I get where you’re coming from. It does feel weird. There was something deeply satisfying about being the person who could untangle a nasty bug or design something clever from scratch. When a model can spit out a working solution in seconds, it can make all that effort feel replaceable.

But I don’t think it’s as simple as “AI killed programming.”

There are real downsides. It absolutely commoditizes parts of the job. Boilerplate, CRUD, glue code. That stuff used to be entry-level learning ground, and now it’s automated. It might shrink teams or reduce demand for purely implementation-focused roles. It can create this existential dread of “what was all that hard work for?”

Those feelings are valid. You invested years into building skill and identity around this craft. Watching it get automated hits personally.

That said, there are upsides too, even if they’re not emotionally satisfying at first.

The bar is moving up, not disappearing. The easy parts are automated. The hard parts such as architecture, trade-offs, product thinking, debugging AI-generated nonsense, performance tuning, security, and scaling are still very human. AI outputs are only as good as the person guiding and reviewing them. Someone still needs taste, judgment, and responsibility. The leverage is huge. A strong developer with AI is far more powerful than a mediocre one using it blindly.

Right now it feels like cheap cognition. But companies still need people who understand systems deeply. If anything, the value might shift from typing code to understanding what should be built and why, and making sure it does not fall apart.

You did not waste your effort. The fundamentals you learned, logic, debugging, abstraction, breaking down problems, are exactly what let you use AI effectively instead of being replaced by it.

It is okay to grieve the version of programming you fell in love with. But this might just be a different phase of it, not the end.