> maybe every few years you switch to whatever new tech stack has gotten popular, but it's fundamentally all the same

So true!

But it's interesting that, from the perspective of someone in the middle, neither near the beginning or end of my career, I am (now, after a period of sadness) experiencing AI as a reinvigoration of fun in the work. But it's a very different kind of fun. I had totally lost the fun of clean code and figuring out new technologies and approaches and abstractions, just like you describe.

But now I'm experiencing the joy of thinking about what I can build, now that it's so much faster and easier to try ideas. I think this is actually getting back to an earlier version of my joy with computers. I can (vaguely) remember in my early years being like "wow! cool! I can make stuff that shows up on a computer screen!". But then it turned out to be ... pretty damn hard to actually do that, which led me to more excitement about all the ideas and technologies and techniques for managing the complexity of software engineering. But then that started feeling more tedious and samey, but I still had to put lots of time into it, there wasn't any other option.

But now all that is so much easier, and I'm rediscovering the fun of "wow cool, I can make things!", but now also with the whole benefit of the time I have spent doing the work of software engineering.