I don't think the joy of coding comes simply from writing lots of code. It's the act of precisely expressing one's internal thoughts into an physical medium, and watching it take effect. Using AI as an intermediary makes it less enjoyable. It's like a painter telling his speedy assistant what he wants to paint, and reviewing every attempt until it looks like what he was aiming for. Obviously the painter won't find that as fulfilling and meaningful. And a skilled painter probably won't be quite as happy as if they'd done it personally. The act of painting is a primary driver, not just having a finished painting at the end.

Compilers don't take away the code we need to write; they translate it into a different formal language that emphasizes and de-emphasizes various aspects of its meaning.

LLMs are categorically a different thing. Instead of soundly translating between formal languages, they adjust how you interact with the formal language.

The enjoyment people get from coding has absolutely nothing to do with the pure volume of code they produce, to the point that this has long been a cliche!

I usually like to write elegant code using Python and frameworks like Django.

The pleasure comes from the "the only right lines of code" instead of "the most lines of code".

Thanks for the honesty and I think I get it. The AI doing the code leap frogs you to a finished product which is the reward. I do worry about craftmanship in that scenario though.