I really do enjoy coding. I always have. It’s one of those purely creative things where you sit in front of a task, think about it, and after hours or days arrive at a solution. It is THE single best thing to get me into flow state… except that flow state doesn’t exist anymore since I started coding with AI.
As the job shifted from “deeply tinkering about a problem” to “tell the AI stuff, let it run forever, and then code review,” I have tons of idle time… on good days I grab another coffee, on bad days I fall down the YouTube rabbit hole, and on “productive” days I work on three things at once (as the loop always is “start task, wait wait wait, review, restart”).
This is a flow state killer—that state I enjoy most while programming. Time flying by, thoughts and ideas combined with a good chunk of hard work flowing onto the keyboard and becoming reality.
Why do you then keep using AI? Didn’t also this, this and this research show that programmers are less productive with it?
I still think that on the projects where I’m mainly working with AI, it definitely speeds me up, but my days on the other hand don’t feel enjoyable anymore. I read about Cerebras coming out with a coding model that’s supposedly super fast—maybe that could keep you in the state as the idle time gets reduced, but honestly I doubt it.
Very sorry that this isn’t an article with a solution at the end, as I don’t have one…