Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

As a long time hobby coder, like 25 years and I think I’m pretty good(?), this whole LLM /vibecoding thing has zapped my creativity the past year or so. I like the craft of making things. I used tools I enjoy working with and learn new ones all the time (never got on the JS/react train). Sometimes I have an entrepreneur bug and want to create a marketable solution, but I often just like to build. Im also the kind of guy that has a shop he built, builds his own patio deck, home remodeling, Tinker with robotics, etc. Kind of just like to be a maker following my own creative pursuit.

All said, it’s hard on me knowing it’s possible to use llm to spit out a crappy but functional version of whatever I’ve dreamt up with out satisfaction of building it. Yet, it also seems to now be demotivating to spend the time crafting it when I know I could use llm to do a majority of it. So, I’m in a mental quagmire, this past year has been the first year since at least 2000 that I haven’t built anything significant in scale. It’s indirectly ruining the fun for me for some reason. Kind of just venting but curious if anyone else feels this way too?

I know what you mean. It takes the satisfaction out of a certain class of problems knowing that you can just generate the solution.

On the other hand, most tasks aren't fun nor satisfying and frankly they are a waste of time, like realizing you're about to spend the afternoon recredentializing in some aspect of Webpack/Gradle/BouncyCastle/Next.js/Combine/x/y/z just to solve one minor issue. And it's pure bliss when the LLM knows the solution.

I think the best antidote to the upset in your comment is to build bigger and more difficult things. Save your expertise for the stuff that could actually use your expertise rather than getting stuck wasting it on pure time burn like we had to in the past.

I like the antidote and does remind me that I tried to create a game, which gamedev has always been a challenge for me. I’ve attempted a few times and didn’t get very far with this one either. I think I could do the coding even though scale is large, but I’m not artistic and asset generation/iteration is my block. I tried a handful of ai tools specifically for this and found they were all really far behind. I don’t particularly like working with asset store art, maybe for parts but characters and the vibe of the game usually would excite and motivate me early on and I can’t quite get there to sustain the effort