos (nothing seem too big nowadays) and have AI code it, debug it, and deploy it in a fraction of time it would take me if I had to code it entirely! Also, I no longer need to learn all these modern frameworks that keep spurring like mushrooms. In fact, frameworks are not a necessity when AI can vanilla JS everything anyway.

It is an amazing time to be alive, scary and uncertain, but amazing nonetheless :)

I've seen takes on X like, "anyone who's coding manually these days is only doing it to be contrarian."

I am surprised how many people like the actual writing part, it always felt to me like doing micro in an RTS game. I know a lot of people love that too but I always played RTS games to feel like a general. But I'm still in the camp of reading every single change the LLM does, so I feel like I get the best of both worlds, but maybe that will end up being a waste of time soon. Like if the job ends up being just writing and reviewing MD files for the agent to digest I'll hate it too.

Edit: I really don't understand the down votes, what did I say that's do bad?

Yes; there are actually people out there who make disparaging remarks about looking at code and caring what it looks like.

> My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code)

My problem is it doesn't even do that. LLMs still aren't good at writing code (despite the hype) and you have to review everything they produce, which takes just as long as writing it myself would. But the industry is falling all over itself to use them to write code, doing a worse job than humans would. It's extremely frustrating.

Why not write the code yourself and use AI for everything you don't like to do? See what happens.

Theres still companies that dont touch AI at all.

The suggestion I encounter the most is that AI makes it redundant to take up programming as a hobby. or art. or music.

Yes, because you were silently fired as a developer and rehired as an AI manager. You can't compare apples and oranges.

> My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager).

I have always been the opposite, despite mostly having IC roles in my career. Still, I don't enjoy the change, mostly because the UX of this tooling is absolutely miserable when you need to do anything serious with it. I am past the point where I thought it was user error and think it's just fundamentally baked into the ecosystem to be annoying to work with. At least in most management situations, the employee isn't going to gaslight you, question every tiny decision you make (or worse, subvert ones it finds more 'favorable' for itself) or just make up wild, easily disprovable bullshit in a constant stream of verbal fecal matter. I've worked with maybe one person that came remotely close to that and they were easily ignored. This stuff's persistent and unavoidable.

I am getting a lot more done, but I am a lot more tired.

It also leaves the part of reviewing the code (which I have realised is really quite different skillset from writing code - it needs a sense of something is fishy here or why is this even here or can't this look better).

It may be obvious to conclude that good programmers are good reviewers but I think all variations exist. I wonder how many people don't like their jobs anymore because they don't like reviewing code written by AI.

Conversely for me AI is letting me focus on the part I actually enjoyed: organizing and planning systems, and powers through the parts which were just a grind to get there.

By far my biggest use at the moment is just getting all the software I use to function as I want it too.

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> My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager).

I love solving problems, programming was always about that for me. The sucky part was always "I know the solution and written it out, now I need to use a text editor to actually make it work like that", and the fun part was always figuring out how to solve the problem, making sure it actually does solve it in real-life, and once it's been implemented, iterating on it until it gives people some sort of pleasure to use.

Most of the other passionate programmers I've met in life have thought about programming the same way, all of us favored approaches with less code, not more, because typing sucks and is slow, and more code means more bugs. I haven't met any of you "I love typing special characters into a computer" people in real-life, and I'm wondering where I could, because clearly it isn't just you who feel like this, seems there is a somewhat large section of programmers who enjoyed the typing experience more than the problem solving part of programming.

What's always been clear, is that people get into programming for different reasons, and some of those reasons might no longer lead to the lucky life of working with what you love and get paid handsomely for it, which sounds terribly sucky and scary, and I do feel for the people that now have to face this.

> it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager).

Who is forcing you to use AI?

Are you forced to use AI by your company? If so why?