Well, I personally don't give a shit whether something is made by a human or a machine as long as the code is performing well and is readable.

Lucky for you and me both, AI is nowhere near capable of replacing a developer.

Learning new things is still needed, AI is good for mediocre tasks that need no real intelligence, but anything else still needs a human.

I struggle with similar feelings, although in other disciplines. I'm going to ask you the same questions I ask myself because they help center me when I'm in a similar mental space.

Who do you create for? Do you create for those people that don't value your work? Do you create for yourself, for your own satisfaction? Do you create for external recognition?

I think we'll turn this corner as a society, especially as everything becomes further enshittified. Inherent value and authenticity, the process and the work are all things that I do believe we all care about, but we've been spoiled with the convenience of everything.

I hope things get better for you.

I recommend a movie night.

My answer to you is that I fully expect the ability to do stuff yourself to be seen as extremely valuable in about 2 or 3 years. This whole AI thing is pretty definitely a bubble, and on top of that it also looks to me like the blockchain and metaverse tech-fads, and I strongly believe that when the bubble bursts people that can say "I spent all that time learning to do things myself rather than rely on ai to do my thinking for me" are going to be the only people with careers.

I’m rapidly feeling like it’s pointless to bother learning when you can badly cobble something together with a chatbot and the managers of the world will ejaculate themselves dry about how good robots are, even when the bloody thing barely functions.

Rhetorical question: How much of your decade of development has been in a professional capacity

That has ALWAYS been true. A barely functioning Proof Of Concept has always been sexy. Someone has an idea, they make a barely functioning example of it working (often depending on stack overflow and asking others for help), show it to Management, and get money. With Management often thinking how they can either rapidly patent something in there or sell it off to a larger company.

Nothing there is new aside from "AI" replacing "ask Stack Overflow".

And, just to be clear, that was also true in the hobbyist space. Think about how often you saw an article like "someone recreated PT in Unreal Engine?!?!?!!?!" (not to mention PT itself being the kind of project you give a new hire to learn the toolchain but...). Same with all those emulators that "added VR" and so forth. They are cool concepts that tend to not go anywhere or...

Once a POC becomes a Product? That is where knowledge matters. You no longer want the answer someone shat out while waiting for a belle claire video to download. You need to actually define your corner cases, improve performance, and build out a roadmap.

And... that ALSO isn't about learning new tools and tech. A lot of that comes out of it, but that is where the difference between "computer programmer" and "software engineer' comes into play. Because it becomes an engineering problem where you define and implement testing frameworks and build out the gitlab issues and so forth.

Like, a LOT of dumbfucks try to speedrun their way to management because it is more money. But the reality is that a good Engineer SHOULD become a manager as they "grow up". Because you need people with technical ability to have a say in building out that roadmap and in allocating resources to different issues. Optimally you still get to code a lot (I am a huge fan of middle management in that regard) but... yeah.

Imagine if this was all proprietary and these conflicts were resolved with costly legal battles or the abandonment of entire projects and IP.

oh right that's exactly what happens with corporate software every day.

Straight from the department of redundancy department.