Do I get the same satisfaction from defining and directing a project that my team at work implements?

Yes. Writing code was always fun but running a project is itself a systems engineering problem. Especially if you’re the one defining project scope.

So yes, absolutely it is the same level of joy. The code I wrote was just the method needed to solve the low-level problem but it was never the entire problem space.

I can see my fingerprints all over the user facing design and I can see all the places where I agonized over different approaches to maximize user enjoyment. Seeing the solutions manifest is thrilling frankly. I see users of LLMs as filling a similar role to mine in this respect.

That said, I understand that not everyone enjoys the entirety of the problem space to the same degree and so I can see how a reasonable group of people might not find the higher-level puzzle as enjoyable as its low-level counterpart just as there are those who might find the low-level tedious instead of rewarding.