alt Hacker News> I find it hard to empathise with people who can't get value out of AI. It feels like they must be in a completely different bubble to me.
I think it depends on why you do programming. I like programming for its own sake. I enjoy understanding a complex system, figuring out how to make change to it, how to express that change within the language and existing code structure, how to effectively test it, etc. I actively like doing these things. It's fun and that keeps me motivated.
With AI I just type in an English sentence, wait a few minutes, and it does the thing, and then I stare out the window and think about all the things I could be doing with my life that I enjoy more than what just happened. I find my productivity is way down this year since the AI push at work, because I'm just not motivated to work. This isn't the job I signed up for. It's boring now.
The money's nice, I guess. But the joy is gone. Maybe I should go find more joy in another career, even if it pays less.
Oh, I agree entirely. The new paradigm is entirely unsatisfying to me too. It's not the same work that I trained my entire life to get good at, and the new work is not as fun. I trained to get good at this work because I just loved it since I was first introduced to it at ~10. I would have, and was, doing it for free for years.
Unfortunately that doesn't change my outlook on where all this is headed.