About six months ago I wrote that I no longer enjoyed software development. At the time I blamed meetings, Jira tickets, endless processes and everything surrounding programming. Looking back at that post today, I do not think I was completely right.
Those things are all still there, but they are no longer what bothers me the most.
Over the last few months AI has become part of my daily work. Not in the “I occasionally ask ChatGPT something” sense, but in the “every single task starts with AI” sense.
At the job the expectation is clear. Use AI. Everywhere. All the time.
A ticket arrives. AI helps understand it. AI writes most of the implementation. AI reviews the code. AI suggests changes to address the review. At my side job I am even expected to help build custom skills for our coding agents so they can automate even more of our work.
I use AI too. It would be stupid not to. If everyone else delivers features twice as fast with AI and I insist on writing everything by hand, I am simply making myself less valuable.
The strange thing is that AI did not replace the parts of the job I disliked.
I still spend too much time in meetings. I still manually test BLE devices because no language model can verify whether a physical device reconnects after walking out of range or whether a firmware update actually succeeded. Not sure if it is a good thing or a bad thing.
What changed is that the part I actually liked keeps shrinking.
Sometimes I notice that I have not really programmed for days. I have been running the same prompts, tweaking custom skills, rerunning an agent because it misunderstood the task, reviewing generated code, explaining the problem in a different way and repeating the process until the result looks acceptable.
The feature gets delivered, but I do not really feel like I built it.
At my job last week we shut down our internal Code Club. Once a month we solved programming challenges in languages we did not normally use. I experimented with Rust, Erlang, Elixir, C++ and other languages just because they were interesting. The idea was to give people space to learn languages that the company might use at some point.
Attendance slowly dropped until there was almost nobody left. There was even a discussion about whether participation should become mandatory for junior developers to sharpen their skills. Thankfully, everyone agreed that a programming club where people are forced to program makes little sense.
Maybe AI contributed to its decline. Maybe people are simply too tired after work. Maybe programming has become just another means to an end.
I only know that Code Club was probably the only thing at work that reminded me why I became a software developer in the first place.
One conversation with a colleague also stuck with me. We joked that eventually AI will write a Jira ticket, another AI will implement it, a third AI will review it, the first AI will address the review comments and finally a human QA engineer will discover that the original ticket described the wrong problem in the first place. It was a joke, but not by much.
I have seen AI code reviews suggesting changes because they completely ignored the context of the ticket. That is bad enough on its own, but it sometimes feels like we are building a pipeline where humans mostly supervise machines talking to other machines.
Maybe this is simply what software engineering looks like in 2026.
After all, companies do not pay us to write code. They pay us to deliver software. If AI helps deliver software faster, it makes perfect sense that companies want everyone to use it. I do not even disagree with that.
What surprised me is that somewhere along the way I stopped feeling like a programmer. It is not because AI writes boilerplate. I do not miss writing boilerplate.
It is because I miss spending an afternoon understanding a problem, designing a solution and gradually turning that solution into working software. That feeling is becoming increasingly rare.
Maybe this is just another evolution of our profession and in a few years it will feel completely normal.
Or maybe one day we will realize that somewhere along the way we stopped programming and nobody really noticed.