I have a problem. AI has made me a more productive developer, but it's also made programming less fun.
I use AI. These days, I can give a local AI agent a task and watch it work directly on my project: writing code, changing files, fixing errors, while I barely touch the code.
It's incredibly useful, but I find it boring.
And I've felt this way pretty much from the beginning. I'm not bored with technology or building things. I'm bored with what the actual process of programming is becoming.
I'm not the only one.
When the hard part was the fun part
Before AI, building something usually meant getting stuck. You had an idea, you knew roughly what you wanted, and then came the annoying part: how do I actually build this? You searched documentation, opened Stack Overflow, tried something, it broke six other things, you questioned your career choices, you made coffee, and then, eventually, it worked.
That tiny moment was ridiculously satisfying.
The feature itself might have been nothing special: a modal finally behaved correctly, an animation stopped jumping, a state bug that made sense after two hours of staring at it. But you figured it out.
That feeling mattered more than I realized until it started disappearing.
I thought I wanted this
Developers have spent decades making programming easier: higher-level languages, frameworks, package managers, autocomplete. Every generation of tools has removed some tedious work, and mostly that's a good thing. I don't miss writing the same boilerplate for the hundredth time.
AI takes it further. We went from autocomplete to Copilot suggesting code as we typed, to agents that can do programming without me. That's where it stops feeling like just another productivity improvement.
Maybe programming was a craft for me
I recently read a Reddit discussion called "AI has made programming so boring." What interested me wasn't the usual debate over whether AI code is good. It was the disagreement over what programming is even for.
Some developers said the code was never the important part. They just want to build things, and if AI helps them do that faster, even better. I get that. But for me, figuring out the code was part of the fun.
If AI reduces programming to describing what I want, waiting, and saying "yes, change that," I'm more productive, but am I still doing the thing I originally loved? I'm not sure.
I feel this even more with my personal projects. Before AI, I could spend days figuring things out, changing my mind, breaking something, fixing it again. When the project finally worked, it really felt like mine.
Now an agent can do a huge part of that work for me in a fraction of the time. So why doesn't that feel better?
Because being faster doesn't necessarily make it more satisfying.
It's a bit like painting. Someone who loves painting doesn't pick up a brush only because they need a picture. They want to paint it.
Maybe that's what I miss in programming: I want to do it.
Frontend may feel this first
Nolan Lawson recently described AI as "the asteroid currently hitting frontend web development"
One example stuck with me. Browser and CSS performance are among Lawson's areas of expertise, but he says that today he'd probably give a Chrome performance trace to Claude Code and ask it for suggestions. Even experts are starting to hand parts of their own specialty to AI. And that says a lot about how quickly the job is changing.
Lawson also mentions something I hadn't thought about: "agent experience" may start to matter more than developer experience.
We still need to know what we're doing because AI gets things wrong, but more and more, knowing something can mean knowing enough to check the work AI already did.
And I'm not sure I enjoy that version of the job.
"You're not a coder. You're a problem solver."
I keep seeing versions of this: developers aren't paid to write code; they're paid to solve problems. Fair, but it misses that people don't choose careers purely for economic output. We also choose them because we enjoy the work itself.
What if I actually like writing code?
For some of us, programming isn't just something we have to get through to build the final product. It's part of why we became developers in the first place. So when I'm told, "Great, now AI can do most of that, and you can supervise it instead," I'm not sure that's an upgrade.
I didn't become a developer to write better Jira tickets.
But I'm not giving up AI
Here's the annoying part: I'm not going back. AI is too useful, and pretending I don't need it just to keep programming the old way doesn't make much sense either. The question isn't whether I'll use AI. I will.
It's: how do I use AI without letting it do the parts I actually want to do myself?
I don't know what that balance looks like yet. Maybe sometimes I'll choose to build something without AI simply because I want to. It's like solving a puzzle when the answer is already online. You can look it up and finish in a minute, but then what's the point? I want to solve it myself.
Maybe boredom is telling me something
Maybe being bored with AI-assisted programming isn't something I need to fix. Maybe it's telling me something about what I actually enjoyed about programming in the first place.
For now, I only know this: AI made me faster. I'm just not sure it made programming more fun, and I'm starting to think those are two very different things.
That's part of why I started learning application security and ethical hacking, something I've always been curious about. I want to understand what happens behind the applications we build, how they can be broken, and how to make them more secure.
Being a beginner again feels good.
I get stuck. I have questions again. Sometimes I understand nothing for a while.
That's exactly what I've been missing.
I just need harder questions.
P.S. I'll be writing more about what I learn in AppSec in my next posts. And I'm curious: has AI made programming more fun for you, or taken some of the fun away?
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