I personally used to enjoy the challenge of it. I enjoyed the craftmanship. I am so glad I got to enjoy the challenge of implementing IETF specs and the debugging interop etc... it's so sad to me now that people just bruteforce all this with agents.

I wonder how carpenters felt when powertools started taking off?

Actual doing is usually responsible for the long-term satisfaction people derive from work.

Cut that out and you're just managing an email inbox.

It's not crazy to feel this way. When the barrier to entry drops dramatically very quickly, it's natural to re-evaluate all your priorities. I personally flip between apathy and excitement.

User expectations are also going to grow. If you're already a dev, you're already ahead if you keep up. It's always been the case that someone could release a free package that makes your personal proprietary software suddenly hard to justify.

Why does cheating give you impostor syndrome?

You stopped creating value and started extracting it. You stopped thinking about how to best serve humanity and started thinking about how to use AI

Motivational saliency requires both the ability to learn and increasing difficulty - witness video games.

The model I think makes sense here is the Csikszentmihalyi Flow model, by another name the challenge-skill model of effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Characterist...

Roughly speaking, you might have taken a task that was in the control, flow, or relaxation zone, closer to the center there, and lowered the difficulty so much that now it's flat out in the middle of the boredom zone.

My answer to this is to either seek out much harder problems (moving it back up into challenge, for example), or to change to a task where I have lower skill and so am in the learning mode rather than the execution mode, which I find much more pleasant and compelling than boring.

You change the goalpost, basically, or give yourself a handicap, to bootstrap yourself back up into motivating regions of the graph. Just a model, but I think it's one that is really useful.

Almost everyone is now about to feel what Lee Sedol felt a decade ago.

We are all Lee Sedol.

There might be a lot going on, depending on what kind of programming tasks you use AI for, but here's one hunch: I think the current AI usage pattern disrupts our core sense-making mechanism on the code we create. It jumps from nothing to a full implementation too quickly and there's no gradual learning curve (impedance match) gently pulling us along, which makes the coding process highly disorienting.

https://woventhought.substack.com/p/ai-assistants-need-adapt...

how are we supposed to answer that? we don't know anything about you lol. you gotta give me more info, like, results for what? when you're coding? what are you working on? is it driven by yourself or is it for your job? help me help you.

Choose between 1. You don't love what you're working on or 2. You don't enjoy working with AI. IMO those are the two primary problems, and both solvable in their own way (more or less).

Because you perceive a readily available result to be worth less? Why do something whose value has gone down?

Same tbh. I lost my motivation to do any work aside from my job for a while. Now I'm working on some stuff for my friends, heavy using AI and it's just...meh. Whatever feeling of craftsmanship and skill I had is gone, now it's mostly mechanical. And if this is the case, I feel like I might as well go do something more interesting / lucrative / beneficial to society.

First, anhedonia is a real psychological crisis. You might want to speak to a professional.

Second, the old saying "it's the journey not the destination" is apt here. If you didn't enjoy the process in the first place then even if AI never came around something would have knocked the wind out of your sails. If you love the process what do you care that AI can do it faster? You can still do the thing. Either learn to love the process or begin the journey of searching for some other thing to fill the void left behind.

Isn't that the actual endgame, what we're doing? All tasks done, all software written, everything automated, housing and food for everyone, humanity free to enjoy whatever?

So yeah, enjoy whatever makes you happy. Take a break, find a hobby, travel somewhere. Or do nothing, that also works.

When using AI you're not the one doing the work, thus you don't feel the same satisfaction as crafting something yourself, nor does it incite any passion.

I had the same feeling at some point, until I went back to coding by hand just to exercise my skills, and I have to say after a while it felt so much better and I was hooked on working my little side project. Using AI doesn't scratch the same itch for me.