Comment by tsurba
And how long have you been doing this? Because that sounds naive.
After doing programming for a decade or two, the actual act of programming is not enough to be ”creative problem solving”, it’s the domain and set of problems you get to apply it to that need to be interesting.
>90% of programming tasks at a company are usually reimplementing things and algorithms that have been done a thousand times before by others, and you’ve done something similar a dozen times. Nothing interesting there. That is exactly what should and can now be automated (to some extent).
In fact solving problems creatively to keep yourself interested, when the problem itself is boring is how you get code that sucks to maintain for the next guy. You should usually be doing the most clear and boring implementation possible. Which is not what ”I love coding” -people usually do (I’m definitely guilty).
To be honest this is why I went back to get a PhD, ”just coding” stuff got boring after a few years of doing it for a living. Now it feels like I’m just doing hobby projects again, because I work exactly on what I think could be interesting for others.
I think you make a good point. There is an issue of people talking over each other. The reality is, we don't all do the same work. It's possible my job and someone else's involves having to deliver very different code where the challenges to it differ.
One person might feel like their job is just coding the same CRUD app over and over re-skinned. Where-as I feel my job is to simplify code by figuring out better structures and abstractions to model the problem domain which together solve systemic issues with the delivered system and enables more features to work together without issue and be added to the system, as well as making changes and new features/use-cases delivery faster.
The latter I find a creative exercise, the former I might get bored and wish AI could automate it away.
I think what it is you are tasked with doing exactly at your job will also mean that your use of agentic AI actually makes you more productive or not.