'AI' Sucks the Joy Out of Programming

Surprisingly, to me, it’s the other ways around - and, I’ve been writing code for two decades now. I love programming and even with AI, I will always have the last word, but I also realized along the way that programming is only a means to an end - you write code to get something done, not to write the code itself. With AI, I can finally give chance to my hundreds of ideas and see what sticks.

> "It's not just the destination, but the journey for getting there."

You can still enjoy the journey, but still profit of AI; I think AI is extremely useful to discuss concepts; e.g. recently I did extensive research about different versions of L4 microkernels to finally implement my own; it's a completely different world now, where I can ask a seemingly "omniscient" expert everithing from general concepts to the minute details; also services like deepwiki are extremely useful. The best "technical discussion partner ever" from my perspective is Claude Sonnet 4.5 with the "thinking" option.

> "And because it got the easy parts right, I feel compelled to give it another chance.."

I agree that the generated code is often incomplete or pretty strange, but recently I was able to generate some quite complex algorithms from a paper to C++ and Go using Gpt-5 and was very surprised that it not only immediately compiled, but also worked. With Claude Sonnet or Opus debugging and fixing took usually as long as writing from scratch. There are always things that just have to be implemented but I'm glad that I don't have to myself, which enables me to focus on the things I mostly care of, or even dare to do projects which would take much too long if I had to write everything myself.

I feel the complete opposite: AI sucked the boring out of programming. I don't have to write boring boilerplate anymore. I don't have to crawl for hours over terrible documentation just to get a library to spit something out. I can quickly iterate on any idea and realize it's a bad one and pivot. I can create benchmark comparison code in seconds and go for the best result. I don't have to write release notes, or write OpenAPI examples.

I get to do all the fun stuff. It's amazing.

I used to love the craft of code itself, but now the thrill is in turning ideas into working products faster. AI shifted where the joy comes from.