Agreed. The higher-ups at my company are, like most places, breathlessly talking about how AI has changed the profession - how we no longer need to code, but merely describe the desired outcome. They say this as though it’s a good thing.

They’re destroying the only thing I like about my job - figuring problems out. I have a fundamental impedance mismatch with my company’s desires, because if someone hands me a weird problem, I will happily spend all day or longer on that problem. Think, hypothesize, test, iterate. When I’m done, I write it up in great detail so others can learn. Generally, this is well-received by the engineer who handed the problem to me, but I suspect it’s mostly because I solved their problem, not because they enjoyed reading the accompanying document.

Though it is not like management roles have ever appreciated the creative aspects of the job, including problem solving. Management has always wished to just describe the desired outcome and get magic back. They don't like acknowledging that problems and complications exist in the first place. Management likes to think that they are the true creatives for company vision and don't like software developers finding solutions bottom up. Management likes to have a single "architect" and maybe a single "designer" for the creative side that they like and are a "rising" political force (in either the Peter Principle or Gervais Principle senses) rather than deal with a committee of creative people. It's easier for them to pretend software developers are blue collar cogs in the system rather than white collar problem solvers with complex creative specialties. LLMs are only accelerating those mechanics and beliefs.

FWIW, when a problem truly is weird, AI & vibe coding tends to not be able to solve it. Maybe you can use AI to help you spend more time working on the weird problems.

When I play sudoku with an app, I like to turn on auto-fill numbers, and auto-erase numbers, and highlighting of the current number. This is so that I can go directly to the crux of the puzzle and work on that. It helps me practice working on the hard part without having to slog through the stuff I know how to do, and generally speaking it helps me do harder puzzles than I was doing before. BTW, I’ve only found one good app so far that does this really well.

With AI it’s easier to see there are a lot of problems that I don’t know how to solve, but others do. The question is whether it’s wasteful to spend time independently solving that problem. Personally I think it’s good for me to do it, and bad for my employer (at least in the short term). But I can completely understand the desire for higher-ups to get rid of 90% of wheel re-invention, and I do think many programmers spend a lot of time doing exactly that; independently solving problems that have already been solved.