I agree. AI has made even mundane coding fun again, at least for a while. AI does a lot of the tedious work, but finding ways to make it maximally do it is challenging in a new way. New landscape of possibilities, innovation, tools, processes.

Yeah that's the thing.

Personal projects are fun for the same reason that they're easy to abandon: there are no stakes to them. No one yells at you for doing something wrong, you're not trying to satisfy a stakeholder, you can develop into any direction you want. This is good, but that also means it's easy to stop the moment you get to a part that isn't fun.

Using ChatGPT to help unblock myself makes it easier for me to not abandon a project when I get frustrated. Even when ChatGPT's suggestions aren't helpful (which is often), it can still help me understand the problem by trying to describe it to the bot.