The programming itself is the reward for people who love doing it. It attracts the sort of detail-oriented thinkers who enjoy the doing and don't frame everything in terms of "value added."

AI is attractive to the sorts of people who have their secretary write their Christmas cards.

AI helps you to focus on the aspects that you are interested in. Perhaps you care about database nifty stuff, but you may need the front end to make an end to end solution. You can delegate that part to AI

I think there's a middle ground. I like coming up with solutions to problems (mostly technical problems, may even be very low level ones). But I always found writing the code generally tedious. Basically, once I had a good detailed idea of what the implementation would look like, actually executing the plan would bore me.

AI is still not competent enough to come up with good solutions in many things I work on. So, at least so far, AI has made me happier.