AI didn't kill your joy. You just finally noticed it was gone.

A post went viral on a developer forum for career advice. It captured a feeling many had been unable to put into words: coding just wasn’t fun anymore. The poster had a convenient scapegoat: AI. And thousands of people nodded along.

But I think they're pointing the finger at the wrong thing.

The rot was already there

It's not a new phenomenon that developers have been experiencing burnout for so long. The pressure to ship faster, iterate quicker, and treat every sprint like a death march didn't start with ChatGPT.

It all began when there was a fundamental shift from "move fast and break things" to considering it a religion rather than a phase. When organizations began to view craft as an extravagance and velocity as the sole measure of success.

AI is the mirror, not the monster

Here is what I believe happened in reality. AI-assisted workflows made the assembly-line nature of modern dev work impossible to ignore.

Writing boilerplate code manually sometimes gives you the false impression that you're engaged in highly profound work. However, when you get the same boilerplate code generated by Copilot in a couple of seconds, that illusion goes away, and you understand that the work had already been trivialized.

Developers have shared that AI-assisted workflows made them feel de-skilled and mentally lazy. This is a valid reaction. However, we should ask ourselves if AI was the cause of those feelings, or if it simply made us aware of the lack of deep thinking required in our tasks? 🤔

→ The task was already shallow. AI just made it fast and obviously shallow.
→ The creativity was already squeezed out by ticket factories and rigid sprint plans.
→ The joy left when building things became "closing Jira tickets."

The interview paradox tells you everything

This is the part that is extremely frustrating. Companies themselves promote the internal adoption of AI for the sake of speed. They encourage you to use Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT - anything to deliver features more quickly.

Imagine you go to an interview and they require you to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard. You can't use AI for that.

So, what's the answer? Are basics essential or not? The industry can't decide whether developers are craftspeople or prompt operators. This conflict demotivates you since it gives the impression that your expertise is both invaluable and essential. It makes you feel like your skills simultaneously don't matter and are the only thing that matters.

What actually needs to change

I don't think the answer is rejecting AI tools. That's nostalgia cosplaying as principle.

The real question is what did we lose to automation before the AI era? We lost thinking time. We lost a culture that encouraged a deep understanding of a problem before trying to solve it. We lost the ability to say “this needs a day more” without someone more senior pointing at the burndown chart.

→ Protect thinking time like you protect production uptime.
→ Stop measuring developer output in tickets closed per sprint.
→ Let people build things they're proud of, not just things that pass QA.

AI can actually help here if we let it. Offload the genuinely boring stuff. Use the freed-up time for design, exploration, and craft. But that only works if leadership values craft in the first place. 🔑

The real question

The developers mentioned in that viral post shouldn’t be faulted for feeling that way. The fun has been sucked out of it for many individuals. But blaming it on AI is like blaming the X-ray for your fracture.

The fracture happened years ago. AI just made it visible.

So here's what I want to know: When was the last time you built something at work that genuinely made you proud — and did AI have anything to do with why or why not?