I don’t find this to be true. I enjoy computers quite a bit. I enjoy the hardware, scaling problems, theory behind things, operating systems, networking, etc.

Most of all I find what computers allow humanity to achieve extremely interesting and motivating. I call them the worlds most complicated robot.

I don’t find coding overly fun in itself. What I find fun is the results I get when I program something that has the result I desire. Maybe that’s creating a service for friends to use, maybe it’s a personal IT project, maybe it’s having commercial quality WiFi at home everyone is amazed at when they visit, etc. Sometimes - even often - it’s the understanding that leads to pride in craftsmanship.

But programming itself is just a chore for me to get done in service of whatever final outcome I’m attempting to achieve. Could be delivering bits on the internet for work, or automating OS installs to look at the 50 racks of servers humming away with cable porn level work done in the cabinets.

I never enjoyed messing around with HTML at that much in the 90s. But I was motivated to learn it just enough to achieve the cool ideas I could come up with as a teenager and share them with my friends.

I can appreciate clean maintainable code, which is the only real reason LLMs don’t scratch the itch as much as you’d expect for someone like me.

What I really enjoy in programming is algorithms and bit-twiddling and stuff that might be in Knuth or HAKMEM or whatever. That’s fun. I like writing Lisp especially, and doing cool, elegant functional programs.

I don’t enjoy boilerplate. I don’t necessarily enjoy all of the error checking and polishing and minutia in turning algorithms into shippable products.

I find AI can be immensely helpful in making real things for people to use, but I still enjoy doing what I find fun by hand.

See, I do though. I enjoy the act, the craft of programming. It's intrinsically fun for me, and has been for the 25 years I've been doing it at this point, and it still hasn't stopped being fun!

Different strokes I guess