Recently after a month of heavily AI assisted programming, I spent a few days programming manually.

The most striking thing to me was how frustrating it was.

"Oh my god, I've melted my brain" I thought. But I persisted in my frustration -- basically continuous frustration, for seven hours straight -- and was able to complete the task.

Then I remembered, actually, it was always like that. If I had attempted this task in 2019 (or a similar task, in terms of difficulty and novelty), it would have been the same thing. In fact I have many memories of such experiences. It is only that these days I am not used to enduring the discomfort of frustration for so long, without reaching for the "magically fix everything (probably)" button.

If I had to guess, I'd say that is the main "skill" being lost. There's a quote like that, I think.

Genius ... means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all. —Thomas Carlyle