I have had the opposite experience.

When it was just asking ChatGPT questions it was fine, I was having fun, I was able to unblock myself when I got non-trivial errors much quicker, and I still felt like I was learning stuff.

With Codex or Claude Code, it feels like I'm stuck LARPing as a middle manager instead of actually solving problems. Sometimes I literally just copy stuff from my assigned ticket into Claude and tell it to do that, I awkwardly wait for a bit, test it out to see if it's good enough, and make my pull request. It's honestly kind of demoralizing.

I suppose this is just the cost of progress; I'm sure there were people that loved raising and breeding horses but that's not an excuse to stop building cars.

I loved being able to figure out interesting solutions to software problems and hacking on them until something worked, and my willingness to do the math beforehand would occasionally give me an edge. Instead, now all I do is sit and wait while I'm cuckolded out of my work, and questioning why I bothered finishing my masters degree if the expectation now is to ship slop code lazily written by AI in a few minutes.

It was a good ride while it lasted; I got almost fifteen years of being paid to do my favorite thing. I should count my blessings that it lasted that long, though I'm a little jealous of people born fifteen years earlier who would be retiring now with their Silicon Valley shares. Instead, I get to sit here contemplating whether or not I can even salvage my career for the next five years (or if I need to make a radical pivot).

Are you 60?