I honestly don't get it - how isn't everyone having a blast with AI? Every one of those side projects you never had time for you can build in a weekend. You can explore five ideas at once. You can do big refactors/cleanups you'd never be able to dream of in the past. As a software engineer it's been fantastic.

That has been my feeling too. I have completed soo many personal projects (or improvements) that were collecting dust on my 'mental shelf'.

Without AI I would probably never get to them because realistically, I do not have dozens, or hundreds of personal hours to devote to fun, but unnecessary projects.

I've been using Claude for a side project I've been trying to write for some time. Seeing it generate features at a much faster clip than I can (that actually compiles) has definitely been addictive. However, the joy I used to get from seeing something that I wrote work is all but gone, and it sucks big time to lose that.

The back and forth is more annoying now as well. Instead of trying different approaches to code to produce an outcome, I'm prompting "this is broken; can you fix it?" or "this almost works! can you do $x instead" and doing stuff in another window while Claude churns. This isn't fun or stimulating at all for me. It's like carrying a dog to a ball instead of making them run for it.

Using it also reminds me that a big part of the experience I've spent years accumulating is (or feels) no longer useful. That everyone can "write" (produce) code now is a good thing, but SO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY was spent on putting writing and understanding code on a pedestal (especially on this site), and seeing that get torn down while gaslighting us into thinking that this never happened has been affecting my psyche for sure.

There's also the dirty feeling I get from abdicating more and more of my skills to a big company that is probably salivating at the idea of developers not being able to write code without Claude Code anymore.

I have a handful of projects I'd like to work on, but I'd rather leave them on the shelf until I can hand-write them than use agents to finish them and, in doing so, create a codebase that I'm less likely to be able to maintain without agents.

I guess I can turn the question back at you: how aren't you not losing your mind at becoming a glorified spec writer?

Some of us work on critical systems

You do know that there's many different personalities that people can have right? A lot of people love writing code and don't care about those things at all.

[dead]