So here’s the programmer’s story I’m hearing more and more from the videos, forums, and NOC dungeons:
Fully adopted ai for years now, personally and professionally.
You’ve replaced Google with AI at work.
All your tickets and emails are ai-written.
You talks to your agents by voice instead of typing.
Copilot reviews pull requests before the human does.
The rest of the organization isn’t asking you for ai help as much…
You are more productive than ever. You have super-human powers with ai.
You are also bored out of your mind.
“I have outsourced all my thinking.” You miss getting stuck. You miss the aha moments. Over the weekend you built a working React Native MVP in a few hours without reading a single line of the code, it’s probably slop, but it looks really good with Astra/Fable5.2… and for the first time ever, your inner voice called you a prompt monkey. But that JEV tho…
AI has removed creativity as all of your pet projects have run their course…
The [Process] Was Actually the Value
Let’s be a Luddite about programming:
You type stuff.
You have to remember syntax.
You read documentation to find the one paragraph you needed.
You have muscle memory of the copy-the-error-into-Stack-Overflow loop.
You debug your own typos for 3 hours.
None of that was the job. It was the toll booth on the way to the job. Our individual process WAS/IS the value.
Inspiration is Still Possible…
It did not die. It moved up a layer.
I have not lost the feeling of being stuck. I get stuck constantly, just on different questions:
Should this exist at all?
What breaks the first day real people touch it?
What do I cut so it ships this week instead of this quarter?
Who is this for, and how do they find it?
Those questions do not one-shot. They still produce the four-hour fight and the 2am click. If you are not getting stuck anymore, you are standing on the layer the machine already owns.
Climb up ser.
If the joy was in being the guy who knew the code, the joy was in mastery. Mastery of a commodity skill becomes a hobby. Artisan code writers, a hipster thing, a dying breed. If the joy was in the thing existing and someone using it, nothing has been taken from you. You have better tools now.
BTW… nobody makes you stop reading the code… You cannot look at the MVP once, then call it slop. That is not AI’s fault. You are still the engineer of record. The agent is a contractor. Read the diff. Own what ships. Detachment is a choice, not a feature.
Fix Your Mental Layer
Pick the layer where you still get stuck, then get stuck there on purpose.
Read every line you ship. Prompting is not shipping. Understanding is.
Learn the one thing the agent cannot hand you: your users. Talk to five this week.
Build the side project for a problem you actually have, not a stack you want to learn.
If none of that lights you up, the job was the code. Say so, and go where the leverage went.
AI did not take the fun out of programming. It took the fun out of typing. If those were the same thing for you, you just learned something important, and it was never about the machine.
Now go build something that needs [you].
All the best,
ps