Yes I too miss the days where I could walk 6 miles into to town to go the general store. The grind of making every step myself, learning the path to avoid the mud, the rock in my shoe that just wouldn’t leave. Good times. Cars suck.

Kidding aside. The human brain has unsurprisingly a huge attachment to effort and equates it with perceived value of a process and outcome.

Whether one spent 20 years developing a general cure for cancer or just magicked one into existence right now does not change the immense value many could gain from it.

Writing software was never about the value to the writer it was about the value to the user.

In the past, one could care less about the user to an extent because they simply enjoyed the process or “grind” of building. There were signs like the engineer that went off to fix a bug and took 2 weeks rebuilding some part of some system delaying the overall feature or product release. The excuse being that it was of course necessary and good development takes time.

Now one may be able to fix that bug in minutes and anything that takes longer than an hour with AI is more seriously questioned as necessary. Sometimes it still is but more often than not that engineer simply wanted to build, to grind on a problem at the cost of potential user value.