𝗗𝗲𝘃𝘀 𝘀𝗮𝘆 𝗔𝗜 𝗸𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗷𝗼𝘆. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗼𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝗲𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝘁𝗚𝗣𝗧.
AI did not kill your joy. You finally noticed it was gone.
A viral post on a developer forum captured a common feeling. Coding is not fun anymore. Many people blame AI for this.
I believe they blame the wrong thing.
Burnout is not new. The pressure to ship faster and treat every sprint like a race started long ago. Companies began to view speed as the only measure of success. They treated craft like an extra cost.
AI-assisted workflows simply made the truth hard to ignore.
Writing boilerplate code by hand feels like deep work. When Copilot writes that same code in seconds, the illusion breaks. You see that the task was already trivial.
Developers say AI makes them feel de-skilled. This is a valid feeling. But ask yourself: Did AI cause this, or did it just show you how shallow your tasks were?
The tasks were already shallow. AI just made them fast and obvious.
Companies push AI to increase speed. They want you to use Copilot or ChatGPT to deliver features faster. Yet, companies still ask you to solve complex logic on a whiteboard during interviews.
The industry cannot decide if you are a craftsperson or a prompt operator. This conflict ruins motivation. It makes your expertise feel both vital and useless at the same time.
The answer is not to reject AI. That is just nostalgia.
The real issue is what we lost to automation before AI. We lost thinking time. We lost the culture of understanding a problem before solving it. We lost the ability to ask for more time to think without looking at a burndown chart.
Protect thinking time like you protect production uptime.
AI can help if you use it right. Offload the boring parts. Use that saved time for design and deep craft. This only works if leaders value craft.
Blaming AI for losing joy is like blaming an X-ray for a broken bone. The break happened years ago. The X-ray just made it visible.
When was the last time you built something at work that made you proud? Did AI play a part in that?
Source: https://dev.to/adioof/devs-say-ai-killed-their-joy-the-rot-started-before-chatgpt-4856
Optional learning community: https://t.me/GyaanSetuAi