AI Has Sucked All the Fun Out of Programming

There's a dev meltdown happening on Reddit right now. Multiple threads have blown up, all claiming the same thing: AI is destroying the joy of programming. One post is from someone with 20 years of experience — backend, frontend, system design, even robotics. Ever since ChatGPT came around, they've been slowly losing interest in the craft. They prided themselves on solving bugs, refactoring, building difficult solutions. That was their thing. And now a machine does it.

Another person says AI has given them straight-up brain rot. They let Claude or Gemini handle the grunt work, the boilerplate, but they're still fighting against it — going slower on purpose just to keep some sense of craftsmanship alive.

I think a lot of developers can relate to this. And I get it. But I don't fully agree.

We've Never Had a Tool That Thinks For You

Here's what makes AI different from every tool that came before it. A hammer extends your hand. A lever multiplies your force. A calculator runs numbers. These tools have always amplified what you can do physically or mathematically.

What's never happened before is a tool that offloads your reasoning. Yes, calculators existed — but you still had to know what numbers to type in. With AI, you can rant at it, describe a vague problem, and it comes back with a working solution. It takes away the need to reason through the problem yourself, and that's genuinely new in human history.

So when people say this feels different — it is different. I won't pretend otherwise.

Programming Is More Than Writing Code

I think part of the friction comes from how we define "programming." There's programming, scripting, software engineering, and now agentic building. I'd put all of it under the umbrella of software engineering. And if your identity is tied to one specific part of that — the act of writing code, line by line — then yeah, AI is going to feel like a threat.

But personally? I enjoy building solutions. I like architecting things. I like thinking about how parts interconnect. The actual typing of code was never the part I was most attached to.

I've been coding with AI since ChatGPT first dropped. Back then it was cumbersome — copy code from my editor, paste it into ChatGPT, ask it to "make sure to output the whole file," then copy it back. It was slow and made mistakes. But I was already embracing that workflow because to me, it was an absolute marvel.

Now with Cursor, Claude Code, and everything else — it's completely changed how I work. And it's brilliant.

The Machinery Argument

I think this is similar to what's happened in other professions. Machinery comes along, and suddenly you don't need to do one specific task by hand anymore. You have to transcend and start utilizing that machinery.

The profession of software engineering, as much as it's been around for a while, hasn't yet hit this place where you'd have to completely change how you're doing things. Until now.

I have a friend who's been programming since the early days. He still remembers actual terminals — not terminal emulators, but physical screens where you'd access a shared machine split across six terminals, and people would divide access to the server through them. The job of a programmer has already changed dramatically even without AI. These tools are just taking it a step further.

The Fun Side Nobody's Talking About

While Reddit is having an existential crisis, some genuinely fun stuff is happening. Someone figured out you can use the accelerometer in a MacBook, and built an app where you slap your laptop and it moans. Made $5,000 in three days. Is this peak software engineering? I don't know. But it's hilarious.

Someone else used the MacBook's lid angle sensor to make their laptop sound like an accordion. Or a creaky door.

These projects are stupid and wonderful. And here's my point: these things would have taken weeks to figure out before — digging through APIs, interfaces, learning how to access the accelerometer. Now you can just turn them out quickly. It's fun. You don't get too attached. It's a quick idea brought to life, and it encourages creativity.

More Code, Not Less Code

They said 90% of code would be written by AIs, and a lot of people misunderstood that. They assumed if you wrote 100 lines a day, you'd only write 10 and AI would handle the other 90.

What actually happened is we're still writing those 100 lines. But we're producing way more code in total. The output has exploded, not the human input shrunk.

And the tools are good enough now that you can have another agent — not the one that wrote the code — come in and inspect it. You point it at a codebase and say: "You don't know anything about this. Go poke at it. Find bugs, overflow issues, security holes, anything that could blow up in production." And it does it.

Where I Land

I enjoy these tools. I enjoy how they let me build more than I ever could before. I'm not too attached to the exact lines of code — I care that the code is performant, maintainable, and secure. But the act of typing it out character by character? That was never the part that made me feel like a craftsman.

If your joy came specifically from the puzzle-solving, the line-by-line problem decomposition, I understand why this feels like a loss. That's valid. But I'd push back gently: the craft isn't gone. It's shifted. The puzzle is bigger now. You're architecting, reviewing, orchestrating, and building things that would have been impossible solo a few years ago.

The question isn't whether AI changed programming. It did. The question is whether you can find the fun in what programming is becoming.