{"slug": "devs-say-ai-killed-their-joy-the-rot-started-before-chatgpt", "title": "Devs say AI killed their joy. The rot started before ChatGPT.", "summary": "A developer argues that AI tools like Copilot and ChatGPT did not kill the joy of coding; rather, they exposed a pre-existing rot in software development culture. The pressure to ship fast and treat velocity as the sole measure of success had already trivialized the craft, and AI simply made that shallowness impossible to ignore. The developer calls for protecting thinking time and measuring output by craft, not tickets closed.", "body_md": "AI didn't kill your joy. You just finally noticed it was gone.\n\nA post went viral on a developer forum for career advice. It captured a feeling many had been unable to put into words: coding just wasn’t fun anymore. The poster had a convenient scapegoat: AI. And thousands of people nodded along.\n\nBut I think they're pointing the finger at the wrong thing.\n\nIt's not a new phenomenon that developers have been experiencing burnout for so long. The pressure to ship faster, iterate quicker, and treat every sprint like a death march didn't start with ChatGPT.\n\nIt all began when there was a fundamental shift from \"move fast and break things\" to considering it a religion rather than a phase. When organizations began to view craft as an extravagance and velocity as the sole measure of success.\n\nHere is what I believe happened in reality. AI-assisted workflows made the assembly-line nature of modern dev work impossible to ignore.\n\nWriting boilerplate code manually sometimes gives you the false impression that you're engaged in highly profound work. However, when you get the same boilerplate code generated by Copilot in a couple of seconds, that illusion goes away, and you understand that the work had already been trivialized.\n\nDevelopers have shared that AI-assisted workflows made them feel de-skilled and mentally lazy. This is a valid reaction. However, we should ask ourselves if AI was the *cause* of those feelings, or if it simply made us *aware* of the lack of deep thinking required in our tasks? 🤔\n\n→ The task was already shallow. AI just made it fast *and* obviously shallow.\n\n→ The creativity was already squeezed out by ticket factories and rigid sprint plans.\n\n→ The joy left when building things became \"closing Jira tickets.\"\n\nThis is the part that is extremely frustrating. Companies themselves promote the internal adoption of AI for the sake of speed. They encourage you to use Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT - anything to deliver features more quickly.\n\nImagine you go to an interview and they require you to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard. You can't use AI for that.\n\nSo, what's the answer? Are basics essential or not? The industry can't decide whether developers are craftspeople or prompt operators. This conflict demotivates you since it gives the impression that your expertise is both invaluable and essential. It makes you feel like your skills simultaneously don't matter and are the only thing that matters.\n\nI don't think the answer is rejecting AI tools. That's nostalgia cosplaying as principle.\n\nThe real question is what did we lose to automation *before* the AI era? We lost thinking time. We lost a culture that encouraged a deep understanding of a problem before trying to solve it. We lost the ability to say “this needs a day more” without someone more senior pointing at the burndown chart.\n\n→ Protect thinking time like you protect production uptime.\n\n→ Stop measuring developer output in tickets closed per sprint.\n\n→ Let people build things they're proud of, not just things that pass QA.\n\nAI can actually *help* here if we let it. Offload the genuinely boring stuff. Use the freed-up time for design, exploration, and craft. But that only works if leadership values craft in the first place. 🔑\n\nThe developers mentioned in that viral post shouldn’t be faulted for feeling that way. The fun *has* been sucked out of it for many individuals. But blaming it on AI is like blaming the X-ray for your fracture.\n\nThe fracture happened years ago. AI just made it visible.\n\nSo here's what I want to know: **When was the last time you built something at work that genuinely made you proud — and did AI have anything to do with why or why not?**", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/devs-say-ai-killed-their-joy-the-rot-started-before-chatgpt", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/adioof/devs-say-ai-killed-their-joy-the-rot-started-before-chatgpt-4856", "published_at": "2026-06-19 19:07:49+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-19 19:36:51.885382+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "artificial-intelligence", "ai-ethics", "ai-agents"], "entities": ["Copilot", "ChatGPT", "Cursor", "Jira"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/devs-say-ai-killed-their-joy-the-rot-started-before-chatgpt", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/devs-say-ai-killed-their-joy-the-rot-started-before-chatgpt.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/devs-say-ai-killed-their-joy-the-rot-started-before-chatgpt.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/devs-say-ai-killed-their-joy-the-rot-started-before-chatgpt.jsonld"}}