Is AI quietly taking the joy out of coding, or am I giving it away?

Earlier this week, I caught myself writing a blog post somewhere between asleep and awake. Not on a screen, but in that half-dream state where your mind drafts things you’d never sit down and type. The core thought? “I don’t enjoy being a developer anymore since AI arrived.”

I woke up, and the sentence was still there. So I decided to follow it and see where it went.

The first thing I noticed is that the dream had it wrong. “I don’t enjoy being a developer anymore” is the easy version. It’s easier to say that because it blames AI. The truth is quite a bit more complex.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love developing. That’s the part that makes this hard to write.

Months of evenings

I built Front Matter CMS from nothing. Just an idea, and then a lot of evenings and weekends turning it into something real. Demo Time went the exact same way. If I think about how many hours went into both of those tools, and then think about how an AI workspace agent would have saved me weeks, maybe months, of that work, the honest follow-up question is uncomfortable:

Would they even exist?

Those months weren’t just a cost. They were the thing that proved the idea was worth doing. The slowness was a filter. You don’t spend a year of free evenings on something you don’t believe in. AI removes that slowness, which means it also removes the filter. I’m not sure yet what that does to which ideas actually get built.

Coding was always a fun hobby for me. The challenges or puzzles were the point. Nobody asked me to do it, I just wanted to build cool things and improve my workflow.

The five-minute manager

Now I sit on my sofa and tell an agent what to do.

I’ve made peace with becoming an (AI agent) manager. That happens to most eventually in our careers. There’s something strange about this particular kind of managing, though. When you ask a person to do something, you don’t expect them back in five minutes saying it’s done and ready for the next task. With an agent, that’s exactly what happens. Done. Next. Done. Next.

There’s no breathing space. There’s always a next thing to think about. The work used to have a rhythm to it. You’d struggle, you’d get stuck, you’d finally figure it out, and there was this moment of joy when it clicked. Hours in the code, and then done. The struggle was also the finish line.

That moment barely happens now. Not because I never touch the code. I still write a lot of code, but I do way more code reviews now (which is the borign part, that is why I like to use AI Code Reviewing tools). Still, the loop has no friction in it anymore. And it turns out, the friction was where the feeling lived.

The puzzles are still there

Here’s the part that took me a while to admit, because it’s the part that isn’t AI’s fault.

The joy always came from solving hard puzzles. Figuring out what’s going on, learning a new technique or framework, fighting with something until it finally gave way. Those puzzles still exist! AI didn’t make them disappear.

I just hand them over.

I tell the agent to find the issue. Sometimes I guide it a little, give it a hand when it’s lost, but that’s it. The hard part, the part I used to love? I outsource it without thinking, every single time. That’s not a model problem. That’s a me problem.

When I ask myself why, the answer comes out sounding completely reasonable: why put yourself through the hurdle and frustration of finding something, when AI can just figure it out, give you the key points, and you do the fix?

It’s sensible. It wins every time. It’s part of the job now, right?

The same thing happens when I get a new idea. I can spend a week building a prototype, or ask an agent to build one in an afternoon. I keep choosing the faster road, and then wonder why the work feels thinner.

The hurdle and the frustration, that was the thing that fed me.

Where it went instead

The appetite didn’t die. I know this because I can see where it went.

I cycle a lot more now. I enjoy it more, I prioritize it, and when I look at why, it’s obvious: it’s friction I can’t outsource. There’s a climb, and there’s no agent I can prompt to ride it for me. There’s a clear finish, and a body-deep I did that at the top. It’s the feeling coding used to give me, and right now the bike is one of the only places I still go to get it.

That last part is what bothers me. The bike is the place where the effort is still mine. It used to be built into the development work, and now it isn’t. If I want it, I have to choose it. The question is what’s worth choosing it for.

Looking ahead

A few sections back I asked whether Front Matter and Demo Time would exist if I’d had AI when I started them. I’ve been carrying that question through this whole post, and I think I finally have an answer.

They’d exist. They’d exist faster, and maybe they’d even be better. I’m just not sure they’d truly be mine.

I had it wrong earlier. The joy came from the challenges or puzzles, sure, but that’s not the heart of it. What I actually loved was building something real, to improve my efficiency, something other people use, and knowing the code came from my own hands. The months of evenings were the proof of that.

That’s the thing AI can quietly take if I let it. Not the joy directly, but the ownership the joy was attached to. It hands me the finished thing, the finished thing works, and somewhere in there, I stop being the person who made it and become the person who approved it.

If I had to build Front Matter or Demo Time again from scratch today, all of it by hand, it would take too long. I know I wouldn’t do it without AI. I’d reach for it because it helps me immensely. The one thing that would protect the joy is the one thing I’m no longer willing to pay for: the time.

In the end, AI makes me faster. It lets me build things I wouldn’t get to otherwise. The time to learn and build is right now, and I’m not giving that up. It just takes a feeling with it, the joy, and I’m still figuring out how to keep both.

So this isn’t a post with a fix at the end, it might be a post that I need to write again in a few months. But for now, I know the answer to the question I started with: AI didn’t take the joy out of coding, I gave it away.

I’d love to hear your thoughts or experiences in the comments.