OP and long time lurker here, I'm desperate and looking for honest-to-god advice on what to do.

I am one of those neurodivergent people who loves programming because it gives me the right stimulation.

I also enjoy drawing, gardening, and exercise.

I don't own a car because I love walking, and such.

So I'm wondering if it's time to call it quits with programming (for a living).

Luckily I have some savings and I have other interests from years of doing random jobs and businesses, and as much as I love programming, especially with others, I think very few of us still want to program.

I'm like the Last Samurai of programming while everyone is using AI-assisted gattling guns.

Is it time to let go?

The differentiator right now is taste. Most people have none (like the business partner in the OP), and some people have plenty (like you seem to have). These two sets of people will produce wildly different results with the same tools.

Two things you can do regarding programming here.

1. Be a consultant for a high wage, use AI, produce good results quickly - little to negative intellectual joy here. You still have the edge here due to good taste.

2. Produce 'artisanal' code in your spare time. Work 3 months for pay, then 9 months on whatever projects scratch your itch.

I still want to program and I don't think it's time to let go. Hit me up (email in bio) if you wanna chat, you sound like a really interesting bloke.

I also really enjoy programming, and relate to your comment below about sometimes waking up in the middle of the night because your brain figured out how to code a hard problem.

Sorry to hear you're having a rough time with work. I do think AI availability has made otherwise smart people put out lazy work. But I also think that there are more people who still "code by hand" than you think.

You might find some joy by going to certain events where people talk about different items coding-wise. I enjoyed the talks for this conference recently https://www.youtube.com/@softwareshouldwork (particularly Richard Hipp's, Delaney Gillilan's and Carson Gross' talks), maybe you can find similar spaces. The benefit has been Youtube's algorithm recommending me better software talks now too.

I’ve been on a sabbatical for 99% of this year, small pockets of time spent doing some maintenance for clients I love.

I bought a seriously derelict property in country Australia and am having a good time slowly fixing it up.

I’ll get back to programming next year, hopefully the blow-ins have moved on to the next hype cycle by that time.

You are far from alone on that path and indeed I also wonder if it may be time to let it go.

> who loves programming because it gives me the right stimulation

A small (and a bit tangential) personal story: I thought I am one of those people who care about the result, more then about the process.

But, I've recently played a game called "The Farmer Was Replaced" that someone mentioned in the comments in one of the posts here, on HN.

The game is basically a farming sim, except you farm by programming a drone using a Python-like language.

Of course, I didn't use AI, because where is the fan in this? In "normal life" (work, personal projects), it is very hard for me to convince myself to do anything manually, because generating code is more efficient. But in a game, using AI assistance would be like using aimbot in a shooter or a cheatcode in some other game. Yeah, it's much more efficient, but what is the point? There is no challenge and no fun that comes from overcoming the challenge.

So, anyway, I was writing code by hand for the first time in I-don't-even-remember-how-many years. And it was so much fun. I don't remember when was the last time I felt so engaged, so immersed, so "in the flow".

So, yeah. After all, maybe I'm not a ruthless pragmatic who only cares about the final result and doesn't gives a shit, how did he get there...

Just find a better place to go. If you have savings, quit this nonsense and start looking for something else while working on yourself.

I just got back to working on a project I like where we don't use any LLMs for code generation because we think it kind of sucks and leads to bad results unless it's for incredibly small contexts (which is usually not worth the prompting).

You're also not as alone as you think in actually liking programming enough to do it by hand even after having used LLMs. There's also the fact that you build more theory up by actually writing the code anyway, so someone who actually wants to know their code base intimitely will always have to write the code.

Why not become a machine gun operator?

No it's absolutely not time to let go. You are one of a limited set of people with pre-AI taste and intuition for good software. They aren't making any more of them. And you'll be a super valuable asset anywhere you go.

I mean, if you want to retire go ahead, but don't do it because of AI. AI is just a tool to generate code faster. It doesn't replace the work of actually making design decisions and knowing what will scale and what's better going forward vs what will work now but spiral into unmanageable spaghetti code soon (yes AIs also have a harder time managing messy code than neat code)