AI-Assisted Coding Killed My Joy of Programming

The Cheat Code Moment

I remember when I was younger..

any time I was playing a video game, and I discovered that they support activating cheat codes in the game..

that I was initially way too excited.. I could finally bought that expensive house in uptown, one that I had my eye on for a while..

I told myself, I’ll just add some cheat codes for the money and then I’ll get back to the normal game playing..

it was simple, it was a promise to myself…

it was a lie!

The Slippery Slope

I eventually ended up using more and more of the cheat codes…

even the ones I initially set out not to use at all because I believed they’d ruin the game experience for me…

I used them all! it did ruin the game for me.. I uninstalled the game after a few hours.

AI Coding Assistants Feel the Same Way

honestly, working with AI assisted code editors give me the same feeling.. I initially get excited.

I can now do more, achieve more, implement and design more and create better projects..

I tell myself it’ll only be for a specific business logic, or a specific file… and then I’ll get back to normal coding… I never do. I end up running the whole project through the AI coding editor.

spoiler alert: it ruins my experience and takes away the joy of programming I initially started my whole career for!

When Coding Stops Being Fun

then I end up doing what I ended up doing to my video games a few years back. I stop doing it.

I close my laptop and go play my piano… because the coding is no longer fun.. it’s no longer exciting..

I am no longer solving any mentally-stimulating problems.. I am just copy-pasting code from an AI assistant.

it no longer scratches any itch, no longer feels rewarding, no longer feels like an accomplishment.

The Emptiness After AI-Generated Code

I feel dead inside afterwards. I feel like I hate myself, wasted hours for nothing… accomplished nothing.

it pains me because I love that excitment, that joy of programming, the troubleshooting and banging my head against the wall for hours dealing with compiler errors, runtime errors, logic errors, bugs, edge cases and all that jazz.

The Democratization of Code in 2025

now that coding is democratized in 2025 with so many “agents”, I no longer feel like I am special as a programmer.

I feel useless to be honest. I feel like anyone can do what I do, and better, faster, cheaper and with less effort.

you write one prompt, not even the most perfect and engineered one, and after 2-3 min you get a full-fledged, (near-)production-ready code.

deploy it and forget about it and it’ll run forever.

experiment as much as you like because building is now no longer a bottleneck… some would argue that it never has been…

some would say that marketing and distribution are the heavier lifts… I might agree to some extent.. I wrote about why distribution beats product when I launched my first SaaS to zero customers.

I Miss the Grind

I still miss that feeling though.

I still want to do programming, use Ctrl + Space for auto-completion, not tab, tab, tab and you are done.

I would’ve loved to stay a few years more into the years of Fortran, Cobol, C, C++, Java, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, Go, Dart and all the other languages.

grinding and learning how to deal with Rust macros (I never did!).

pity.

Losing Control of Your Own Codebase

and when you run your whole codebase through AI, you are no longer in charge, AI is.

you have no clue what is where, how to make the changes you want, how to debug issues, how to optimize performance, how to refactor code, how to scale the system.

you tell AI to do all that and you’re completely ignorant to it all. you are just a consumer of AI generated code.

and if that’s all that I can do, run a few prompts and sit there like an ugly duck, then what’s the point of being a programmer?

What’s Left for Programmers?

what’s the point of me even being there to tell it what to do.

it can already ideate, brainstorm, perform market research, competitor analysis, design systems architecture, design database schemas, write code, test code, deploy code, monitor code, fix bugs, optimize performance, refactor code, scale systems and do everything else that I used to do as a programmer.

perhaps the ONLY thing it’s not doing is customer discovery. the grind of calling people, reaching out to them, asking about their pain points in their workflows, understanding their needs and desires, and then building something for them. The same customer discovery I learned to prioritize after my first product failure.

it’s not far fetched to think that AI can do that too in the near future.

The Craft Evolves

programmers once felt this way about high-level languages replacing assembly. about ides replacing vim. the craft evolves—maybe the joy migrates too. I just haven’t found where it moved yet.

Why I Keep Going Back to My Piano

at least the piano doesn’t autocomplete my scales. maybe that’s why I keep going back. some things should stay slow.

Finding the Balance

so here I am, caught between efficiency and joy. maybe you’re here too. if you’ve found the balance, I’d genuinely love to hear how.