Last month I finished one of the largest side project of my career — an open-source framework, docs, demo, the works. Eight-years-ago me would have floated for a week.
Instead I felt… fine. Mildly pleased. Like I'd closed a well-run Jira ticket.
Here's the thing: a big part of the code was written with AI assistance. I designed everything — the concepts, the failure semantics, what the demo had to prove — and I reviewed everything. The thinking was mine. But the hours of grinding, the stupid bugs at midnight, the twentieth test run — those are gone. And apparently that's where the feeling lived.
I'm not against this. I don't actually want to hand-write boilerplate again, the same way I don't want to hand-wash clothes. But nobody warned me that the satisfaction was coupled to the struggle, and that automating one would automate away the other.
The best analogy I've found: it's the difference between cooking a meal and ordering a very good delivery. The food might even be better. But you didn't cook.
What I've been trying
- Keeping one deliberately hand-made project where AI is only allowed to explain, never to type
- Going deeper into the work AI can't do yet e.g. production debugging
- Letting "people actually use the thing I designed" become the new reward channel instead of "I typed the thing"
Jury's still out.
So, the actual question
Does anyone else feel this?
If you've been coding 5+ years and work with AI daily — where did your satisfaction move? Did it come back somewhere else, or is it just gone?
And for folks earlier in their careers: do you even relate to this, or does it sound like blacksmiths complaining about factories?
Genuinely curious what this community is feeling.
Top comments (22)
To be fair, it's not really about whether you use AI or not. I've been creating software for 10 years now, and it's always been like that. You start something new, more excited than ever, then it gets boring, then it gets exciting again towards the end (because you're actually finishing it), and you think releasing it is going to be heavenly... which it is, but it only lasts about an hour, or a couple if you're really lucky. Then you immediately start looking for a new project, because you want to feel that again.
It's a vicious cycle, and I guess there's no cure for that kind of "addiction".
Fellow addict here, apparently going through withdrawal!
You’re right that the high was always short — but it reliably arrived. What’s new for me isn’t the duration, it’s that the hour never showed up at all. Though your framing is genuinely a little liberating: if the high was always just the hit that fueled the next project, maybe what I’m feeling isn’t loss, it’s withdrawal.
That’s exactly the point 💯
Nor, I am feel very proude of it. I was implement a lot of new stuff under short time, the difference is right now I am sure to reach my goal because this speed up process give me a focused time to make someting which is a key point for me.
Even I map my all articles in dev.to to a interactive map which is show the connection between those.
So I told even if my steps looks fast, the direction of the road is very clear for me.
Right now I am working to bring back to life my very first github repo Spider-Paint, I am sure to release again after 12 years pause.
The cooking vs. delivery line nails it. For me the feeling moved to the first real user doing something I didn't plan for. That's the new 2 AM bug: it hurts and it's satisfying at the same time. Your hand-made, AI-only-explains project sounds like a good idea, I might steal it.
I can relate to this, but my experience has been a little different.
For my projects, I’ve started using AI heavily for code generation.
My workflow generally looks like this:
The result?
For me, AI hasn’t removed the satisfaction of building something. It has shifted more of my effort towards designing, understanding, testing, and improving the product.
I still consider understanding the generated code important. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be confident maintaining or debugging the project later.
I think the interesting question is not just whether AI writes the code, but how much ownership the developer retains over the decisions and the final product.
I think it’s the same with everything: when you pursue a goal, you expect to feel good after achieving it because it takes time and it’s difficult to make progress from start to finish.
But, as with any goal, once you’ve achieved it, doing the same thing again may not give you the same feeling. I think it’s similar when using AI to complete a project. You can make a lot of progress without getting stuck because of bugs, implementation challenges, or a lack of ideas, but the achievement may not feel as rewarding as it used to.
These days, I think the satisfaction comes more from having a complete, useful MVP that people can actually use. Simply studying something or gaining a basic understanding doesn’t feel as rewarding as it used to. We’ve shifted toward feeling accomplished when we complete an entire project one that’s well documented, secure, and free of major bugs and that works not just for us, but for other people too.
The bit about an hour of digging feeling wasteful, even on your own project, stood out to me. If the digging is what you enjoy, that hour doesn't need to justify itself in shipped features. I'd be reluctant to let work's expectations about speed decide how I spend my hobby time too.
What worries me is that coders will have to do more debugging of code they didn't write. It's possible the AI code may contain less bugs, but in my experience most bugs happen because modules make incorrect assumptions about other modules.
When I worked for a large corporation youngsters would be hired and immediately started writing code, when there were bugs they asked us experienced coders to work on them. Eventually this became so tedious that we had a bit of a revolution that was partly successful.
I can see the same scenario happening with AI. Coders may be presented with the task of finding bugs in code that nobody knows who wrote or what the requirements for it were. I'm kinda glad I'm retired now.
To address the satisfaction question I still write code as a hobby and still get a thrill when people use my software and like it. I do use AI a little to give me ideas but am reluctant to accept the AI code without fully understanding it. I used to say "first there was nothing, then I made something" the fact that I created something useful out of nothing except my own imagination was the real buzz. Although I conveniently forgot that I was including libraries written by people I never met.
The 'AI can explain, never type' rule still lets it hand you the key insight, which fits your comment about the handmade project becoming a diet you keep cheating on. What if the boundary were one question you want to investigate yourself, rather than an entire project you must finish unaided? You could stop once you've understood that question, even if the rest ships with assistance. That might preserve room for discovery without making slow delivery the price of enjoying your own work.
Good idea, i'll try it out.
The cooking comparison is accurate. When you cook, you manage the heat and the carryover, and the outcome depends on paying attention to the pan. Ordering delivery removes the variance, so even when the meal arrives hot, there was no risk to absorb.
With assisted code, the labor changes from synthesis to review. Instead of wrestling a state machine into place, you spend the afternoon reading generated diffs and looking for unhandled edge cases. That work is necessary, but it feels like auditing someone else's books rather than building the ledger. For me, the reward moved to whether the invariants hold under production stress and whether my boundary tests caught the failure before the model shipped it. It is a quiet satisfaction, more like reconciling accounts at the end of the month than stepping back from a finished workshop table.
"Auditing someone else’s books rather than building the ledger” is exactly the sentence I was missing.
What’s interesting is you’ve found the reward on the other side of that shift: the invariants holding, the boundary test that caught it first. I had a moment like that recently — a failure-containment path I’d designed tripped correctly in production, stopped exactly the broken scope and nothing else — and it genuinely felt better.
Quieter, like you said, but real. Maybe that’s just what the reward looks like now — fewer fireworks, more “the books balance".
Hi, I'm actually relatively new but I also share that same feeling. You can't feel fulfilled if you the struggle was non-existent. That's what I feel with delegating all work to AI. Mostly, I just use AI to learn something, to search something fast, but never to write code for me, especially the ones I haven't mastered yet. Boilerplate, sure they could write it since I've done it a thousand times. But newer ones, finding solutions, and making sure it works yourself, those are the fuel that would ignite when you finish something. AI is good but it could go a lot worse fast when the engineer has little discipline.
“Boilerplate sure, but never the ones I haven’t mastered yet” is a really good line to draw, and honestly a more disciplined one than I managed. The complication I’d add from eight years in: at work, that line isn’t always yours to draw. When the whole team ships at AI speed, hand-writing something for the learning is a luxury you have to fight for. That’s partly why the feeling in this post exists at all.
But your core point stands — the struggle you skip is fulfillment you don’t get to collect later. Protect that discipline while it’s still cheap to protect.
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