The hidden cost of AI coding

Some people love programming, for the sake of programming itself. They love the CS theory, they love the tooling, they love most everything about it.

Other people see all that as an means to an end - and find no joy from the technical aspect of creating something. They're more interested in the end result / product, rather than the process itself.

I think that if you're in group A, it can be difficult to understand group B. In vice versa.

I'm a musician, so I love everything about creating music. From the theory, to the mastery of the instrument, the tens of thousands of hours I've poured into it...finally being able to play something I never thought I'd be able to, just by sheer willpower and practice. Coming up with melodies that feel something to me, or I can relate to something.

On the other hand, I know people that want to jump straight to the end result. They have some melody or idea in their head, and they just want to generate some song that revolves around that idea.

I don't really look down on those people, even though the snobs might argue that they're not "real musicians". I don't understand them, but that's not really something I have to understand either.

So I think there are a lot of devs these days, that have been honing their skills and love for the craft for years, that don't understand why people just want things to be generated, with no effort.

There's nothing stopping you from coding if you enjoy it. It's not like they have taken away your keyboard. I have found that AI frees me up to focus on the parts of coding I'm actually interested in, which is maybe 5-10% of the project. The rest is boiler plate, cargo-culted, Dockerfile, build system and bash environment variable passing circle of hell that I really could care less about. I care about certain things that I know will make the product better, and achieve its goals in a clever and satisfying way.

Even when I'm stuck in hell, fighting the latest undocumented change in some obscure library or other grey-bearded creation, the LLM, although not always right, is there for me to talk to, when before I'd often have no one. It doesn't judge or sneer at you, or tell you to "RTFM". It's better than any human help, even if its not always right because its at least always more reliable and you don't have to bother some grey beard who probably hates you anyway.

After all, if we lose the joy in our craft, what exactly are we optimizing for?

Solving problems for real people. Isn't the answer here kind of obvious?

Our field has a whole ethos of open-source side projects people do for love and enjoyment. In the same way that you might spend your weekends in a basement woodworking shop without furnishing your entire house by hand, I think the craft of programming will be just fine.

I have actually had some really great flow evenings lately, the likes of which I have not enjoyed in many years, precisely because of AI-assisted coding. The trick is to break the task down in to components that are of moderate complexity so that the AI can handle them (Gemini 2.5 Pro one-shots), and keep your mind on the high-level design which today's AI cannot coordinate.

What helps me is to think of it like I'm a kid again, learning to code full of ideas but without any pre-conceived notions. Rather than the Microsoft QuickBasic manual in my hands, I've got Gemini & Claude Code. I would be gleefully coding up a storm of games, websites, dubious webcrawlers, robots, and lord knows what else. Plenty of flow to be had.

This comment section really shows the stark divide between people who love coding and thus hate AI, and people who hate coding and thus love AI.

Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding, are probably the devs who are already outputting the worst code right now.

Most comments here surprise me: I am using Githubs Copilot / ChatGPT 4.0 at work with a code base which is mostly implements a basic CRUD service... and outside of small/trivial example (where the generated code is mostly okay), prompting is more often than not a total waste of time. Now, I wonder if I am just totally unable to write/refine good prompts for the LLM (as it works for smaller samples, I hope I am not too far off) or what could explain the huge discrepancy of experience. (Just for the record: I would totally not mind if the LLM writes the code for the stuff I have to do at work.)

To clarify my questions: - Who here uses LLMs to generate code for bigger projects at work? (>= 20k lines of code) - If you use LLMs for bigger projects: Do you need to change your prompting strategy to get good results? - What programming languages are you using in your code bases? - Are there other people here who experience that LLMs are no help for non trivial problems?

I don't know man, maybe prompt most of your work, eyeball it and verify it rigorously (which if you cannot do, you should absolutely never touch an LLM!), run a script to commit and push after 3 hours and then... work on whatever code makes you happy without using an LLM?

Let's stop pretending or denying it: most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could.

Still, prompting LLMs well requires eloquence and expressiveness that many programmers don't have. I have started deriving a lot of value from those LLMs I chose to interact with by specifying clear boundaries on what's the priority and what can wait for later and what should be completely ignored due to this or that objective (and a number of other parameters I am giving them). When you do that well, they are extremely useful.

I’ve been struggling with a very similar feeling. I too am a manager now. Back in the day there was something very fulfilling about fully understanding and comprehending your solution. I find now with AI tools I don’t need to understand a lot. I find the job much less fulfilling.

The funny thing is I agree with other comments, it is just kind of like a really good stack overflow. It can’t automate the whole job, not even close, and yet I find the tasks that it cannot automate are so much more boring (the ones I end up doing).

I envy the people who say that AI tools free them up to focus on what they care about. I haven’t been able to achieve this building with ai, if anything it feels like my competence has decreased due to the tools. I’m fairly certain I know how to use the tools well, I just think that I don’t enjoy how the job has evolved.

Can't relate at all. I've never had so much fun programming as I have now. All the boring and tedious parts are gone and I can finally focus on the code I love to write.

I've been singin' this song for years. We should return to Small Data. Hand picked, locally sourced, data. Data I can buy at a mom and pop shop. Data I can smell, data I can feel, data I can yearn for.

Gone are those days.

When we outsource the parts of programming that used to demand our complete focus and creativity, do we also outsource the opportunity for satisfaction? Can we find the same fulfillment in prompt engineering that we once found in problem-solving through code?

Most of AI-generated programming content I use are comments/explanations for legacy code, closely followed by tailored "getting started" scripts and iterations on visualisation tasks (for shitty school assignments that want my pyplots to look nice). The rest requires an understanding, which AI can help you achieve faster (it's read many a book related to the topic, so it can recall information a lot like an experienced colleague may), but it can't confer capital K Knowledge or understanding upon you. Some of the tasks it performs are grueling, take a lot of time to do manually, and provide little mental stimulation. Some may be described as lobotomizing and (in my opinion) may mentally damage you in the "Jack Torrance typewriter" kinda way.

It makes me able to work on the fun parts of my job which possess the qualities the article applauds.

This article resonates with me like no other has in years. I very recently retired after 40 years writing software because my role had evolved into a production-driven limbo. For the past decade I have scavenged and copied other peoples' code into bland cookie cutter utilities that fed, trained, ran, and summarized data mining ops. It has required not one whit of creative expression or 'flow', making my life's work as dis-engaging as that of... well... the most bland job you can imagine.

AI had nothing to do with my own loss of engagement, though certainly it won't cure what ailed me. In fact, AI promises to do to all of software development what the mechanized data mining process did to my sense of creative self-expression. It will squeeze all the fun out of it, reducing the joy of coding (and its design) to plug-and-chug, rinse, repeat.

IMHO the threat of AI to computer programming is not the loss of jobs. It's the loss of personal passionate engagement in the craft.

So long as your experience and skill allows you to produce work of higher quality than average for your industry, then you will always have a job which is to review that average quality work, and surgically correct it when it is wrong.

This has always been true in every craft, and it remains true for programmers in a post LLL world.

Most training data is open source code written by novice to average programmers publishing their first attempts at things and thus LLMS are heavily biased to replicate the naive, slow, insecure code largely uninformed by experience.

Honestly to most programmers early in their career right now, I would suggest spending more time reviewing code, and bugfixes, than writing code. Review is the skillset the industry needs most now.

But you will need to be above average as a software reviewer to be employable. Go out into FOSSland and find a bunch of CVEs, or contribute perf/stability/compat fixes, proving you review and improve things better than existing automated tools.

Trust me, there are bugs -everywhere- if you know how to look for them and proving you can find them is the resume you need now.

The days of anyone that can rub two HTML tags together having a high paying job are over.

The author is already an experienced programmer. Let me toss in an anecdote about the next generation of programmers. Vibe coding: also called playing pinball with the AI, hoping something useful comes out.

I taught a lecture in my first-semester programming course yesterday. This is in a program for older students, mostly working while going back to school. Each time, a few students are selected to present their code for an exercise that I pick randomly from those they were assigned.

This guy had fancy slides showing his code, but he was basically just reading the code off the page. So I ask him: “hey, that method you call, what exactly does it do?”.

Um…

So I ask "Ok, the result from that method is assigned to a variable. What kind of variable is it?" Note that this is Java, the data type is explicitly declared, so the answer is sitting there on his slide.

Um…

So I tear into him. You got this from ChatGPT. That’s fine, if you need the help, but you need to understand what you get. Otherwise you’ll never get a job in IT.

His answer: “I already have a job in IT.”

Fsck. There is your vibe coder. You really do not want them working on anything that you care about.

I think.. based on recent events.. that some of the corporate inefficiencies are very poorly captured. Last year we had an insane project that was thrown at us before end of the year, because, basically, company had a tiff with the vendor and would rather have us spend our time in meetings trying to do what they are doing rather than pay vendor for that thing. From simple money spent perspective, one would think company's simple amoral compass would be a boon.

AI coding is similar. We just had a minor issue with ai generated code that was clearly not vetted as closely as it should have been making output it generated over a couple of months not as accurate as it should be. Obviously, it had to be corrected, then vetted and so on, because there is always time to correct things...

edit: What I am getting at is the old-fashioned, penny smart, but pound foolish.

i dont know where you are working, but where I work i cant prompt 90% of my job away using cursor. in fact, I find all of these tools to be more and more useless and our codebase is growing and becoming more complex

based on the current state of AI and the progress im witnessing on a month-by-month basis - my current prediction is there is zero chance AI agents are going to be coding and replacing me in the next few years. if i could short the startups claiming this, I would.

When I coding, most of time was used to search docs over internet. My first language is not english, search over hundrud of pages is quiet slow.

AI help me a lot, you don't need search, just ask AI, and it provide the answer directly. After using AI, I have more time used on coding, more fun.

> After all, if we lose the joy in our craft, what exactly are we optimizing for?

For being one of the few lucky ones that gets to stay around taking care of the software factory robots, or designing them, while everyone else that used to work at the factory is now queueing somewhere else.

I always thought about the problem of AI taking jobs, that even if there are new jobs created to replace the older ones, it will come at a cost of decrease in satisfaction of overall populace.

The more people in general get disconnect from nature/physical world/reality. via layers of abstraction the more discontent they will become. These layers can be: 1) Automatics in agriculture. 2) Industries. 3) Electronics 4) Software 5) and now AI

Each higher layer depends on lower ones for its functioning without the need to worry about specifics and provides a framework for higher abstraction to work on.

The more we move up in hierarchy the more disconnected we become from the physical world.

To support this I observed that villagers in general are more jolly and content than city dwellers. In metropolis specially I saw that people are more rude, anxious and always agitated, while villagers are welcoming and peaceful.

Another good example is that of an artist finding it boring to guide AI even though he loves making paintings himself/herself.

I'm a veteran professional programmer with 40+ years of experience. So far, I'm finding coding with an AI to be pure sweetness and light.

I cannot imagine why you cannot find flow using an AI assistant. I am definitely somebody who finds bliss in programming; and in my experience, AI assistants increase my bliss. My ideas are expressed in code much more efficiently. I spend less time in miserable documentation sets. I find myself fearlessly adding functionality that I would not have added if I weren't using an AI. And I have not a shadow of a doubt that my productivity has gone up dramatically. If anything, I find that AI assistants keep me in flow sate, particularly in cases where I would previously have had to wade through pages of ancient crusty Unix API documentation.

Maybe you should try a different AI. I found the ChatGPT AIs totally unhelpful, and counter-productive; but would recommend Claude Sonnet 3.7 without hesitation. I'm still working my way through other AIs. Others may be better at present, but so far I haven't found any that are dramatically better. It's hard to keep up with the furious pace of innovation.

It might also take a while to find your fu. I found the benefits to using an AI pretty much immediately; but I'm still discovering new and interesting ways to use my AI assistant.

I love that quote he led with.

In my case, I couldn't agree more, with the premise of the article, but my life today, is centered around writing software the very best that I can; regardless of value or price.

It's not very effective, if I were to be trying to make a profit.

It's really hard to argue for something, if the something doesn't result in value, as perceived by others.

For me, the value is the process. I often walk away from my work, once I have it up and shipping. I do like to take my work all the way through shipping, support, and maintenance, but find that my eye is always drawn towards new shores[0].

    “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”
    –John A. Shedd

There is craft in business, in product, and in engineering.

A lot of these discussions focus on craft in engineering and there's lots of merit there regarding AI tools and how they change that process, but I've found that folks who enjoy both the product side of things and the engineering side of things are thriving while those who were very engineering focused understandably feel apprehensive.

I will say, in my day job, which is often at startups, I have to focus more on the business / product side just given the phase of the company. So, I get joy from engineering craft in side projects or other things I work on in my own time to scratch the itch.

I asked chatgpt mini something about godot, and often it gives erroneous answers.

So it causes developers to regularly fix what chatgpt is wrong about.

Not great.

Flow Management

Flow comes when challenge meets skill

Too much skill and too little challenge creates boredom;

too little skill and too much challenge creates anxiety

AI has reduced the challenge needed for achieving your goal, creating boredom

Remedy: find greater challenges?

I think a lot of this discussion is moot - it all devolves into the same arguments rehashed between people who like using AI and people who do not.

What we really need are more studies on the productivity and skill outcomes of using AI tools. Microsoft did one, with results that were very negative towards AI tools [1]. I would like to see more (and much larger cohort) studies along this line, whether they validate Microsoft's conclusions or oppose them.

Personally I do not find AI coding tools to be useful at all - but I have not put extensive time into developing a "skillset" to use them optimally. Mainly because I believe, similar to what the study by MS found, that they are detrimental to my critical reasoning skills. If this turns out to be wrong, I would not mind evaluating changing course on that decision - but we need more data.

1. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

The post focuses on flow, but depending on what you mean by it, it isn't necessarily a good thing. Trying to solve something almost too difficult usually gets you out of flow. You still need concentration, though.

My main worry about AI is that people just keep using the garbage that exists instead of trying to produce something better, because AI takes away much of the pain of interacting with garbage. But most people are already perfectly fine using garbage, so probably not much will change here.

I've tried getting different AIs to say something meaningful about code, never got anything of value back so far. They can't even manage tab-completion well enough to be worth the validation effort for me.

Earlier this year, a hackernews started quizzing me about the size and scope of the projects I worked on professionally, with the implication that I couldn't really be working on anything large or complex -- that I couldn't really be doing serious development, without using a full-fat IDE like IntelliJ. I wasn't going to dox myself or my professional work just so he could reach a conclusion he's already arrived at. The point is, to this person, beyond a certain complexity threshold -- simple command-line tools, say -- an IDE was a must, otherwise you were just leaving productivity on the table.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42511441

People are going to be making the same judgements about AI-assisted coding in the near future. Sure, you could code everything yourself for your own personal enrichment, or simply because it's fun. But that will be a pursuit for your own time. In the realm of business, it's a different story: you are either proompting, or you're effectively stealing money from your employer because you're making suboptimal use of the tools available. AI gets you to something working in production so much faster that you'd be remiss not to use it. After all, as Milt and Tim Bryce have shown, the hard work in business software is in requirements analysis and design; programming is just the last translation step.

Would you be happier and feel more flow if you were typing in assembly? What about hand-punching cards? To me this reads more as nostalgia than a genuine concern. Tools are always increasing in abstraction, but there’s no reason you can’t achieve flow with new tools. Learning to prompt is the new learning to type.

My experience has been almost the opposite.

Typing isn't the fun part of it for me. It's a necessary evil to realize a solution.

The fun part of being an engineer for me is figuring out how it all should work and fit together. Once that's done - I already basically have all of the code for the solution in my head - I've just got to get it out through my fingers and slog through all the little ways it isn't quite right, doesn't satisfy x or y best practice, needs to be reshaped to accommodate some legacy thing it has to integrate that is utterly uninteresting to me, etc.

In the old model, I'd enjoy the first few hours or days of working on something as I was designing it in my mind, figuring out how it was all going to work. Then would come the boring part. Toiling for days or weeks to actually get all the code just so and closing that long-tail gap from 90% done (and all interesting problems solved) to 100% done (and all frustrating minutia resolved).

AI has dramatically reduced the amount of time the unsatisfying latter part of a given effort lasts for me. As someone with high-functioning ADD, I'm able to stay in the "stimulation zone" of _thinking_ about the hard / enjoyable part of the problem and let AI do (50-70%, depending on domain / accuracy) of the "typing toil".

Really good prompts that specify _exactly_ what I want (in technical terms) are important and I still have to re-shape, clean up, correct things - but it's vastly different than it was before AI.

I'm seeing on the horizon an ability to materialize solutions as quickly as I can think / articulate - and that to me is very exciting.

I will say that I am ruthlessly pragmatic in my approach to development, focusing on the most direct solution to meet the need. For those that obsesses over beautiful, elegant code - personalizing their work as a reflection of their soul / identity or whatever, I can see how AI would suck all the joy from the process. Engineering vs. art, basically. AI art sucks and I expect that's as true for code as it is for anything else.

It's 9am in the morning. I login to my workstation and muddle my way through the huge enterprise code base which doesn't fit into any model context window for the AI tool to be useful (and even if it did, we can't use any random model due to compliance and proprietary and whatnot).

I have thousands deadlines which are suddenly coming due and a bunch of code which is broken because some poor soul under the same pressure put something that "works" in. And it worked, until it didn't, and now it's my turn in the barrel.

Is this the joy?

I'm not complaining, I'm doing it for the good money.

Funny that I found this article going to hacker news as a pause in my work : I had to chose between using Aider or my brain to code a small algorithmic task, sorting items of a list based on dependences between items written in a YAML file.

Using Aider would probably solve the task in 5 minutes. Coding it in 30 minutes. The former choice would result in more time for other tasks or reading HN or having a hot beverage or walking in the sun. The second would challenge my rusting algorithmic skills and give me a better understanding of what I'm doing for the medium term.

Hard choice. In any case, I have a good salary, even with the latter option I can decide to spend good times.

So if I'm understanding this, there are two central arguments being made here.

1. AI Coding leads to a lack of flow.

2. A lack of flow leads to a lack of joy.

Personally, I can't find myself agreeing with the first argument. Flow happens for me when I use AI. It wouldn't surprise me if this differed developer to developer. Or maybe it is the size of requests I'm making, as mine tend to be on the smaller size where I already have an idea of what I want to write but think the AI can spit it out faster. I also don't really view myself as prompt engineering; instead it feels more like a natural back and forth with the AI to refine the output I'm looking for. There are times it gets stubborn and resistant to change but that is generally a sign that I might want to reconsider using AI for that particular task.

I found myself recently making decent superficial progress only to introduce a bug and had a system crash (unusual bc it’s python) bc I didn’t really understand how the package worked (bc I bypassed the docs for the AI examples). It did end up working out ok - I then went into the weeds and realised the AI has given me two examples that worked in isolation but not together - inconsistent API calls essentially. I do like understanding what I’m doing as much or more than getting it done, bc it always comes back to you, sooner or later.

The things I'm usually tabbing through in cursor are not the things that make me feel a lot of enjoyment in your work. The things that are most enjoyable are usually the system level design aspects, the refactorings to make things work better. These you can brainstorm with AI, but cannot delegate to AI today.

The rest is glorified boilerplate that I find usually saps me of my energy, not gives me energy. I'm a fan of anything that can help me skip over that and get to the more enjoyable work.

>"...the one thing that currently worries me most about using AI for software development: lack of joy."

I struggled with this at first too. But it just becomes another kind of joy. Think of it like jogging versus riding a motorcycle. Jogging is fun, people enjoy it, and they always will. But flying down a canyon road at 90MPH and racing through twists and turns is... way more fun. Once you've learned how to do it. But there's a gap there in which it stops being fun until you do.

To make things good, still takes a bunch of work - though I don't know if it's all the satisfying work.

Honestly, most of the "real engineer" rhetoric is exhausting. Here's the thing: the people most obsessed with software craftsmanship, pattern orthodoxy, and layered complexity often create some of the most brittle, hostile, constantly mutating systems imaginable. You may be able to build abstractions, but if you're shipping stuff that users have to re-learn every quarter because someone needed to justify a promotion via another UI revamp or tech stack rewrite, you're not designing well. You're just changing loudly.

Also, stop gatekeeping AI tooling like it’s cheating. We’re not in a craft guild. The software landscape is full of shovelware and half-baked “best practices” that change more often than a JavaScript framework’s logo. I'm not here to honor the tradition of suffering through YAML hell or memorizing the 400 ways to configure a build pipeline. I’m here to make something work well, fast, and that includes leveraging AI like the power tool it is.

So yeah, you can keep polishing the turd pile of over-engineered “real” systems. The rest of us will be using AI to build, test, and ship faster than your weekly stand-up even finishes.

> if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Like pronouncing your surname? Holy hell.

Ok, I needed to get that off my chest, will go back to reading the article now.

Typing isn't what makes programming fun.

AI coding preserves flow more than legacy coding. You never have to go read documentation for an hour. You can continuously code.

As a scientist, I actually greatly enjoy the AI assisted coding because it can help with the boring/tedious side of coding. I.e. I occasionally have some new ideas/algorithms to try, and previously I did not have enough time to explore them out, because there was just too much boring code to be written. Now this part is essentially solved, and I can more easily focus on key algorithms/new ideas.

I had a lot of joy making an experimental DSL with a web server runtime using primarily LLM tools.

Then I shared it on HN and was subject to literal harassment.

“ Fast forward to today, and that joy of coding is decreasing rapidly. Well, I’m a manager these days, so there’s that…”

This sounds a more likely reason for losing your joy if your passion is coding.

Have you encounter anything regarding tech debt when using AI?

Don't see any mention regarding this in the post, which is the common objection people have regarding vibe coding.

A related thought, just leaving this here.

There's something great about old technology (though obviously one must be aware of survivorship bias when citing such technology), despite the fact that, logically speaking, new technology should have obviously been better.

Perhaps it's some variant of Jevons' paradox. The better / more efficient things get, the more of an impetus there is to use them in truly crappy ways. And this is how I'm starting to feel about programming with vs without an AI: you can either program manually to create truly creative, functional, elegant stuff, or use AI to produce garbage more efficiently. There just doesn't seem to be an in-between category, at least in terms of demand.

In case you haven't seen this video of a toaster from the 60s before, you're in for a treat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y

I'm also reminded of Edsger Dijkstra's quote on elegance: https://platosmirror.com/edsger-dijkstra-elegance-is-not-a-d...

One of the things people often overlook don't talk about in this arguments is the manager's point of view and how it's contributing to the shakeups in this industry.

As a developer I'm bullish on coding agents and GenAI tools, because they can save you time and can augment your abilities. I've experienced it, and I've seen it enough already. I love them, and want to see them continue to be used.

I'm bearish on the idea that "vibe coding" can produce much of value, and people without any engineering background becoming wildly productive at building great software. I know I'm not alone. If you're a good problem solver who doesn't know how to code, this is your gateway. And you better learn what's happening with the code while you can to avoid creating a huge mess later on.

Developers argue about the quality of "vibe coded" stuff. There are good arguments on both sides. At some point I think we all agree that AI will be able generate high quality software faster than a human, someday. But today is not that day. Many will try to convince you that it is.

Within a few years we'll see massive problems from AI generated code, and it's for one simple reason:

Managers and other Bureaucrats do not care about the quality of the software.

Read it again if you have to. It's an uncomfortable idea, but it's true. They don't care about your flow. They don't care about how much you love to build quality things. They don't care if software is good or bad they care about closing tickets and creating features. Most of them don't care, and have never cared about the "craft".

If you're a master mason crafting amazing brickwork, you're exactly the same as some amateur grabbing some bricks from home depot and slapping a wall together. A wall is a wall. That's how the majority of managers view software development today. By the time that shoddy wall crumbles they'll be at another company anyway so it's someone else's problem.

When I talk about the software industry collapsing now, and in a few years we're mired with garbage software everywhere, this is why. These people in "leadership" are salivating at the idea of finally getting something for nothing. Paying a few interns to "vibe code" piles of software while they high five each other and laugh.

It will crash. The bubble will pop.

Developers: Keep your skills sharp and weather out the storm. In a few years you'll be in high demand once again. When those walls crumble, they will need people who what they're doing to repair it. Ask for fair compensation to do so.

Even if I'm wrong about all of this I'm keeping my skills sharp. You should too.

This isn't meant to be anti-management, but it's based on what I've seen. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

* And to the original point, In my experience the tools interrupt the "flow" but don't necessarily take the joy out of it. I cannot do suggestion/autocomplete because it breaks my flow. I love having a chat window with AI nearby when I get stuck or want to generate some boilerplate.

I’m the opposite. Tabbing through boilerplate increases my flow.

The old joy may be gone. But the new joy is there, if you're receptive to it