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Re:The happiest I've ever been by SoftTalker on Saturday February 28, 2026 @02:59PM (#47199539)
The programming itself is the reward for people who love doing it. It attracts the sort of detail-oriented thinkers who enjoy the doing and don't frame everything in terms of "value added."

AI is attractive to the sorts of people who have their secretary write their Christmas cards.

Re:The happiest I've ever been by cataphract on Saturday February 28, 2026 @03:51PM (#47200082)
I think there's a middle ground. I like coming up with solutions to problems (mostly technical problems, may even be very low level ones). But I always found writing the code generally tedious. Basically, once I had a good detailed idea of what the implementation would look like, actually executing the plan would bore me.

AI is still not competent enough to come up with good solutions in many things I work on. So, at least so far, AI has made me happier.

Re:The happiest I've ever been by signatoremo on Saturday February 28, 2026 @05:54PM (#47201278)
AI helps you to focus on the aspects that you are interested in. Perhaps you care about database nifty stuff, but you may need the front end to make an end to end solution. You can delegate that part to AI
Re:The happiest I've ever been by layer8 on Saturday February 28, 2026 @09:56PM (#47203163)
What if you care about all the parts?
Re:The happiest I've ever been by guhidalg on Saturday February 28, 2026 @11:18PM (#47203666)
You don’t, there’s always a choice about what to include and what to exclude in your system.

Unless you are hand selecting every atom that goes into a thing (maybe you make nuclear weapons?), you always make choices about what you focus on and what is irrelevant to your project.

Re:The happiest I've ever been by whstl on Sunday March 01, 2026 @05:31AM (#47205483)
Not disagreeing, but apart from coding the most boring part of the entire job is the one that's the hardest to correctly delegate to AI: testing and ensuring the whole thing is sound.

Which is why it's changing the calculus on junior devs: if you're not mature enough to do self-review and self-QA, you're just dead weight for the team/company.