"But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared."

I think you (and almost everyone in this thread) are missing an important point here: even without relying on external input on our work, we feel less proud of the work we produce by hand when we know we could have prompted our way there orders of magnitude faster.

If I build something cool by hand, and I enjoy the process of building it, then why does AI affect anything? The problem lies in how I feel about the final result. It feels fundamentally bad to know that however hard I worked on this, it would have been better, faster, or both had I used AI to produce it. I think it really is that simple.