Coding Frustration and AI Era Relief

Fifteen to twenty years ago, when I was passionate about programming and working as a developer, the most frustrating part of the job was that you had to spend much more time on implementation than on thinking of solutions. The most valuable part, though, was the core solution you came up with for a problem — its architecture, edge case handling, reliability, and how it should work in a business environment. You could spend hours or days on it. This was also the most interesting part of the work: imagining, assembling all the pieces, and finding and resolving all the bottlenecks.

Then, the implementation stage came in. We all know development principles like reusable code and patterns. But, in reality, how many times do you write the same or very similar code for another CRUD, authentication, security, load balancing, sorting, searching, etc.? I bet dozens.

I was so tired and frustrated that I couldn't think about an interesting task, invent a solution, and feel proud of it for a day. But instead, I have to go to work and do boring things 90% of the time for the proper implementation, not just the interesting part. Moreover, it was often when you do not want to implement what you invent because it’s mostly boring, you just want the results you've already come up with.

This frustration also led to implementation mistakes, bugs, and inaccuracies because you want to finish this as soon as possible. You already know it will work, but the extra work kills your motivation and sometimes leads to burnout.

This was the modus operandi. You have to deal with it because that's the way… it was the way.

Today, we are entering the era of AI coding. We have actually been living in it for about two years. The decades of frustration we experienced are finally coming to an end. The automation of code writing certainly reduces costs, which is why it has become so popular.

For thousands of developers, engineers, and builders, it will be a relief, as they can finally focus on interesting challenges and tasks and create much more exciting solutions, enjoying themselves much more than before. There are talks about job loss and such problems, but imagine being a tech person who can now drive progress by working purely on solutions and inventions instead of wasting days writing yet another UI form or API implementation.

LLMs freed our minds for our engineering challenges and inventions. For me, it seems a core value, maybe it’s too optimistic, but it seems the progress driver as it was before with industrialization, and then the Internet. A new thing that takes a well-known job on itself to let us dream and run to the next evolutionary step.