One solution: do NOT just program for work. If it's not work related - where management can dictate how you work - you can whatever you want, and if what you want is to keep writing software and not outsource your brain to an AI, absolutely do so.
I am now a tenure-track community college professor. I’m evaluated entirely by my teaching and service. While teaching a full course load is intense, and while my salary is nowhere near what a FAANG engineer makes, I get three months of summer break and one month of winter break every year to rejuvenate and to work on personal projects, with nobody telling me what research projects to work on, how frequently I should publish, and how fast I ship code.
This quote from J. J. Thomson resonates with me, and it’s more than 100 years old:
"Granting the importance of this pioneering research, how can it best be promoted? The method of direct endowment will not work, for if you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible results being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want this kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it." (from https://archive.org/details/b29932208/page/198/mode/2up).
Times have changed. The field has become much more serious about making money; fantasies about volunteering at Apple have been replaced with fantasies about very large salaries and RSU grants. Simultaneously (and I don't think coincidentally), the field has become less fun. I recognized how privileged this sounds talking about "fun", given how for most of humanity, work isn't about having fun and personal fulfillment, but about making the money required to house, feed, and clothe themselves and their loved ones. Even with the drudgery of corporate life, it beats the work conditions and the abuse that many other occupations get.
Still, let's pour one out for a time when the interests and passions of computing enthusiasts did line up with the interests of the corporate world.
Money sucking the joy out of things, a tale as old as time.
My “brain” has always been a systems thinker. I was fortunate enough even in my first job to be directly in front of our customer and gathering requirements, not having the label for it then but trying to solve XYProblems, dealing directly with users and their pain points and seeing an entire data entry department built around my code. This was when I was 22 - 3 decades ago.
Now my brain helps me go from ambiguous, conflicting requirements, working with people, an empty AWS account and an empty git repo to a complete working solution.
Coding has always been the necesary grind between vision and implementation