I like programming for fun, but professional software engineering has never been more than very occasionally fun to me. I do it because it pays well.

Most companies use some variant of the sprint/"agile" methodology, which means that you as the programmer are similar to an assembly line worker. You don't control the pace, you rarely get the chance to actually finish anything as much as you would like to so you don't get the satisfaction of a finished product, you get little downtime in between tickets or projects to feel a sense of satisfaction at what you have done before you move on to something else.

I totally understand why businesses operate this way. It's simple: if you try not to operate this way, you increase the likelihood that your competitors will release more rapidly and take all your market share. It's the basic evolutionary logic. If you can release a decent but buggy product six months faster than the competitor can release a better and less buggy product, there is a good chance that you will drive them out of business. It all makes sense, but it doesn't result in a pleasant experience for me as a programmer.

The job is also very sedentary and it puts stress on your eyes and your hands. Of course I'm not going to compare myself to a coal miner, but the fact remains that in its own ways the job is more rough on the body than some people might expect. Meanwhile the intellectual and constantly changing nature of the field means that you can never rest on your laurels - the job requires constant mental engagement. It's hard to do it well while multitasking and thinking about other interesting things at the same time.

If jobs in this field did not pay so well, I don't think I'd ever even consider doing this as a career. It just doesn't have nearly enough upsides for me. The only upside I can think of besides the money is that you get to spend time interacting with intelligent people. But one can get that in other places.

Coding with the help of AI is a big improvement for me because just automating away the boilerplate and greatly reducing the time that needs to be spent in doing reading, research and experimentation already takes away some of the main time-sinks of the job. And while I appreciate code's deterministic and logical elegance, I've written more than enough code in my life to not miss writing it directly. I also enjoy writing English, after all. It's refreshing for me to spend my time composing precise English instructions for the AI instead of writing in a programming language. My English skills are above average, so this also helps me to leverage one of my talents that had previously been underutilized. Well, my English skills always came in handy when I needed to talk to coworkers or managers, but I meant that they had been underutilized in the act of actually creating software.