Yeah, I am also feeling the rot and do not like it one bit. However, the world does not revolve around my feelings, so I have adapted and fully embraced it. That being said, I think AI took away 90% of the enjoyment I got from the job of Software Engineer. It isn't just the code writing, it was the space to go deep and immerse myself fully to solve a problem. I think there is still a need to problem solve at different levels, but with AI the velocity has increased so much - the space to focus on one thing for any amount of time has also been drastically reduced (this could be because I work for a company and may be company specific. I also do freelance dev, and find much more enjoyment there, but still not the same as pre AI).

Yup. I have embraced LLM usage since it's obvious this genie is not going back in the bottle and they are objectively force-multipliers at certain tasks. But I didn't get into software engineering to be productive, I fell into this career because I loved building things and it just sort of evolved into a pretty lucrative hobby.

AI is completely sucking the enjoyment out of my work.

It's like they invented a robot that can build whatever you want out of Legos. You'll never have to touch your Legos again! /s