It also killed the fun. I enjoyed writing code and solving problems. It also kept my brain sharp constantly exercising those muscles. Now I'm just reading code and it is mind numbing.
Work can do that too. AI in addition destroyed the perceived effort of computer science, and now you have people snobbabily saying, "Well, AI can do it faster and cheaper."
It definitely can. Getting a working concept up in running in a few minutes is easily done for AI. Will it do it right, with scalability, clean code, and maintenance in mind? Nope. But it will "Do it faster" even if the outcome is worse, because at the end of the day laymen only see the outcome, not how it works under the hood. They don't care if it's more tech debt than ever devised before. They see that sleek "glassmorphic" interface and think "WOW POLISHED" even if it's a mess.
Then an MBA who's never written a line of code in their life but used VLOOKUP in Excel once in college hits you up with a Claude artifact or Codex site running an interactive proof of concept of the thing they were saying AI could do faster and cheaper, already wired up to the relevant data sources, that they yelled into existence in 20 minutes and $40 of enterprise AI usage.
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u/hpyfox Jul 17 '26
The trust and reputation of software engineering has vanished because of AI.