one reason why i started enjoying programming less and less was because i felt i was spending 95% of the time on the problems you described which i felt were more or less the same over the years and werent complicated but annoying. unfortunately or fortunately, after coding for over 15 years for the past 4 months ive only been prompting and reading the outputted code. it never really feels like writing something would be faster than just prompting, so now i prompt 2-3 projects at the same time and play a game on the side to fill in the time while waiting for the prompts to finish. its nice since im still judged as if its taking the time to do it manually but if this ever becomes the norm and expectations rise it would become horribly draining. mentally managing the increased speed in adding complexity if very taxing for me. i no longer have periods where i deep dive into a problem for hours or do some nice refactoring which feels like its massaging my brain. now all i do is make big decisions
This is also my experience. I am personally really happy about it. I never cared about the typing part of programming. I got into programming for the thinking about hard problems part. I now think hard more than ever. It's hard work, but it feels much more fulfilling to me.
I miss the deep dives. I make time for them again. A month or two ago, I was working on a really complex problem where I relied way too much on AI, and that reliance kept my thinking about the problem relatively shallow, which meant that while I understood the big picture of the problem, I didn't really understand the intricacies. And the AI didn't either; I must have wasted about a week just trying to get the AI to solve it.
Eventually, I switched. I stopped using the AI in my IDE, and instead used a standalone Copilot app that I had to actually explain the problem. That forced me to understand it, and that helped me solve it. It demoted the AI to an interactive rubber duck (which is a great use for AI). That moment when I finally started to understand the real problem, that was great. That's the stuff I love about this work, and I won't let the AI take that away from me again.
