AI is taking out the joy out of programming.

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Any fella programmers feel the same?

And yes, I mean programming, not just the coding part; there's a surge of toxic pro-AI bros in the dev communities who repeat the same unfounded stupid claims such as "Coding was never the hard part", or "Coding is automated now, but System design and architecture are not", "if you spent most of your time on coding then you are a Code Monkey - hahahaa *fart* imao".
Though these claims are false, LLMs can even do system design and architecture; besides Architecture was never ever a programmer's daily activity, the daily activity was coding - system architecture is often decided before the initiation of project or when introducing a new MAJOR feature that introduces a new business model and require new integration to be used. ie. when Uber introcuded Uber Eat, they had to create a new schemaless database for it - or when the system has to be scaled.

Small system design decisions such as adding a field to a db table or splitting some service is simply a usual backend development activity.

Truth is, Coding was the most fun part and the most time-consuming part, I would say at least 50% of a dev work life, the remaining is distributed to stuff like requirement gathering, PR reviewing (even this one is getting automated), designing feature, documentation (this one too is fading away)...etc.

Sure you can still code by hand, this what I would do on a personal project, but when you're working with corporates, expected deadline periods now shrinked astronomically; what was used to be expected to finish in a week is now expected to be finished in a day. Agile Development feels now useless, is just shipping and dumping now; and employers turned out don't give a damn about code readibility or quality, they just want to deliver in lighting speed.

I am not seeing any positive future for programming as a career, sure the hardest domains of programming (low-level, kernel, game engine) would still have more years ahead (compared to web and gaming development) but I predict the LLMs will catch up them all.

What was I considered to be one of the LEAST boring jobs in the world (pre-AI programming work was never a routine job, everyday there was something new , a new problem and new challenge) is becoming one of most boring jobs now, chatting with a bot to do most of the work.

Sorry to hear that.

I did programming as part of my education but went into engineering instead forty years ago.

I retired and get to play golf instead of worrying about losing my job.

I think it's having similar impacts on writing, music and visual art.

f*****g sucks.

I work from home as part of a 2-person team of programmers, not making nearly as much money as I could if I worked for a major corporation, but with more control over my working conditions.

I use AI for some things, but certainly not for everything. There are still plenty of situations where it is actually easier and quicker just to write the code myself than to explain the context in sufficient detail to an AI. I use AI only when I think it will actually save me a substantial amount of time. On one recent project I relied heavily on AI. On others I still do not.

I agree with the OP and must say this is one reason I didn't regret retiring earlier this year. But I don't think I have anything intelligent to add to the conversation.

One of the main concerns I've heard about AI coding is the potential data breaches and general web security.

Granted, I'm not going to sit and pretend that this is my area of knowledge. I've always admired programmers because I think that coding requires a great deal of skill.

However, unfortunately with the rise of Gen AI, a lot of skills are being devalued. Frankly, I admire glass-blowers a great deal more than prompters. I've seen some beautiful hand-made art made out of coloured glass before.

The reason I moved away from working in design is because of Gen AI. Deadlines became shorter. Jobs listings started to expect and demand AI usage. That's not why I studied design. I didn't want some prompt to do it for me. Especially since with AI generations, they tend to make mistakes that humans wouldn't. Mistakes that would have ended up with me being fired but since the computer did it apparently no one cares.

My mum was gifted this bag with an AI illustration on it and it's disturbing to look at because the head of the ballerina is on backwards. Also, all the fingers are warped. Frankly the more I look at it, the worse it gets.

I think I've learnt that the average person doesn't care about details. However, if I bring that up people tend to dismiss me and say oh, well the technology is in its infancy. Give it time. However, a human designer would not get that level of compassion.

There's a part of me that just wants to remake those terrible AI posters for free, so then I don't have to look at them anymore when I go into a café or walk down the street. I keep having to remind myself that it's not my problem anymore.

I suppose it's interesting because as you say, I think that programming spaces are more open to AI then art spaces are in general. A lot of prompters put work into pretending that they don't use Gen AI in their art. I've seen people fake their art process because they want people to think that they are doing it by hand.

Art has become my hobby. I now work in retail and I don't know if I'll ever escape it. Sometimes I feel haunted by my former dreams. Classic story I suppose haha.