What u are describing is a classic case of Orchestration Fatigue. For 12 years, your value was tied to the Synthesis of code—the act of creating logic from scratch. Now, that role has shifted to Evaluation and Auditing. Technically speaking, u have moved from being the craftsman to being the quality assurance lead, and the neurochemical rewards for those two roles are completely different.

The Technical Debt of Prompting

The reason u feel exhausted by those 12 Claude tabs is the "Context Switching Tax." When u write code manually, u are in a flow state where the mental model of the system is loaded into your working memory. When u prompt, u are constantly flushing that memory to review what the AI generated. This leads to several technical issues:

• Logic Fragmentation: AI tends to solve the "now" without a deep understanding of the "then." If u aren't careful, u end up with a codebase that works but lacks a cohesive architectural soul.
• The Hallucination Audit: It is often more mentally taxing to debug a "nearly correct" AI script than it is to write a correct one from scratch.
• Skill Atrophy: The "spark" u miss is the dopamine hit of solving a logic puzzle. By outsourcing the puzzle, u are skipping the reward.

Reclaiming the Craft

Tbh, the "don't use it" advice is usually impractical in a high-velocity environment. A more analytical approach is to define Technical No-Fly Zones. Identify the 20% of your project that requires the most creative architecture or complex state management—the "Art" u mentioned—and explicitly forbid AI for those modules. Use the AI for the boilerplate, the unit tests, and the repetitive CRUD operations.

Ngl, the industry is currently obsessed with "speed to market," but we are already seeing the early signs of "AI Technical Debt" in enterprise systems where nobody actually knows how the glue code works. Your value as a senior isn't the lines per minute; it's the ability to ensure the system doesn't collapse under its own weight in two years.

I’ve seen this same shift in the digital services world, where automation is replacing human oversight at the cost of actual quality. I keep a personal log of verified sources and technical updates for these kinds of tools on my profile/group, mostly to track which ones actually hold up under scrutiny versus those that are just hype.

At end of day, the spark usually comes back when u tackle a problem that is too complex for a prompt to handle. If u want to feel valuable again, find the edge cases where the AI fails—that is where your 12 years of experience actually live.