Has anyone gone back to doing code katas, code craft like exercises by hand? They help keep me grounded.

Also I feel like it’s fine to let AI write your code. I felt very much like the OP did. A couple of things help keep my sanity. one is that as developers I think our job has evolved to knowing what decision an AI makes is good and which one is bad, this can be code or design – but there is nowhere a developer(or for that matter a knowledge worker) can hide from ai. In this world you will be forced to communicate with them. Partly because as a community we have decided(for better or worst) that AI should bring non trivial amounts of productivity gains to software development.

The other one is something I want to validate which is for those of us who are mediocre at coding, it might be a gift because it would free up some time and thus mind space to consider what we are actually good at.

I use coding agents and LLMs at work where I'm more or less to some degree required to. At home, I write code the old fashioned way. Not katas, etc., necessarily, but I've decided that if we live in a world where code is cheap (or cheaply generated) that I'll hone my Lisp skills. I haven't used a Lisp in a few years and it's brought a lot of the joy of programming back for me, at least at home.