I miss the part of programming where I figure it out myself

Artificial Intelligence

Software Development

Productivity

Work

AI Has Made Coding Boring

Behind the Stack

6 min read·

Just now

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I understand why we’re using it. I also understand why some of us miss doing the work ourselves.

Photo by AcidFern on Unsplash

I already wasn’t particularly fond of modern web development before AI showed up.

A lot of it felt like finding the right library, copying an example from the documentation, changing a few things, and connecting it to another library. Something wouldn’t work, so you’d search for the error and find another piece of code to paste in. Eventually, you’d have an application.

I know that’s an unfair description of the whole field. There’s plenty of difficult, thoughtful work in web development. But the part I’m describing is real, and I never found it particularly exciting.

Now AI can do much of that assembly for us. We describe what we want, it produces the code, and we spend our time checking whether it understood us. That’s useful. It’s also taken the job further in a direction I already wasn’t enjoying.

So yes, I think AI has made some coding work boring. And I don’t think admitting that means we don’t understand how useful it is.

There’s a kind of programming I enjoy where I can get completely absorbed in what I’m doing. Thinking about where a pointer is pointing, what happens if I change it, why a particular…