I think there are two groups of people emerging. deep / fast / craft-and-decomposition-loving vs black box / outcome-only.

I've seen people unable to work at average speed on small features suddenly reach above average output through a llm cli and I could sense the pride in them. Which is at odds with my experience of work.. I love to dig down, know a lot, model and find abstractions on my own. There a llm will 1) not understand how my brain work 2) produce something workable but that requires me to stretch mentally.. and most of the time I leave numb. In the last month I've seen many people expressing similar views.

ps: thanks everybody for the answers, interesting to read your pov

That's kind of the point here. Once a dev reached a certain level, they often weren't doing much "relaxing code typing" anyways before the AI movement. I don't find it to be much different than being a tech lead, architect, or similar role.

Ya know, I have to admit feeling something like this. Normally, the amount of stuff I put together in a work day offers a sense of completion or even a bit of a dopamine bump because of a "job well done". With this recent work I've been doing, it's instead felt like I've been spending a multiplier more energy communicating intent instead of doing the work myself; that communication seems to be making me more tired than the work itself. Similar?

Yes it's taxing and mentally draining, reading code and connecting dots is always harder than writing it.

And if you let the AI too loose, as when you try to vibe code an entirely new program, I end up in the situation where in 1 day I have a good prototype and then I can spend easily 5 times as much sorting the many issues and refactoring in order to have it scale to the next features.

Yes, absolutely, I can be mentally wiped out by lunch.

So far what I've been doing is, I look for the parts that seem like they'd be rewarding to code and I do them myself with no input from the machine whatsoever. It's hard to really understand a codebase without spending time with the code, and when you're using a model, I think there's a risk of things changing more quickly than you can internalize them. Also, I worry I'll get too comfortable bossing chatbots around & I'll become reluctant to get my hands dirty and produce code directly. People talk about ruining their attention spans by spending all their time on TikTok until they can no longer read novels; I think it'd be a real mistake to let that happen to my professional skill set.

I think it's the serial waiting game and inevitable context switching while you wait.

Long iteration cycles are taxing

Nah, I don’t miss at all typing all the tests, CLIs, and APIs I’ve created hundreds of times before. I dunno if I it’s because I do ML stuff, but it’s almost all “think a lot about something, do some math, and and then type thousands of lines of the same stuff around the interesting work.”

For me it's the opposite, I'm wasting less energy over debugging silly bugs and fighting/figuring out some annoying config.

But it does feel less fulfilling I suppose.

I like to alternate focusing on AI wrangling and writing code the old fashioned way.