I've been a developer for 8 years and in the first 7 years I've always heard from people that I was fast at building good quality tools. Now, any developer can match my output easily. I feel no pride anymore in anything I build using AI. The act of really thinking about an elegant solution makes me feel guilty because someone else has written a whole book of code by the time I'm done thinking. It sucks. I hate it and I don't know what to do. I have no energy left to work on side-projects anymore because my soul is sucked out of me every single day and I feel like anyone could just come in and sweep my idea in a few days of vibe coding.

> Now, any developer can match my output easily.

No they can't. They can get a clanker to crap out code at a pace that matches or beats yours, but I assume your code is better, and know that you have a better understanding of your code than the clanker user has of the clanker code.

AI solutions are still extremely mediocre. Sure, if you tell it exactly what to build, it will build it way faster than any human could. LLMs still lack creativity to come up with the best solution. They’re trained on the average, so they’ll output the average. I constantly have to interrogate LLMs to get them to give me the best code. Taste is more important than ever.

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