I can relate to this. I used to code as a hobby (never professionally), but since AI came along, I've pretty much lost interest in writing code by hand. Obviously just one data point, but I can easily imagine something similar happening in fields like math.

There's second order effects to this.

I still enjoy writing code by hand, but it's incredibly lonely here. No one at work talks about code details anymore. I'm basically by myself now.

I'm a bit of a holdout, but I can tell you that what used to be lively discussions about architecture are now just "ask Claude" responses. No one else wants to think through their code anymore.

There is value in doing things no one else likes to do. But only if this path delivers results in the long term. It's not certain that my path does that but if this field is truly collapsing I'd rather give it a shot with my brain intact rather than doing nothing.

I don't use LLMs at all. To be honest, I've been waiting years to "get left behind" now and it still hasn't happened. The main things I've noticed are that (a) like you said, LLMs have destroyed any culture of actually talking about programming and learning/sharing things; and (b) the quality of my coworkers' output has dropped proportionally to how excited they are about LLMs, and they've no longer able to answer questions about it during video calls. I wonder how much of their "productivity boost" is just those of us who still care fixing their shitty slop code... Oh, and I guess (c) that I spend more and more time trying to pull meaning out of a mountain of LLM prose that someone sent me, which is utterly soul-crushing.

Counterpoint: I'm the same way, and the last couple weeks I've been messing more with Qwen more and I've been more productive in my pet projects than I had been in months or perhaps years, because I'm no longer blocked by having to do the boring bits I didn't want to do before. I now have a well-read junior I can hand tasks off to while I work on something else or just mess around until I get to the next interesting bit. Just to name one example, one of my projects includes a file browser, and a feature I had put off for years was adding an item count on the status bar, which took like a couple minutes of prompting Qwen (and then a few more minutes to figure out the crash).

Don't get me wrong, I'm actually the same way. I use AI almost every day to build all sorts of pet projects now, and the results are often surprisingly good. From a productivity standpoint, AI is absolutely a game changer.

It's just that I no longer really consider myself a programming hobbyist, because what I'm doing now doesn't really feel like programming anymore. I'm mostly just talking to an AI.

It's kind of like if I were into crocheting. A big part of the fun is the repetitive process of actually making something by hand. If I suddenly had a magic machine that could produce whatever I wanted in seconds, I'd obviously be a lot more productive, but I wouldn't really call myself a crocheter anymore.

I think the key is balance. Just because you can delegate everything, doesn't mean you should. In some cases, I've found, I simply can't. I have an idea for something I want, but I don't yet know what the best solution should be, and I need to find that out by working through the code myself.

Another thing to consider is what are you trying to accomplish. If you are just coding for fun then why would you hand that off to an LLM? If you want to see if an idea is even worth pursuing then it makes sense to leverage an LLM to speed up the prototyping.

Was farming more fulfilling before machines? In some ways, most likely: During harvest the entire village gathers and works together in beautiful landscapes, using local knowledge passed down through generations.

Preferences change. If AIs can lower some of the barriers to learn and develop mathematics that might mean more people than ever will do math.

I feel like the people you are talking about in the latter just want life to be like when they were in 8th grade. You go to school and your parents and teachers do everything for you.

Welcome to the real world, where you have to solve real problems.

Anyone following their passion for abstract thinking or whatever and doesn't enjoy being a prompter instead is degraded to an 8th grader, and even infantilized? Seriously, what a ridiculous statement to make.

So someone should pay them their hard earned money for them to not have to solve problems that are actually relevant? They should never grow up to learn how things actually work and make contributions that actually matter?